Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: Contexts and Practices 9781784537005, 9781350124295, 9781350113299

Table of contents :
Cover page
Title page
Halftitle page
Copyright page
Epigraph page
Contents
List of figures
Contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Raising voices
Who speaks?
Inflections, enunciations
Knowing where to look
A collection of voices
Who speaks for whom?
Notes
Lis Rhodes – Certain measures
Note
Part One Acknowledgements
In conversation: MORE – Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz with Irene Revell
1 Elinor Cleghorn – In a tiny realm of her own: Lotte Reiniger’s light work
Notes
2 Catherine Grant – Returning to Riddles
A theory film
Opening pages
Laura speaking/Laura listening
Her friendship with Maxine has intervened
And, in her mind, she flung herself through the air
Mulvey’s Manifesto
Acknowledgements
Notes
3 So Mayer – ‘Being a together woman is a bitch’: An ‘African American woman’s film’ genealogy of Julie Dash’s Four Women (1975)
Acknowledgements
Notes
4 Lucia Aspesi – Film Esperienza. The work of Marinella Pirelli
Invisibility
The centrality of the human body
Light and movement
Notes
5 Rachel Garfield – Prescient intersectionality: Women, moving image and identity politics in 1980s Britain
Notes
Part Two Negotiations and Engagements
In conversation: Maria Palacios Cruz interviews Basma Alsharif
Addendum
Notes
6 Maud Jacquin – ‘Overexposed, like an X-ray’: The politics of corporeal vulnerability in Sandra Lahire’s experimental cinema
Notes
7 Erika Balsom – ‘Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s’: Penelope Spheeris’s I Don’t Know
Notes
8 May Adadol Ingawanij – Aesthetics of potentiality: Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Essay Films
Artistic practice in post-Doi Moi Vietnam
The face of Nhu Quynh
Art and collective capacity
Notes
9 Sarah Neely and Sarah Smith – The art of maximal ventriloquy: Femininity as labour in the films of Rachel Maclean
Notes
Part Three Situations and Receptions
In conversation: Club des Femmes, Helena Reckitt –An interview on International Women’s Day 2017
Notes
10 Catherine Elwes – Strategies of exposure and concealment in moving image art by women; a cross- generational account
Introduction
Self-effacement; strategies of abstraction and displacement
Repositioning the gaze and the subcutaneous body
Masquerade, impersonation and surrogacy;‘ wrestling with the icon
Self-revelation ‘post-feminism’
Contemporary evocations of self
Notes
11 Maeve Connolly – Choreographing women’s work: Multitaskers, smartphone users and virtuoso performers
Introduction
The labour of appearance and the virtuoso performer
Women’s work on camera
Choreographing histories of labour
Conclusion
Notes
12 Maria Walsh – Female solidarity as uncommodifi ed value: Lucy Beech’s Cannibalsand Rehana Zaman’s Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen
Notes
13 Melissa Gronlund – Can we still talk about women artists?
Identification
Production
Reception
Academia
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PLATES

Citation preview

Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image

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Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image Contexts and Practices Edited by Lucy Reynolds

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Lucy Reynolds and Contributors, 2019 Lucy Reynolds has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xxiv–xxvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels Cover image © Appropriazione A propria azione Azione propria, Sole in mano (1973) (16mm transferred to DVD, 6 mins) (© Marinella Pirelli / Courtesy Archivio Marinella Pirelli, Varese) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: ePDF: ePub: XML:

978-1-7845-3700-5 978-1-3501-1329-9 978-1-3501-1328-2 978-1-3501-2429-5

Series: International Library of the Moving Image Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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‘. . . a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head.’ Lis Rhodes, ‘Whose History?’ 1979

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Contents List of figures Contributors Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Raising voices Lis Rhodes – Certain measures

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Part One Acknowledgements In conversation: MORE – Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz with Irene Revell

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Elinor Cleghorn – In a tiny realm of her own: Lotte Reiniger’s light work

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Catherine Grant – Returning to Riddles

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So Mayer – ‘Being a together woman is a bitch’: An ‘African American woman’s film’ genealogy of Julie Dash’s Four Women (1975)

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Lucia Aspesi – Film Esperienza. The work of Marinella Pirelli

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Rachel Garfield – Prescient intersectionality: Women, moving image and identity politics in 1980s Britain

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Part Two Negotiations and Engagements

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In conversation: Maria Palacios Cruz interviews Basma Alsharif

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Maud Jacquin – ‘Overexposed, like an X-ray’: The politics of corporeal vulnerability in Sandra Lahire’s experimental cinema

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Contents

Erika Balsom – ‘Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s’: Penelope Spheeris’s I Don’t Know

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May Adadol Ingawanij – Aesthetics of potentiality: Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Essay Films

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Sarah Neely and Sarah Smith – The art of maximal ventriloquy: Femininity as labour in the films of Rachel Maclean

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Part Three

Situations and Receptions

In conversation: Club des Femmes, Helena Rickett – An Interview on International Women’s Day 2017

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10 Catherine Elwes – Strategies of exposure and concealment in moving image art by women; a cross-generational account

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11 Maeve Connolly – Choreographing women’s work: Multitaskers, smartphone users and virtuoso performers

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12 Maria Walsh – Female solidarity as uncommodified value: Lucy Beech’s Cannibals and Rehana Zaman’s Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen

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13 Melissa Gronlund – Can we still talk about women artists?

