Resisting Paradise
Barbara Hammer | USA | 16mm | 80 min. | 2003 | Featuring Claude
Duthuit, Lisa Fittko | Canadian Premiere
Barbara Hammer’s unerring eye for fascinating, hidden histories
takes her to Cassis, France, where she investigates two very different
kinds of lives lived there during WWII: those of the painter Matisse
and of the anti-Fascist Resistance fighters.
Resisting Paradise addresses tensions that have informed
all of Barbara Hammer’s work: the tension between the desire
to produce works of visual beauty and the impulse to agitate for
social change. Like many of her films, it uncovers a little-known
history. During WWII, the lovely town of Cassis in the south of
France provided the light and landscape that inspired some of the
lushest paintings of the modern era; it also became a point of departure
for Jews fleeing the Nazi terror. Wartime letters between painters
Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse are contrasted with the role played
in the Resistance by Matisse’s wife and daughter. Hammer discovers
the stories of heroic municipal workers who forged identity cards
for Jews and antifascists such as Lisa Fittko, who helped Walter
Benjamin in his attempt to escape over the Pyrenées. Archival
images and the testimony of Matisse’s grandson Claude Duthuit
and Resistance fighters such as Fittko disclose a fascinating and
inspiring history, but the questions the film asks about the role
of art during wartime remain urgent and contemporary.
Barbara Hammer has been called “the hardest-working woman
in independent film” by Indiewire – an appropriate title
for an artist who has made 80 films and videos since 1972 and won
many important awards along the way. A pioneer of lesbian and feminist
cinema, Hammer is best known for her trilogy of experimental features,
Nitrate Kisses (1992), Tender Fictions (1995) and History Lessons
(2000), which creatively use the cinematic archives to establish
a place for lesbian women in the history of images.
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