AFW + NFSA #64: Nitrate Kisses

Nitrate Kisses directed by Barbara Hammer (1992) 67 mins.
7:30PM Tues 30 April
The Brunswick Green, 313/315 Sydney Road, Brunswick.
16mm projection. $10 on the door.

Hammer’s first feature documentary, Nitrate Kisses weaves together striking images of four gay and lesbian couples with archival footage from the so-called ‘first gay film’ made in America, Lot In Sodom (1933).

“Nitrate Kisses is a swirling collage combining archive footage with new recordings of sometimes-explicit intimate scenes and oral testimony, in which lesbians and queers describe how they were forced to forge their own path in society from the 1930s onward. Hammer uses the archive footage to reveal neglected or silenced histories, such as that of the American author Willa Cather, of the very first American queer film Lot in Sodom (directed in 1933 by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber), and of the lesbians in Nazi Germany who had to keep themselves hidden even after the war was over.” - IDFA

Screens with AFW member Rowena Crowe’s 16mm short How To Lean To (2023), 4 mins.
“A cathartic response to the frustrations I experienced as a single queer artist facing the mundane but monolithic task of applying for a home loan. In it I read the dry text of DIY manuals in an effort to build self-reliance while physically circling for a stifling domestic setting” — Rowena Crowe.