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Semiotics of the Kitchen & Nitrate Kisses

During this screening you will see short film Semiotics of the Kitchen followed by Nitrate Kisses, both selected by Guest of Honor Hito Steyerl.

poster IDFA 2021
During this screening you will see short film Semiotics of the Kitchen followed by Nitrate Kisses, both selected by Guest of Honor Hito Steyerl.

Programme

  • Semiotics of the Kitchen (Martha Rosler, US 1975) (7 min.)

    In 1974, Martha Rosler, a pioneer of feminist video art, made this parody of the cooking shows that were already popular at the time on TV and at household fairs. Standing in front of the stove and fridge, this “anti-Julia Child” puts on her apron and goes through an A to Z of kitchen utensils. She lards her alphabet with a pinch of humor, a dash of frustration, and a generous portion of anger—indispensable ingredients in any feminist kitchen.

    Rosler’s body language adds a whole new layer of meaning to the objects she demonstrates. There are other things you can do with a kitchen knife besides chopping an onion, and with every scoop of the soup ladle, Rosler seems to spoon another helping of the patriarchy out the window. And how to use a nutcracker or a meat tenderizer? Here too, the film leaves little to the imagination.

  • Nitrate Kisses (Barbara Hammer, US 1992) (67 min.)

    That which is kept, named, and shown is what matters: this is what Barbara Hammer argues in Nitrate Kisses, as she spotlights the hidden and erased visual history of queers. Hammer (1939-2019) was a pioneer of experimental lesbian film and queer cinema. Her breakthrough came in 1974 with the short film Dyketactics, in which, in a groundbreaking act for the time, she presented sex from a lesbian perspective.

    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.

This is part of

Details

Length

74 min.

Part of

IDFA 2021

Documentary lovers, keep November 17 to 28 free in your calendar. The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam presents its 34th edition in cinemas throughout Amsterdam, including several special programs in Eye.

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