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Bibliography Index

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List of figures X

Lis Rhodes, Certain Measures: Index of Disbelief, 2016, photographic still. Courtesy the artist. C1.1 Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz with Werner Hirsch during the production of N.O.Body, 2007. Courtesy Boudry/Lorenz. C1.2 Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz with Yvonne Rainer and Wu Tsang during the production of Salomania, 2009. Courtesy Boudry/Lorenz. 1.1 Lotte Reiniger, Aschenputtel (Cinderella), 1922, screen grab. 1.2 Lotte Reiniger at her trick table, 1922, photograph taken from Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, Batsford Books (London, 1975). 2.1 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, screen grab. Courtesy Laura Mulvey. 2.2 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, screen grab. Courtesy Laura Mulvey. 2.3 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, screen grab. Courtesy Laura Mulvey. 2.4 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, screen grab. Courtesy Laura Mulvey. 3.1 Julie Dash, Four Women, 1975. Courtesy Julie Dash. 4.1 Marinella Pirelli, Appropriazione A propria azione Azione propria, 1973. Courtesy Archivio Marinella Pirelli, Varese. 4.2 Marinella Pirelli, Film-Ambiente, 1969. Courtesy Archivio Marinella Pirelli, Varese. 5.1 Sankofa, The Passion of Remembrance, 1986. Courtesy Isaac Julien’s Studio. 5.2 Alia Syed, Fatima’s Letter, 1992. Courtesy the artist, LUX, London and Talwar Gallery.

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C2.1 Basma Alsharif, Home Movies Gaza, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. C2.2 Basma Alsharif, A Field Guide to the Ferns, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. 6.1 Sandra Lahire, Edge, 1986. Courtesy LUX, London. 6.2 Sandra Lahire, Terminals, 1986. Courtesy LUX, London. 7.1 Penelope Spheeris, I Don’t Know, 1970. Courtesy Penelope Spheeris and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 7.2 Penelope Spheeris, I Don’t Know, 1970. Courtesy Penelope Spheeris and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 8.1 Nguyen Trinh Thi, Song to the Front, 2011. Courtesy the artist. 8.2 Nguyen Trinh Thi, Letters from Panduranga, 2015. Courtesy the artist. 9.1 Rachel Maclean, Feed Me, 2015. Courtesy Film and Video Umbrella, British Art Show 8, Creative Scotland. 9.2 Rachel Maclean, It’s What’s Inside That Counts, 2016. Courtesy HOME, University of Salford Art Collection, Tate, Zabludowicz Collection, Frieze Film and Channel 4. C3.1 Tina Keane, In Our Hands, Greenham, 1984. Courtesy the artist and Cinenova. C3.2 Club des Femmes, ‘Instructions for an Unmade Film’, a public participation activity commissioned by The Photographers’ Gallery to coincide with the exhibition ‘Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s’, October 2016–January 2017. Courtesy Tim Bowditch. 10.1 Catherine Elwes, There is a Myth, 1984. Courtesy the artist. 10.2 Ope Lori, Deracination, 2010. Courtesy the artist. 11.1 Sarah Browne, Something from nothing, 2014. Courtesy the artist. 11.2 Sarah Browne, Something from nothing, 2014. Courtesy the artist. 12.1 Lucy Beech, Cannibals, 2013. Courtesy the artist. 12.2 Rehana Zaman, Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen, 2014. Courtesy the artist. 13.1 Rosalind Nashashibi, Jack Straw’s Castle, 2009, production still. Courtesy the artist and LUX, London.

