HISTORY LESSONS is a new film from Barbara Hammer, winner of the 2000 Frameline Award for Outstanding Contributions to Lesbian and Gay Media Arts at the 24th San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

Experimenting with the form of the historical documentary, HISTORY LESSONS is an entertaining pastiche of cultural celluloid artifacts, appropriated historical footage, and dramatically composed skits focusing on pre-Stonewall lesbian life and revelry.

Hammer has accumulated an extraordinary body of archival footage - some dating back to the 19th century - of sports films, military films, vintage stag reels, and lesbian angst dramas. Some of this material she presents with unmediated glory; other clips, such as Eleanor Roosevelt's address to a ladies roundtable, she bends to her will and purpose through audacious visual and audio juxtapositions. A deliciously frolicking tension develops between the original and manipulated clips until the viewer is gleefully convinced that every woman depicted on the screen is a lesbian, and that the epic history of lesbians is something everyone should be proud of.

"Witty, giddy... high-spirited... Offers radical sexual politics in a jester's surprise package of impudent humor. It's all quite delightful."—Variety