Barbara Hammer: Embodied Histories (1988)
85 minutes
Created during a period when misinformation about AIDS was rampant in the United States, Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS assembles video and audio fragments alongside mid-1980s news headlines deconstructing how mainstream media portrayed AIDS, arguing that its distortions and misrepresentations functioned as a "snow job" that fueled greater homophobia, sexual discrimination, and repression of gay people. "I first heard of AIDS in 1985 when I was teaching at Columbia College in Chicago. I noticed the strange and inflammatory articles in the newspapers and I asked my students to collect hysteric headlines for me. And so I began my work on Snow Job . I examined the public ignorance, stigmatization, and just plain wrong attitudes towards this new illness." – Barbara Hammer