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List of figures

13.2 Laure Prouvost, We Will Go Far (On Ira Loin), 2015. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia.

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List of Plates Section 1 (before p. 000) 1.1 Catriona Shaw, Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Peaches during the shooting of To Valerie Solanas And Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation, 2013. Courtesy Boudry/Lorenz. 1.2 Lotte Reiniger and assistants working on Prince Achmed, Berlin 1923, photograph taken from Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, Batsford Books (London, 1975). 1.3a and 1.3b Laura Mulvey with Emma Hedditch, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 2008, screen grabs. Courtesy Emma Hedditch. 1.4 Julie Dash, Four Women, 1975. Courtesy Julie Dash. 1.5 Marinella Pirelli, Doppio autoritratto, 1974. Courtesy Archivio Marinella Pirelli, Varese. 1.6 Ruth Novaczek, Tea Leaf, 1988/2016, screen grab. Courtesy the artist. 1.7 Basma Alsharif Deep Sleep, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris. 1.8 Sandra Lahire, Serpent River, 1989. Courtesy LUX, London. Section 2 (before p. 000) 2.1 Penelope Spheeris, I Don’t Know, 1970. Courtesy Penelope Spheeris and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 2.2 Nguyen Trinh Thi, Letters from Panduranga, 2015. Courtesy the artist. 2.3 Rachel Maclean, Over the Rainbow, 2013. Courtesy Collective Gallery and The Banff Centre, Canada. 2.4 Pablo Pakula performance interruption as part of ‘On Social Reproduction’ discussion, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, as part of ‘Now You Can Go,’ December 5, 2015. Courtesy Pablo Pakula. Photograph: Christian Luebbert.

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Opi Lori, Deracination, 2010. Courtesy the artist. Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Bete & Deise, 2012. Courtesy Wilfred Lentz Rotterdam, LUX, London and the artist. Co-produced by ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’ (Amsterdam), Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam; with the support of the Mondriaan Foundation and the Culture Programme of the European Union. Lucy Beech, Cannibals, 2013. Courtesy the artist. Laure Prouvost, We Will Go Far, 2015, installation view, Collection Musée départmental d’Art contemporain de Rochechouart. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia.

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Contributors Basma Alsharif is an artist and film-maker born in Kuwait of Palestinian origin. Basma was raised between France, the US and the Gaza Strip. She has a BFA and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works between cinema and installation, with an interest in the human condition in relation to shifting geopolitical landscapes and natural environments. Major exhibitions include: the Whitney Biennial, Les Rencontres d’Arles, Les Modules at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Al Riwaq Biennale Palestine, the Berlin Documentary Forum, the Sharjah Biennial and Manifesta 8. She received a jury prize at the Sharjah Biennial 9 and was shortlisted for the Abraaj Prize 2018. Lucia Aspesi is an independent film curator and assistant curator at Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan). From 2010 to 2012 she was a researcher on the ‘Document et art contemporain’ post-diplome programme at ÉESI (École européenne supérieure de l’image), studying the history of Italian expanded cinema. She co-curated with Iolanda Ratti a monographic show on Marinella Pirelli at Museo del Novecento (Milan). Lucia has presented film programmes in different institutions, including ICA (The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London); Xcèntric CCCB (Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona); La Triennale di Milano; Centre Georges Pompidou and La Fémis in Paris. She is a contributor to Mousse Magazine. Erika Balsom is a senior lecturer in film studies at King’s College London. She is the author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (Columbia University Press, 2017) and Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2013), as well as the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT Press, 2016). Her writing has appeared in publications such as Grey Room, Artforum, Frieze, e-flux journal, Cinema Journal and Screen. Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. Their staged films and film installations often start with a song, a

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picture, a film or a script from the past. They produce performances for the camera, staging the actions of individuals and groups living – indeed thriving – in defiance of normality, law and economics. Their films upset normative historical narratives, as figures across time are staged, projected and layered. Their performers are choreographers, artists and musicians, with whom they are having a long-term conversation about performance, the meaning of visibility since early modernity, the pathologization of bodies, but also about glamour and resistance. Elinor Cleghorn is a writer and researcher specializing in women’s experimental film-making and its history. She received her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London, with a thesis exploring the relationship between dance and embodied film-making practices in the work of Lotte Reiniger, Loie Fuller and Maya Deren. In 2011, Cleghorn programmed Maya Deren: 50 Years On at BFI Southbank, a season of talks, events and screenings commemorating the fifty-year anniversary of Deren’s death. She has been a regular contributor to the BFI’s education programme, and has given talks and lectures on film feminism and early experimental film histories at venues including Tate Modern, ICA London, Camden Arts Centre, Nottingham Contemporary and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Cleghorn’s writing has appeared in journals and websites including Screen, The Moving Image Review and Art Journal, Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema and Lux Online. She lives and works in Sussex. Maeve Connolly co-directs the MA in Art & Research Collaboration (ARC) at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dublin. She is the author of TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (Intellect, 2014), on television as a cultural form, an object of critique and a site of artistic intervention, and The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Intellect, 2009), on the cinematic turn in contemporary art. Recent publications include contributions to the anthologies European Women’s Video Art (John Libbey Publishing, 2019), Expanding Cinema: Theorizing Film Through Contemporary Art (Amsterdam University Press, 2019), Workshop of the Film Form (Fundacja Arton and Sternberg Press, 2017) and Exhibiting the Moving Image: History Revisited (JRP Ringier, 2015). Maeve serves on the advisory boards of aemi, PLASTIK Festival, and the journals Alphaville and MIRAJ . Her current research focuses on artists as agents and analysts of infrastructural change.

