Tender Fictions

Tender Fictions (1995)

Childhood stories of the artist as a young lesbian and intimate tales of the lesbian as a young artist underscore the filmmaker's life of performances. With a Swiss army knife she robs an American Express Bank in Morocco, accosts a shepherd in a field on International Women's Day, and tap dances on Shirley Temple's star on Hollywood Boulevard. This child movie star was the ideal by which Hammer's ambitious mother measured her own Barbie. Grandma, already a cook for Lillian Gish in Hollywood, introduced the cute, loquacious child and her mother to D.W. Griffith. Lesbian autobiography is a slender genre, so Hammer draws from general culture studies for critique and to provide an ironic edge to the synthesized "voices of authority".

Date of release
1995-03-15
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (5)
Runtime
58m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Barbara Hammer

Casting

Interesting facts

Tender Fictions is a 1996 autobiographical documentary film directed by American experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. It is the second of a trilogy of documentary films that includes Nitrate Kisses and History Lessons. Together, the three films are sometimes known as the "History trilogy". Tender Fictions details Hammer's life and her attempts to "construct" a self. The film was nominated for a prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.

Background

At the end of Hammer's 1992 experimental documentary film Nitrate Kisses, writer Joan Nestle urges the viewer to preserve and document lesbian history for future generations. Hammer decided to create an autobiography, "before someone [did] it for [her]." The intention of Nitrate Kisses had been to explore the "making" of history, and who it is made by, with a particular emphasis on the "lost" history of lesbians and gay men.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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