Feminism and Video: A View from the Village (original) (raw)
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Feminism and Video: The View from The Village
Camera Obscura; Archive for the Future
My first undergraduate filmmaking class circa 1968 at Harvard had fifteen students; fourteen of them were men -boys, reallyand I was the one female. It was the only film production class at the entire university. The professor, Robert Gardner, was very much a man, an old-fashioned gentleman artist, a documentarian, alternately gallant to or oblivious of me -as was the general wont in those bygone days between older men and their female students, at least when no lechery was involved. Though hardly shy, I barely spoke, so sure was I that a mere question of mine would reveal the depth of my stupidity when it came to cameras. At the time, I probably thought that the gap in my comfort zone in the world -the mechanical and electronic -was genetic: women were inherent Luddites. We shot on Bolexes and edited on Movieolas. Since I was unable to speak in the class, I sat by the Charles River with the manuals, the camera, and the light meter for hours, trying out everything without peer surveillance. Student strikes against the war in Vietnam were key features of my film education. You often didn't finish editing because you would not cross the picket line by the middle of spring semester (1968 -70) to enter
Vertical Hold: A History of Women's Video Art
Feedback: The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews
On my way to and from classes when I was a student at California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s, I always passed the video editing rooms, and I always saw only men at the stations, and they were always making electronic paintings. This quotidian scene occurred during the seismic shifts of the civil rights movement, women's liberation, black liberation, and impassioned resistance to the war in Vietnam. I, like so many women
The following reflections are an attempt to outline the current situation in film, feminism and Film Studies from a German perspective. The question being raised is twofold, as film reflected within the context of institutionalized research forms the perspective from which the question concerning the significance of film in today's world is perceived and dealt with. As my intent is not so much to determine a specific position but rather to outline the general situation, I would like to discuss the following problems: what is the present situation in Film Studies; which relationships exist between Film Studies and feminist film theory on the one hand and between Film Studies and Media Studies on the other? What can be said about the relationship between film and media, and also about what has become of the special relationship between women and film? An outline of the present situation does not project a picture of the future situation so that, consequently, I will not offer solutions for the problems raised here nor draw any conclusions. This paper must, on the contrary, be considered solely as a contribution to the discussion on these subjects, the moment of a self-reflection of film studies being the central issue.
The German Cinema Book , 2020
In 2001, the feminist director Jutta Brückner wrote that films by women were the product of an often arduous "quest for traces. " 1 Her comment echoed an interview three decades earlier, when Brückner had spoken of film as a means to "reconstruct symbolically" the "disrupted physical integrity" of women in history. 2 The reference in both instances was not only to her own work but in general to filmmaking by women who seek new forms of articulation for feminine subjectivity and experience. Brückner's observations have resonance too for a different cultural practice of retrieval, that of history-writing in respect of women's film. This chapter attempts a reconstruction of key moments in German women's filmmaking, which we explore in particular, but not solely, in its relation to feminism. Like Brückner's film narratives, our history-which for reasons of space is necessarily partial-starts from an assumption of "disrupted integrity, " though not, as for Brückner, in the physical or symbolic body of woman, but in the similarly fractured cinematic body of work by women over twelve decades of German film. It is, moreover, not only Brückner's understanding of film as a medium capable of lending tangible presence to an otherwise invisible or fragmented gendered experience that is useful for this chapter. Her filmmaking method offers further helpful insights for approaches to women's cinema history. Early in her filmmaking career, in films including the experimental documentary Tue recht und scheue niemand (Do right and fear nobody, 1975) and the semi-autobiographical Hungerjahre (Years of Hunger, 1979), Brückner used newsreel inserts, still photographs, voice-over, and found sound to "suggest the complexity of a whole period": in Tue recht, five decades of one woman's mid-twentieth-century petit bourgeois existence; in Hungerjahre, the 1950s as viewed from the perspective of a bulimic adolescent. Brückner's juxtapositions of archive image and sound with memory fragments and fictional narrative revealed female subjectivities in a state of emergence, developing as "the result of a long cultural process" that is "constituted by … history. " 3 Analogously, the history of women's filmmaking-of the moments, then, in which women become the active subjects of cinematic perception as well as social actors in film production and circulation-demands an approach that registers traces of feminine subjectivity and agency as the products of specific conditions of historical emergence: conditions that may at one moment facilitate women's filmmaking and at others suppress female participation in the film industry or cinematic practice. Examples from early film history should serve to illustrate the point. Three women who would later move into production and directing-Henny Porten, Asta Nielsen (see Chapter 5), and Leontine Sagan-began careers in acting at a historical moment in which film performance and stardom belonged to, indeed were significantly shaping an early twentieth-century culture of public visibility for women. In Emilie Altenloh's pioneering sociological study of early cinema audiences, Asta Nielsen in particular figures not merely as an audience magnet for a cross-class community of female fans. 4 Feminist historians including Miriam Hansen, Heide Schlüpmann, and Andrea Haller have also shown how the mass presence of women in the film audience may be understood as part of a broader early twentieth-century challenge to the "dominant organization of public experience" around masculine norms. 5 That challenge was rooted in socio-historical developments including the expansion of women's education, the advance of 31 FEMINISM AND WOMEN'S CINEMA
Looking Back and Forward: A Conversation about Women Make Movies
Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2013
In the summer of 1984 I interned at Women Make Movies, working closely with Debra Zimmerman, the organization's relatively new director and then sole employee. When I returned in 1988 to work in distribution, the organization had moved to Soho and taken on significantly more films and staff. I eventually joined the board in 2001 and currently serve as chair. As a teacher and scholar, I owe much of my perspective on feminist film to what I have learned from the staff, board members, filmmakers, consultants, funders, programmers, and nonprofit film professionals with whom I have come into contact through WMM-no one more than Zimmerman. An intense presence with a seductive voice and an infectious laugh, she taught me how to hail a New York City cab, read a budget, see more festival films in one day than would seem humanly possible, and turn a passionate commitment to women and film into a vocation. This is a distillation of our conversations in late summer 2012, as Zimmerman juggled real-estate issues, negotiations with a
Feminist Approaches to Media and Technology
Office Location Sessional Desk Area B #15 Office Hours Friday, 11:40am -12:30pm and 2:30-3:00pm (before and after class) DELIVERY MODE/LOCATION Course Location: OA2010 Campus: Orillia Times: Friday, 12:30-2:30