[ Sultry funk plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Reverberating ] ♪♪ [ Film projector rattling ] ♪♪ [ Ethereal vocals play ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Dog's nails clicking on floor ] ♪♪ Yeah, so, this, um, this archive that I've had for over 30 years -- and I've kept everything -- has been sold to Yale and the Beinecke Rare Book collection will have it in about two weeks.

It's like it's more than my life.

It's a history of queer art in San Francisco, lesbian art.

It's more than lesbian art.

It's lesbian activism.

It's really a priceless collection.

Three boxes of my personal journals and outtakes, all kinds of wonderful materials.

So, I'm very lucky that, at this stage in my life, my legacy is being determined and being put in places that are available.

♪♪ This one, I think, has the finished films that I made in '68 before I came out and that has films like "Baptism," where a group of neighbors and I baptized each other in a pool.

I went down Barbara.

I came out Sunrise.

And it was some antlers that were over my head, that dunked me in the water.

"Machu Picchu," "The Galapagos."

Uh... "Could be thrown out."

Obviously, I didn't throw it out.

"Strange.

To be further" something.

"...looked at," I think.

So, this'll be one I want to see because what I thought should be thrown out then, I may think is quite valuable now.

And, again, it's Super 8.

You can tell by the sprocket holes.

[ Birds chirping ] [ Frog croaks ] [ Frog croaking ] I moved from film to video.

Well, way back, actually.

As soon as the half-inch tape recorder came out in 1975, Max Almy and I made a tape together called...

Glitches break up.

What do you call it?

Glitches.

What's that?

Glitches.

The first kiss.

-Mm.

-I mean, to me, it's like it shows that, you know, that we are human beings and we're not just looking at each other as objects.

-Mm.

-And, sometimes, when you film without sound and without this dialogue, you miss that.

[ Laughter ] With the -- -Oh.

-You know, one of those experiences that just everything ceases, except the Eros of the moment.

The Eros of the moment.

Though artwork is my life right now and I've never allowed that to be.

It's always been something from my imagination, something that I detach myself from so highly.

My life is in -- is in the living when I'm editing because I don't have any -- I haven't had any a priori ideas about how I'm going to cut.

-Uh-huh.

-So, I start experimenting with cutting and I get real high from it and real thrilled.

-Uh-huh.

-And that's just like being out here today.

That's just -- think what hit us first, when we got here.

It was like, "We're free."

[ Laughing ] You're free."

Of course, you're feeling it like tenfold because you're going to stay here and you get to use this place and create here and do all these things here that you want to do.

But, in a way, I can bounce off that.

I can relate it into my own life.

Like I don't have any ties.

I can just work.

I can -- I can do what I want and I feel good about myself -Ugh, oh, yeah.

and I feel good about it.

So that communication between us is important for me and I think it sort of helps to like bolster where you're at and just, you know, kind of bounce off where you're at.

And we would record our first kiss, our dating, our relationship, our fight.

We had somebody else shoot a sex scene and then we had to edit it reel-to-reel.

So, I taught Max how to shoot film, so, the Bolex camera features in the film as well, and then she taught me how to shoot video.

That was part of the process of making that film as well.

So, then I started working in digital, especially when I moved into a documentary format, where I wanted to do interviews.

Then found that I loved editing digitally because I could do anything -- I could move, I could paste, I could put filters on, I could change colors, I could take color and be black-and-white instantaneously, not having to go back to a film print and wait for it to come from the lab.

This is a Jersey magazine called Jersey Now.

And it's an amazing photograph of Claude Cahun with her arms through a lump of Jersey granite.

It's a very traditional Jersey stone.

[ Music whooshing ] ♪♪ So, digital filters?

I haven't even begun to explore them, but they can be used for emotional reasons and I know, in "A Horse Is Not a Metaphor," for instance, when I'm going with my shave-- Well, it's not shaved head.

I lost my hair with chemotherapy.

I'm going into the water and I touch the water with my hands and then light streams out from that touching of the water.

[ Upbeat tune plays ] ♪♪ "As we've discussed and the tests have confirmed, you have ovarian cancer, stage 3."

-[ Screeching ] -[ Scat singing ] ♪♪ ♪♪ That was a filter that I put on.

I had no idea what it would look like.

And yet, when I saw it, I thought, that's the way I felt, in a way.

A friend had gone with me so I could be in nature.

I was nude and I was bathing and it was like the baptism in 1968.

I was rebirthing myself or cleansing.

So, maybe we are all making just one film, each filmmaker is making one film, even though there are probably 100 of them now.

Always was my goal.

Ever since I met Stan Brakhage and he said, "I've made 100 films," I thought to myself, "I'm going to make 100 films."

Huh.

I think I can retire now.

[ Chuckles ] I think my legacy is that I have one more in the computer and, like I told my friend last night, an artist at my birthday party, she told me something I told her that has made a big difference in her life -- that I always finish what I start, so...

There is a piece -- A lot of the work that I shot for a video that was in the performance "Evidentiary Bodies" is what I'm speaking about.

