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Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS
Barbara Hammer first heard of AIDS in 1985 while she was teaching at Columbia College in Chicago. She noticed strange, inflammatory articles in newspapers and asked her students to collect hysterical headlines for her. This marked the beginning of her work on Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS.
In this project, she examined the public ignorance, stigmatisation, and fundamentally misguided attitudes surrounding the new illness. By creating a snowstorm of newspaper clippings, she aimed to reveal the extent to which the media was producing a “snow job”.
Bio Barbara Hammer
Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) was an American feminist filmmaker, visual artist, and lesbian activist with a career spanning over fifty years—constructing revelations on gender and sexuality, and later illness and mortality. She produced over ninety films, ranging from experimental shorts to essays and full-length documentaries, as well as performances, installations, and photographs that illuminate the representation of lesbian lives. In her work, Hammer explodes traditional notions of female sexuality by showing it for what it is: complex, messy, human.
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This film was part of Barbara Hammer: A Short Film Retrospective, an event during Film Fest Gent 2026, in collaboration with yanco and Art Cinema OFFoff