Tracing the Tide: Barbara Hammer on Elizabeth Bishop

In Barbara Hammer’s first film, Schizy, 1968, a split lens is used to present a double image from multiple points of view. Destabilizing vantage points are common occurrences in Hammer’s films. Wonderfully difficult to describe, Hammer’s films do share this common trait: onscreen and offscreen it’s Hammer’s own physicality that activates visual space.

Known for a respected practice of experimental works and refined essay films, Hammer’s camera-body movement is present in over 80 films: from a handheld motion to a hip swerve, such visual muscularity shows Hammer having “no anxieties about following [her] desire.” With her latest feature documentary, Welcome to this House, 2015, Hammer takes on the adventurous paths of another queer woman for whom precision, experimentation, and visual integrity match the complexity of Hammer’s own output. Elizabeth Bishop was reserved and shy, Hammer is dynamic and vivacious.

Welcome to this House introduces facets of Bishop’s life through some of the houses where Bishop lived, featuring three of her most loved homes filmed on location in Brazil and the USA. Tracing Bishop’s relationships through these homes—in Key West with Louise Crane, in Samambaia with Lota Macedo Soares, and finally on her own at Ouro Preto—is part of a larger investigation for Hammer. Making women’s intimate lives visible has been an ongoing focus for Hammer, and especially queer relationships where women’s intimacy has been historically erased, dismissed, minimized, or just completely sanitized. Bishop’s queerness was always an open secret, thoroughly steeped in poetic candor and uncompromising strides.

During the first minute of Welcome to this House an unruly wind scuttles through a seaside garden. It could have been filmed at Clear Comfort, Alice Austen’s home perched on the Hudson river’s edge, and site of Hammer’s The Female Closet in 1998. Despite this coincidence, it’s the house where Bishop grew up in Nova Scotia that opens the film. Bishop was raised by grandparents in Worcester, MA, the same city of the poet’s birth on February 8, 1911. Orphaned as an infant, Bishop moved in with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, but moved back to Massachusetts when her father’s family obtained custody.

Bishop’s life is marked by vast quantities of private meanings and high-grade public achievements: Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949-50; the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1956; the National Book Award in 1970—nine years before passing away on October 6, 1979, in Boston where she lived in full view of the harbor.

Bishop saw herself “closely related to coastal areas,” as Barbara Page states in the film. In the poem One Art Bishop tells us that “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” no matter how great a loss. The writer misses two cities, but their loss “wasn’t a disaster.” A proficient designer of momentum, Bishop points out in this poem from her last book, Geographies III, that worldly possessions matter very little. Was living in Brazil for 15 years an influence for perfecting the art of detachment? Was it the constant moving around? Or the need to make and remake a roaming studio on her own terms?

Hammer’s film doesn’t leave us with comfortable theories on Bishop, the film elucidates on the spaces where Bishop lived, loved, and worked: their textures and character as the sensory companions to an artist attentive to the way light lingered on and off surfaces. Bishop looked at everyday life by shifting attention to the unknowables gleaming on the underside of thought. For all her reserve, Bishop was never boring: her words are full of pep and pringle, tracing the tides that only someone well constituted to thinking across disciplines can do exceptionally.

Crucial to understanding how Bishop structured her words is this obvious refusal to be landlocked. Hammer’s film portrays this important element by not encasing Bishop’s work, her story, or even her open desires and private dismays. Hammer’s camera moves swiftly through these homes, reconciling the labor of extensive research with the vocabulary of Bishop’s imagination. Like Bishop, Hammer has perfected codes of movement suitable to her perceptions.

Bishop began studying at Vassar in 1930, seven years after another prominent Vassar graduate, Edna St. Vincent Millay, became the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923. As with many of her creative contemporaries with means, Bishop moved to Paris in the mid 30s with Louise Crane—Paris being the city where Millay was already situated, where Sylvia Beach had already launched a book store, where Natalie Barney was famously holding sapphic salons. In one of her poems about Paris, Bishop looks out from her Paris apartment and contemplates the homogeneity of the courtyard buildings, observing the looming interiority of such dwellings:
“It is like introspection/ To stare inside, or retrospection/ a star inside a rectangle, a recollection…”

Bishop’s simultaneous attention to surface and interiority was not lost on Hammer. Welcome to this House looks at Bishop’s houses from the outside and through the spatial dimensions that were Bishop’s foundation. One of the film’s greatest visual pleasures is in the buoyancy of Bishop’s words, suspended over Hammer’s visual streams. In one mesmerizing sequence, Bishop’s poetry is paired with layering waves and electric wires against a tropical blue twilight, an erotic counterpart to Bishop’s rhythms.

The story of Bishop is also a story of how women choose to give each other power. When the urban developer Lota de Macedo Soares builds Bishop a live-in studio adjacent to their home, it’s not a simple case of Macedo Soares giving her lover the symbolic room of her own. It’s also an act of making another world possible, one where Bishop will form, reform and reframe her work. Bishop and Macedo Soares were both workaholics. I imagine there was very little explanation required to convey the importance of work to each other.

Hammer’s film resituates domestic space as a place where women who blur gender roles exercise their will and power without being confined by traditional conventions of what a home should represent: throughout her homes Bishop prioritized pleasure and professional production over the standard narratives of domestic and gendered labor.

What follows is Patricia Silva's interview with Barbara Hammer, conducted over several months throughout 2015.