Full Description
A diverse range of leading scholars, activists, archivists and artists explore the histories, practices and concerns of women making film and video across the world, from the pioneering German animator Lotte Reiniger, to the influential African American filmmaker Julie Dash and the provocative Scottish contemporary artist Rachel Maclean.
Opening with a foreword from the film theorist Laura Mulvey and a poem by the artist filmmaker Lis Rhodes, the book traces the legacies of early feminist interventions into the moving image and the ways in which these have been re-configured in the very different context of today. Reflecting and building upon the practices of recuperation that continue to play a vital role in feminist art practice and scholarship, contributors discuss topics such as how multiculturalism is linked to experimental and activist film history, the function and nature of the essay film, feminist curatorial practices and much more. This book transports readers across diverse cultural contexts and geographical contours, addressing complex narratives of subjectivity, representation and labour, while juxtaposing cultures of film, video and visual arts practice often held apart.
Contents
Foreword, Laura Mulvey (Birbeck, University of London, UK)
Introduction: Raising Voices, Lucy Reynolds (University of Westminster, UK)
Introduction: Certain Measures, Lis Rhodes (Artist and filmmaker, UK)
Part One: Acknowledgements
In Conversation: MORE: Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz with Irene Revell
1. In a tiny realm of her own: Lotte Reiniger's light work, Elinor Cleghorn (Independent scholar, UK)
2. Returning to Riddles, Catherine Grant (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)
3. 'Being a together woman is a bitch': 'An African American woman's film' genealogy of Julie Dash's Four Women (1975), So Mayer (Freelance writer, UK)
4. Film Esperienza. The work of Marinella Pirelli, Lucia Aspesi (Pirelli HangarBicocca, Italy)
5. Prescient intersectionality: Women, moving image and identity politics in 1980s Britain, Rachel Garfield (University of Reading, UK)
Part Two: Engagements and Negotiations
In Conversation: Maria Palacios Cruz interviews Basma Alsharif
6. 'Overexposed, like an X-ray': The politics of corporeal vulnerability in Sandra Lahire's experimental cinema, Maud Jacquin (Art historian and curator, France & USA)
7. 'Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s': Penelope Spheeris's I Don't Know, Erika Balsom (King's College London, UK)
8. Aesthetics of potentiality: Nguyen Trinh Thi's Essay films, May Adadol Ingawanji (University of Westminster, UK)
9. The art of maximal ventriloquy: Femininity as labour in the films of Rachel MacLean, Sarah Neely (University of Stirling, UK) & Sarah Smith (Glasgow School of Art, UK)
Part Three: Situations and Receptions
In Conversation: Club des Femmes, Helena Reckitt: An Interview on International Women's Day 2017
10. Strategies of exposure and concealment in moving image art by women; a cross-generational account, Cate Elwes (Video artist and curator, UK)
11. Choreographing women's work: Multitaskers, smartphone users and virtuoso performers, Maeve Connolly (Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Ireland)
12. Female solidarity as uncommodified value: Lucy Beech's Cannibals and Rehana Zaman's Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen, Maria Walsh (Chelsea College of the Arts, University Arts London, UK)
13. Can we still talk about women artists? Melissa Gronlund (The National, USA)
Bibliography
Index