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Maria Palacios Cruz is a film curator based in London and the co-founder of The Visible Press. She has curated retrospectives of Ute Aurand, Luke Fowler, Robert Beavers, Morgan Fisher and Ken Jacobs, and worked closely with artists including Laida Lertxundi, Beatrice Gibson, Ana Vaz, Basma Alsharif, Mary Helena Clark, Alia Syed, Kathryn Elkin, Jean-Paul Kelly and Lis Rhodes to present their work in the form of screenings, exhibitions, publications and other events. She is deputy director at LUX, the UK agency for artists’ moving image. Catherine Elwes is a video artist and curator, and was active in the feminist art movement in the late 1970s. She co-curated the exhibitions Women’s Images of Men and About Time at the ICA in 1980, and was the director of the biennial UK/Canadian Film & Video Exchange (1998 to 2006) and co-curator of Figuring Landscapes (2008 to 2010), an international screening exhibition on themes of landscape. Elwes has written extensively about feminist art, performance, installation, landscape and the moving image and is author of Video Loupe (K.T. Press, 2000), Video Art: A Guided Tour (I.B. Tauris, 2005), Installation and the Moving Image (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2015) and is currently writing Landscape and the Moving Image (Wallflower/ CUP). Catherine is Founding Editor of MIRAJ (Intellect Books) and has published in numerous books, journals, exhibition catalogues and periodicals including Art Monthly, Third Text, MIRAJ , the Millennium Film Journal, Time Out, Independent Media, Performance Magazine, Variant, Filmwaves (of which she was an editor), Vertigo and Contemporary Magazine. Catherine retired as Professor of Moving Image Art at Chelsea College of Arts in November 2017. Rachel Garfield is an artist engaged in the role of lived relations in the formation of subjectivity. Her recent films, of the trilogy The Struggle have shown in the Hatton Gallery Newcastle, The Nunnery and Beaconsfield London, The London Short Film Festival and Open City Film Festival. In addition to her art, Rachel’s published writing includes the chapters ‘Between Seeing and Knowing: Stephen Dwoskin’s Behindert and the Camera’s Caress’, eds. Laura Mulvey, Sue Clayton; ‘Anwar Shemza: Negotiating the British Landscape’, ed. Iftikhar Dadi, (2015); ‘A Particular Incoherence: Some Works of Vivienne Dick’, ed. Treasa O’Brian, (2009), ‘Ali G: Just Who Does He Think He Is’ (2001). Rachel is currently preparing for the book AV Punk: women, experimental film and a punk aesthetic, Bloomsbury.

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Catherine Grant is Senior Lecturer in the Art and Visual Cultures Departments at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is currently researching the reenactment of feminist histories in contemporary art. The project includes the essays ‘Fans of Feminism: re-writing histories of second-wave feminism’ (2011) and a ‘A Time of One’s Own’ (2016), both published in the Oxford Art Journal. She is also working on an edited collection entitled Fandom as Methodology with Kate Random Love, published with Goldsmiths Press (2019), and is the co-editor of Girls! Girls! Girls! (2011) and Creative Writing and Art History (2012). Melissa Gronlund is the art correspondent for The National in Abu Dhabi. Originally from New York City, she studied Comparative Literature at Princeton University, in New Jersey, and Film Aesthetics at Oxford University. She is the author of Contemporary Art and Digital Culture (2016), which explores the relationship of contemporary art to the internet and digital technologies. From 2007–2014 she lectured on contemporary art at Oxford University, the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, and co-edited the journal Afterall, based in London. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Agenda, e-flux journal, and The New Yorker.com, among other places, and she has written catalogue essays on many artists. She also contributed a chapter on YBA video art to the forthcoming Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989. May Adadol Ingawanij is a moving image theorist, teacher and curator. She is writing a book on animism, moving image performances, and contemporary art in Thailand and Southeast Asia. Recent English-language publications include Exhibiting Lav Diaz’s Long Films: Currencies of Circulation and Dialectics of Spectatorship (2017) and Long Walk to Life: The Films of Lav Diaz (2015). May writes on moving image, art, film history and Southeast Asia for a wide range of general print and online publications. She writes in English and Thai, and her work has been translated into Portuguese, Norwegian and Korean, among other languages. Recent curatorial projects include Lav Diaz: Journeys (London, 2017); Southern Collectives (with the Experimenta Cinema in Asia Network, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Buenos Aires, 2016); On Attachments and Unknowns (with Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh, January 2017); Comparing Experimental Cinemas (with Experimenta India, Bangalore,

