Tender Fictions

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 Hammers life and her attempts to construct a self. The film was nominated for a prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival.

The film contains a collage of old home movies, photographs, interviews, sounds and quotations. It details Hammers childhood as a young girl born into a JewishUkrainian family, with a mother who wanted her to be like child actress Shirley Temple, and a grandmother who worked as a cook for actress Lillian Gish. It chronicles her life in the 1960s and the moment in 1970 when she first heard the word lesbian, and realized that it applied to her.According to Hammer, and to film academic Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, a central theme of Tender Fictions is the constructedness of biographies and autobiographies and, by extension, the self. To find her sense of self, Hammer explores the lives and works of artists including D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Shirley Temple. In the film, she says I invented myself as an artist by reading autobiographies of famous artists, poets, painters. None of these were by or about lesbians. ........

Source: Wikipedia