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Home  2016-17  Welcome to This House
ยป2016-17 Season
THU, SEP 29, 2016, 7pm

February 26, 2019 by Susan Taunton

Welcome to This House

In Person
Post-screening Q&A with legendary filmmaker Barbara Hammer!
The Loft Cinema / FREE
Presented by the UA Poetry Center, and co-sponsors the UA Institute for LGBT Studies, Gender & Women's Studies, Exploded View Cinema, and Joe and Janet Hollander
Still from Welcome to This House

Lesbian Looks opens our 23rd annual season with Barbara Hammer’s 2015 lyrical documentary Welcome To This House (2015). The film explores the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)–her life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop’s ‘best loved homes’ in the US, Canada, and Brazil believing that buildings and landscapes bear
cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends, and scholars provide "missing documents" of numerous female lovers. Bishop’s intimate poetry is beautifully performed by Kathleen Chalfant, with the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara.

“Hammer weaves together anecdotal fragments and imagery to build a portrait of a poet as a lesbian at a time when nobody talked of such things openly. Elizabeth Bishop had told Robert Lowell, whom she met in the ’40s, that she was "the loneliest person in the world"; in Welcome to this House, Hammer crafts a vivid picture of how loneliness worked as a driving force in Bishop’s life and work. The film explores the ambiguity of relationships when things were about the "love that dare not speak its name," necessarily fraught, hidden, and ambivalent.”
—Ruth Novaczek

“a layered portrait of the person behind the poet”
—Monica Nolan, Frameline »Read full review

“a sensorial experience of Bishop’s work and chosen habitat, which at its best becomes a polymorphous evocation of the sonorous affects permeating Bishop’s physical and psychological milieu”
—Clayton Dillard, slantmagazine.com »Read full review

»Read interview with Barbara Hammer in the Paris Review

Filed Under: 2016-17

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