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2014); Forces and Volumes screening programme (BIMI Essay Film Festival, London, 2015); Asian Artists Film and Video Forum (MMCA Seoul, 2015). She co-directs the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster. Maud Jacquin is an art historian and curator. She received her PhD from University College London, completing a thesis on the politics of narrative in women artists’ film and video. In 2016, she curated ‘From Reel to Real’, a film programme at Tate Modern and Tate Britain that gathered works by twentyfive women film-makers from the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, as well as a retrospective of films and performances by Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. She is co-founder and director of Art by Translation, an international research and exhibition programme involving participating students and host institutions in four countries. So Mayer is a writer, curator and activist. They are the author of Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love (Wallflower, 2009). They are co-editor of There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (with Corinn Columpar and Wayne State, 2010) and Lo personal es politico: Feminismo y documental (with Elena Oroz, INAAC, 2011). So and Corinn are currently editing Mothers of Inventions: Parenting and/as Filmmaking Practice. So is a contributor to Sight & Sound, Film Quarterly and Literal, and a member of queer feminist film curation collective Club des Femmes, and a founder member of Raising Films, a campaign and community for parents and carers in UK film and TV. Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989/2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996/2013), Citizen Kane (BFI Classics series, 1992/2012) and Death 24 × a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen, including Riddles of the Sphinx (British Film Institute, 1977; DVD 2013) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council, 1980). With artist/film-maker Mark Lewis, she has made Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994) and 23 August 2008 (2013).

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Sarah Neely is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling. Her current research focuses on the areas of film history and memory, and artists’ moving image. She is co-investigator on the threeyear AHRC-funded project, Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive (with Richard Rushton, Lancaster University, and Annette Kuhn, Queen Mary) and is also leading on a year-long project celebrating the centenary of the Scottish filmmaker and poet, Margaret Tait (margarettait100.com) (with LUX Scotland and Pier Arts Centre, Orkney). Her recent book, Between Categories: The Films of Margaret Tait, was published by Peter Lang in 2016. Helena Reckitt is a curator and researcher with extensive international experience in developing curatorial and critical research projects that focus on the overlapping realms of art, curating, feminism and sexual politics; affect and relationality; and curatorial education. Her research explores the undetonated potential of earlier moments of cultural and political radicalism, particularly those from the feminist and queer past. Having played a key role in defining, and arguing for the importance of, feminist and queer perspectives on art, theory and activism, recently Reckitt has focused on identifying feminisms that are under-represented within the Anglo-American canon. She explores why these feminisms have been elided, and stages research projects that revisit and reignite them through forms of translation, re-enactment, annotation and collective reading. Drawing on theories of social reproduction and affect, her research examines the sexual politics of artistic and curatorial labour, including the implications of curators and curatorial students being interpellated as feminized. Connecting these research areas are the numerous exhibitions and discursive events that she has initiated that explore art and curating’s generative potential and relational dimensions. She is a Reader in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London. Irene Revell is a curator whose work seeks out new contexts and connections for practices with challenging social and political implications. Recent projects include the exhibition ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE with Karen Di Franco (Chelsea Space, London, 2018); ‘These Are Scores’ workshop series; and monthly Now Showing screenings with Cinenova Working Group (2015-ongoing). Much of her work since 2004 has been with the London-based curatorial agency Electra of which she is co-director. Recent writing has appeared in journals including Sound

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Studies, Cesura//Acceso (with Annea Lockwood), On Curating (with Lina Džuverović). Since 2014 she has been Visiting Curator and Lecturer on the MA Sound Arts at London College of Communication where she now holds an AHRC TECHNE award for practice-based doctoral research. Lucy Reynolds explores questions of the moving image, feminism, political space and collectivity through her practice as a writer, curator and artist. Her articles have appeared in journals including Afterall, Screen, Screendance, Art Agenda and Millennium Film Journal, and she has curated exhibitions and film programmes for a range of institutions nationally and internationally. As an artist, her films and installations have been presented in galleries and cinemas internationally, and her ongoing sound work A Feminist Chorus has been heard at the Glasgow International Festival, the Wysing Arts Centre, the Showroom and The Grand Action cinema in Paris. She lectures at the University of Westminster and is co-editor of MIRAJ . Lis Rhodes lives and works in London. Her films have been screened internationally since the mid-1970’s, more recently in ‘Art and The Feminist Revolution’, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2007. 47th New York Film Festival, 2009. ‘Dissonance and Disturbance’, exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2012. ‘Light Music’ Tate Modern, 2012–2013. ‘Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015’, the Whitechapel Gallery, 2015. A Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists, 2012. A founder member of the feminist distribution network Circles, (now known as Cinenova); Community Arts advisor to the GLC. Emerita Reader, Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London. Selina Robertson is a freelance film programmer and writer with twenty years’ experience of working in cultural film exhibition, including the BFI, BFI Flare, the Film Council and the Independent Cinema Office, where she currently works part-time. In 2007, she co-founded Club des Femmes, a queer feminist film collective. She is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London researching the cultural memory of London’s feminist film exhibition histories of the 1980s. Sarah Smith is a writer, lecturer and curator, specialising in artists’ moving image and feminist art. Her writing has appeared in journals, including Screen,