[ Mellow tune plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ And now I'm checking the focus with my right finger?

-Mm-hmm.

-Yeah.

I think you've got it down.

Oh, that's good.

That's good.

And here, at the end, we can just let it play out.

♪♪ I was a slow bloomer and I was raised in the '50s, so, I was raised to be a middle-class girl with a white picket fence and you'll get married.

But I did get married to a man.

I got married to a working-class guy and I said, "I'll marry you, if you go around the world with me," so, we went around the world on a motor scooter a couple of years after we got married and we came back and I was influenced by the hippie culture.

We moved to Northern California, built our own house, dynamited out areas, put in our own cement for the foundation.

I dug fence posts for my horse corral.

It was an alternative lifestyle that I was part of and I didn't recognize the sexism in that until later.

And, when I did, I came out.

But I also came out because I felt another woman's leg press against my own.

We were watching "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in San Francisco, and Marie Shaw was sitting next to me and her knee against mine.

I suddenly got an erotic rush and I decided, "I'm acting on it.

This is not something I'm going to ignore."

Well, Marie came home and we spent the night.

So, my influences were directly experiential.

[ Breathing deeply ] ♪♪ ♪♪ -As your soundtrack.

-Yeah, [indistinct] audio, yeah.

But I could just put my hands... -Yeah.

-You could stroke it -Yeah.

because it's all about stroking.

-Yeah.

I mean, this is just kind of giving it -- Yeah, sensually touching the body of your -- Lookit, touch the body of your cello.

It's like a woman.

[ Staccato breaths ] [ Cello playing ] ♪♪ [ Hyperventilating ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Gasping ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Exhales forcefully ] [ Thunder rumbling ] I'm interested in all the genres and bringing them together, rather than keeping them separate.

If you look, even, at the early '70s films, like "Dyketactics," you could still say, "Okay, there's a group of women in nature, celebrating their bodies, touching each other, making love."

But you could also say, "That's a documentary of the way we lived our lives in the 1970s."

So easy -- "Anybody want to go to the country with me and play for the weekend?"

And off we went with a lot of volunteers.

[ Psychedelic music plays ] [ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Indistinct conversation ] Yeah, but I liked it going over.

-Okay.

-And breaking up the words.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Whirring ] How big?

That's about 4.

Louder.

4!

4!

[Indistinct], don't touch it.

Don't touch it.

From -- No.

[ Thunderous pop ] [ Whirring powers down ] Did you touch it?

-No.

-Well, I -- -She didn't touch it.

-She didn't touch it.

Whew!

[ Laughs ] Whoa!

[ Mellow tune plays ] [Indistinct] the camera.

That looks cool.

All my work I've been doing since I started undergoing chemo, again, after ten years, and throughout that period, I would have creative ideas and I would hire Angel, my camera person, to come in and she would shoot.

We'd make, instead of a greenscreen, we had a blackscreen.

Then I'd wake up a month later with an idea how to use that footage.

So, it's piecemeal that it came together.

Seems like it doesn't want to be linear, you know?

I mean, I've always shot it and conceived of it in these chunks and so, okay, I could string it together, but one of the few times I've tried editing, it never felt interwoven.

It always felt chunky.

And, with "A Horse Is Not a Metaphor," I could use the nine cancer treatments that I had and just use that as kind of a backbone to these.

But this, this doesn't call for that and it's not really about structure.

It's about living with cancer, which is like a daily activity.

[ Ethereal vocals play ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Today when I was trying to do a little meditation and rest, I was feeling like I was wrapped in a Teddy bear.

Very warm.

And, I mean, I know so many people that are coming, so, I know they'll be embracing me, you know, and I expect there might be tears.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Staccato breaths ] [ Cello plays suspenseful tune ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Discordant, staticky music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Discordant, staticky music fades ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Applause ] [ Laughter ] You're not crying because that's not what you gave us.

You gave us a celebration.

You gave us truth.

And -- the point being that we are not dead, we are not dying, we are alive until that second we fall down, and people forget that.

And artists are like that.

Artists work, artists produce, artists create and becomes what keeps you alive.

It's the circle, you know, It keeps you alive.

You get life from it and then you create a life and expressiveness about it.

So, this is powerful, in that way, because nowhere are you living in grief and that's what you're giving us.

You're not giving us grief.

You're giving us life and I think it's fantastic.

[ Applause ] Hammer: Thank you.

The challenge, for me, often, in making a film is to do what you're told you can't do.

So, just tell me no and I'll find a way to get inside.

I was talking to people in Hawaii when I was in Key West.

I was hanging out, shooting single-frame in front of the house.

I did everything I could until, finally, I got permission.

But that's the way this film evolved.

And, more or less, all my films evolved from chance encounters, enthusiasm for a subject, and then the commitment to the process, to following all the way through.

In the late, mid- to late '90s, I wanted to work in the feature format and I started a film which became... 1992, it was released and the idea that I was interested in is history -- who makes history and who's left out?