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Contributors

Field Day Review, Sculpture Journal and Feminist Media Studies. Sarah regularly contributes as a speaker to gallery and museum public events and writes for both national and international exhibition catalogues. Sarah was a member of College Art Association’s International Committee from 2014 to 2017, peer reviews for numerous academic publishers including Bloomsbury and Yale University Press and is a member of Cambridge Scholars’ Women’s and Gender Studies Advisory Board. She is Reader in Visual Culture at The Glasgow School of Art and is currently working on a monograph on critical engagements with cinema in gallery-based film and video. Maria Walsh is a writer on art and film with theoretical interests in philosophy and psychoanalysis. She is Reader in Artists’ Moving Image at Chelsea College of Arts, University of London where she also co-convenes the Subjectivity & Feminisms research group and co-curates the ongoing project, the Subjectivity & Feminisms Performance Dinners, which involves staff, students and invited artists in a collective research context. Maria is the reviews editor of MIRAJ. Her articles have appeared in Screen, Senses of Cinema, Rhizomes, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Film-Philosophy, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, MIRAJ and Art Monthly. Books include Art and Psychoanalysis (I.B. Tauris, 2012) and Twenty Years of MAKE Magazine: Back to the Future of Women’s Art (I.B. Tauris, 2015), co-edited with Mo Throp. She is currently writing Therapeutic Aesthetics (in Artists’ Moving Image) (Bloomsbury). Sarah Wood is an artist, film-maker and curator. Often working with found footage and the archival object, her work interrogates the relationship between the narration of history and individual memory, and asks why preservation is made at certain historical moments. Wood’s recent works include the films Boat People (2016), Azure (2016) and Memory of the Future (2018), and the book Civilisation and its Malcontents (2017). She is currently the artist-inresidence at the Kubrick Archive. She is a co-founder of the queer feminist film collective Club des Femmes.

Preface When Lucy Reynolds invited me to write the Preface to this collection, I realized how much it meant to me to have even a slight involvement with this project. Inevitably, my own history is interwoven with debates about women and film, especially the early days, but this book traces their legacies and, even more crucially, how those traces re-emerge and are reconfigured in the very different context of today. All I hope to do here is offer a few quasiautobiographical reminiscences, that is, some personal reflections on this complex history. As Lucy begins her introduction in the year 1978, citing my essay of the time, as well as the Camera Obscura/London Film-makers’ Co-op event, this moment offers me a first point of reference. I would like to begin by quoting Lucy’s quotation of Lis Rhodes’ image of film history as ‘a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head’. Looking back at the loose group of feminist films that Camera Obscura screened at the Co-op and I discussed in my essay (I would have had in mind mid and late1970s films by Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, Jackie Raynal, Valie Export and my collaborations with Peter Wollen; Sally Potter’s early films, also relevant, were made a little later), the image of a ‘crumpled heap’ seems very apposite. In the first instance, women’s film history has never formed a coherent chronology, and this is surely the point here, as women’s contribution to culture has always been dispersed and fragmentary. This lack of coherence, on the side of cultural failure or deprivation perhaps, is paralleled by aesthetic principle: an avantgardist hostility to narrative, derived in part from a fundamental rejection of linear and, by and large, chronological structures. But the ‘crumpled heap’ also evokes the place of these films in history. Although quite scattered in cultural origins, they are clearly linked by a feminist political aesthetic, and belong to a shared moment of film-making that had an influence and theoretical significance across time but only lasted very briefly in practice. A few key conditions help to illuminate the late 1970s as the end of an era in terms of film history, and the beginning of another in terms of feminism. It

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was probably the last moment in which film-makers still thought of themselves primarily in terms of cinema, however wide and varied its range of reference might be. The title of this collection, Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image, draws attention immediately to this changed perspective: the term ‘moving image’ definitely evokes a later era and one in which the context of art is as, or even more, important than film. Secondly, there was an immediate and comparatively uncomplicated feminist context, a first energizing drive that would not be sustainable as the movement grew more complex and declined in relevance, only to be revived as a more dispersed and fragmentary point of political reference for women today. Women film-makers, in the context of 1970s feminism, had no choice but to give priority to creating a new cinema, for and by women. The questions asked, and the desires articulated, necessarily fed into an experimental, anticonventional, tradition-challenging, practice. In the first instance, the Women’s Liberation Movement had given specific emphasis to representation as such, and images of women in particular, as a site of political struggle. Political struggle led to politically theoretical questions, exploring the whys and wherefores that lay behind patriarchal culture and its erotic and commercial investment in the circulation of images of women. Film was a – or even the – key medium in which feminists took up and explored these issues. The process involved deliberation: a theorization of the aesthetic issues at stake led back to personal priorities and then back again, as the search for a voice of one’s own chimed with the collective voice of the movement. The cinema produced by the political, aesthetic and intellectual demands of feminism was unlike anything seen before and belongs to that moment of time. Innovative and exciting, these films resonated widely across contemporary film practice and film theory, inflecting the 1970s theory/practice overlap. For instance, plays with narrative, word and image, voice and modes of address contributed to eroding the commitment to the purity of the medium that had traditionally defined avant-garde film aesthetics. In this sense, films made for and by women opened up new spaces – interstices as it were – within film’s histories, breaking down traditional oppositions (for instance, between narrative and narrative taboo) and creating unprecedented and extended awareness of woman as troubling to representation, whether in film or in art more generally. Although these films could not have come into existence outside the context of the

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Women’s Liberation Movement and the feminist drive of their makers, their radical aesthetics and challenge to cinema as such had a much wider impact, influencing film theory, how cinema could be ‘thought’ and what it meant to put images of women on the screen. My experience of feminist film in the 1970s was limited primarily to the UK, and to the dialogues and influences across the Atlantic and the Channel, and my comments above reflect that context. One considerable change would greatly expand this perspective and our awareness of women’s films historically and internationally. The independent, experimental voices of 1970s feminism fed directly into the academic world of women’s studies, film studies, cultural studies, etc. It can be easy to diminish or overlook the importance of this achievement. In contrast to the 1970s, an academic environment can now support the kinds of research into film history and the art of other cultures, old and new, that enable the range and scope of the essays in this book. Feminist experimental film in the 1970s, as I suggested above, deviated from traditional, conventional narrative. It substituted instead forms of story-telling: the evocation of character, the juxtaposition of anecdotes, the fusing of myth with contemporary and personal dilemmas, and the layering of temporalities. Similarly, even as the research collected in this book fills in gaps and develops critical ideas relevant to women artists, feminism and the moving image; even as its scope expands across time and place, its essays are marked by an extraordinarily rich variety of perspectives and positions, inside and outside of women’s history and feminist creativity. In this sense, the ‘then’ of 1970s experiments still finds a resonance in the art and the scholarship of ‘now’. Ultimately, the book stands as a tribute to the persistent significance of feminism for art, while also suggesting that the concept ‘feminism’ only remains positive and powerful if refracted and renewed through questioning, multiple readings and even, perhaps, fragmentation in the context of art and politics today. Laura Mulvey

Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank Anna Coatman, Arts Editor at the publishers I.B. Tauris, with whom I first began to discuss this project as long ago as 2014. Through Rachel Garfield’s generous introduction, Anna’s warm encouragement offered vital support for an idea that was surely too ambitious for one person to successfully achieve while juggling childcare and a range of part-time lecturing jobs. But she added further momentum to my frustrations at the lack of good published writing on women’s moving image practices – egging me on to submit a proposal, and approving a wish-list that I had been amassing for some years, of some of the most significant writers and curators in the intersecting fields of English-speaking scholarship in moving image and feminism. It felt important that Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image was not a single-authored volume. To properly reflect the spirit of collectivity nurtured by feminism and the women’s movement, many voices were needed to address the different facets of a complex and far-reaching subject. Yet the goodwill and enthusiasm with which my invitation was met by the twenty-two authors and artists who have contributed to this volume was beyond my expectations. It has been thrilling to work closely with such fine scholars, artists and curators on the realization of their texts, and explication of their work and that of others. I thank them most wholeheartedly for their trust, patience and forbearance over what has been a long editorial process. I am also indebted to Laura Mulvey for contributing a foreword to the collection, and Lis Rhodes for the contribution of her poem Certain Measures. To receive such thoughtful and insightful opening texts and images from two of the key protagonists to have shaped feminist discourse was a wonderful framing and endorsement of this collection of writings. My grateful thanks also go to Althea Greenham, Catherine Grant and Amy Tobin, whose scholarly feminist wisdom, as part of the feminist reading group of which I am proud to be part, was invaluable for my attempts at the daunting task of introducing such an eminent