[ Upbeat jazz vocals play ] ♪♪ All the sexual activity in my films is directed, from "Dyketactics" through "Nitrate Kisses," and I feel very comfortable with sexuality.

I so appreciate other people's bodies and I think I'm the kind of person that they are comfortable with.

And so, through that appreciation -- verbally, visually, as they're getting ready for the scene -- I celebrate them through my way of filming.

The camera's not on a tripod.

I'm stroking.

I'm part of the scene that I'm directing.

Speaker: Jerre was one of the first women to take a man's place in a factory, and I've forgotten what she did.

I operated a lathe, drill press, but the standard lathe, the big one, was what I did, mostly.

I worked for Ford Instrument.

Then I went out to California and I worked on the boats as an electrician.

The two women with the shaved heads and the tattoos -- Alastair had built a sculpture within her -- within their home, their studio, here in New York and Julie Tolentino and Alastair went inside.

I directed them inside to hang from the the burnt-out former house, to use safe sex gloves and to -- to perform their sexuality within this structure.

Because, somehow, I felt, during the time of AIDS, this is the way we were performing our sexuality, within... [ Operatic vocals play ] ...a time fraught with disaster, with consequences that we didn't know might occur.

And so the fragility of the charred wood next to... the beige bodies that were so smooth because the women were so young, was something I felt represented our vulnerability in a time of AIDS.

[ Upbeat blues play ] Do you feel like you could be airbrushed out of history?

Woman: There's definitely, within the dyke community, part of it that they don't want to show.

What we value and how we want to place ourselves with what we do isn't in the realm of what a lot of lesbians consider valuable.

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Tranquil vocals play ] ♪♪ ♪♪ At 20 years old, I didn't know I'd be an artist.

I didn't know I'd be an artist that had four major retrospectives by the time I was 73.

That I would -- I'm 75 now.

That I would have a Guggenheim at 74.

Would never even thought of being -- I wasn't thinking of myself as an artist and I wanted to be a forest ranger.

[ Laughs ] But women were not allowed to be forest rangers!

In 1957, I entered UCLA and it was a closed field to me.

Mm.

So, of course, that's totally different now and now, I'm very interested in the arts and that's been my career and I'm not going to have another career.

-Mm.

-I'm happy here and I can learn about nature and management and protecting our waters on my own.

My avocation.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

♪♪ I think there's genius in relationship, as well as in ordinary work.

I think that -Hm.

genius comes with hard work, that it isn't a birthright and it isn't something that is a special talent.

I think it's a talent of persistence and commitment and love and not giving up -- determination, perseverance.

And that's what a relationship is.

Relationship is genius.

Genius is relationship.

-Yeah.

I'm a genius.

[ Laughter ] ♪♪ ♪♪ I look back, I mean, things you don't [indistinct].

Then after Marie and I got together in the summer, I saw that I was heading for London on my own, without her.

And I thought maybe I did have a touch of homophobia.

Maybe I was afraid.

Well, she joined me not much later.

And, of course, the problem with youth hostels was those single beds.

[ Laughter ] We managed.

[ Laughter and applause ] But today, you know, what's to fear, death?

That's what I get to face now.

-Mm-hmm.

That's pretty damn interesting because, you know, two most important things in our life -- we're born and we die.

Do we get to know either of them?

You know, so, my desire is to have medical aid in dying.

The legislature is meeting today and tomorrow and they met last week in Albany to hear stories about those of us who are terminally ill and would like doctor assistance when we go.

I can choose my time.

I don't have to go into a coma for five days and have Florrie suffering during that time, as well as friends.

I can be cognizant, know that I don't have much time left and take the pills, injection, whatever it is, say goodbye on my own terms, like I've made films on my own terms.

♪♪ And we were standing on rocks with a creek flowing between us.

I was up high.

She was down in the creek bed.

And, as soon as I saw Florrie, -[ Laughs ] -I fell in love with her.

I fell in love with her, so you could say I fell in love with her body and her demeanor.

Because I didn't yet know your personality.

Objectified right from the start?

-[ Laughing ] -Oh, my God!

It's true!

[ Laughter ] And I drove into the Brick Hut, which was a woman-owned café.

In Oakland.

Yeah.

No longer there.

And, suddenly, this woman was up behind me and, um, wanting my phone number.

[ Snaps fingers ] Oh, you know what?

You exaggerate!

-[ Laughs ] -I never left my table.

Well, I came by and wanted -Exactly!

your phone number.

-Exactly!

Let's get it right.

I did notice you, though.

You sashayed in there with your work boots, your very short, very tight shorts, a little tank top.

And I thought, "Ooh!

She's back!

-[ Laughs ] -I'm here.

I'm free.

Let's see what happens!"

Yeah.

Love you, Hammer.

I love you too, Burkey.

[ Whispering ] Burkey.

-Yeah.

-[ Snorts ] [ Laughter ] I love you, too, Florence Reed.

I love you, too, Florrie.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