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body of writing. Thanks too to the encouraging and detailed feedback provided anonymously by the book’s peer reviewers. Over the slow gestation of the project, Anna moved on to other editorial endeavours and I would like to thank the two fine editors who took over the care of this slowly developing publication. Both Baillie Card and Madeline Hamey-Thomas offered valuable support and advice as the editorial process advanced, and as I.B. Tauris itself yielded to the operations of Bloomsbury, where I found with great pleasure that the production process had come full circle: as Anna Coatman returned to guide the book to final completion. The most heartfelt gratitude is also due to Judith Rifeser, who took time out from her own PhD research to take on the fine-tuned editorial work of checking and collating text. In another example of the goodwill that has fuelled this project, Judith gave her time gratis to help with the editorial shaping of the volume at a crucial point in its development. Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image has received very little funding for its execution, relying on the collective enthusiasm and help of feminist scholars such as Judith, and all those who generously contributed essays and texts to the book without fee. I would like to thank May Adadol Ingawanij and Neal White, the co-directors of the Centre for Research in Art and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster, for enabling us to bring colour to some of the illustrations in this book by funding its colour plates. I also wish to thank Basma Alsharif, Batsford and Pavilion Books, Lucy Beech, Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, Sarah Browne, Club des Femmes, Julie Dash, Catherine Elwes, Isaac Julien, Tina Keane, Alice Lea and LUX, Ope Lori, Rachel Maclean, Rosalind Nashashibi, Ruth Novaczek, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Pablo Pakula, Laure Prouvost, Penelope Spheeris and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Alia Syed, Nguyen Trinh Thi, Gillian Wearing and Maureen Paley Gallery, and Rehana Zaman for kindly providing images without charge. Finally, this publication proves the efficacy of feminism as a collective endeavour. Many have contributed in a myriad of ways to the making of this book and have believed in its value for opening up new considerations of women’s practices with the moving image, and the place of feminist thought and action as part of that. I dedicate this book to them and to the readers

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I hope that this publication will find: in generations young and old, as artists, film-makers, curators and writers, and across genders. And last of all, a dedication to Haylie, who I hope, along with the rest of her generation of young women, will have the confidence to take patriarchy in her stride. This volume is to remind them how much we have already done, and how much there is still to do.

Introduction: Raising voices

Who speaks? In 1978 the film-maker and writer Laura Mulvey gave a lecture for the Oxford Women’s Studies Committee entitled ‘Film, Feminism and the Avant-garde’.1 It heralded with great optimism the occasion of the US-based feminist journal Camera Obscura’s visit to the London Film-makers’ Co-operative that same year, to screen a range of films as yet rarely seen in Britain, by film-makers such as Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras. The films were part of a season entitled Feminism, Fiction and the Avant-Garde, which culminated in two days of discussion, exploring the potential feminism raised for a cinema by and for women. As the editorial for the subsequent issue of Camera Obscura concluded, their aim had been ‘to put together a provocative selection of women’s films which raised theoretical questions both of feminism and film theory (although not attempting to argue for them as “feminist films”)’.2 The bracketed disavowal at the end of the sentence is telling, for it suggests that Camera Obscura saw these films as distinct from the campaigning documentaries then prevalent in feminist film production, and exemplary of a more discursive mode of film-making. This mode used experimental forms of narrative to explore, as Janet Bergstrom had written in a previous issue, a ‘complex function’ of ‘autobiographical reference’. Bergstrom explained how this approach: ‘draws on a woman’s lived experience while at the same time complicating the question “who speaks” by dispersing the origin of the enunciation across many positions; the film-maker, like the filmic system and its characters, is shaped by conflicting interests and desires.’3 Mulvey was writing at a time when there was still little acknowledgement of women’s historical and contemporary contributions to cinema in mainstream

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scholarship and programming. She welcomed the events as a potentially fruitful convergence, or ‘historic conjuncture’ between those explicitly engaged with the development of a feminist film analysis, based primarily on the paradigm of ‘classical Hollywood narrative’4 film; and those so-called avantgarde film-makers aligned more closely to the ethics and aesthetics of visual arts and the film co-operative network prevalent across Europe and the UK at that time. For Mulvey, the avant-garde’s experimental approach to film-making might thus offer new strategies for the development of a feminist film practice, while the film-makers of the Co-op might in turn gain an increased awareness of feminism’s burgeoning film activity. It seemed to be a concrete indication, or mutual recognition, of a growing two-way traffic. On the part of feminist theorists, there is growing awareness of the avant-garde tradition; and on the part of the avant-garde, among both men and women film-makers, a sense of the relevance of the feminist challenge.5

Mulvey’s own investment in this convergence can be traced in the contemporaneous films she made with Peter Wollen, Penthesilea (1974) and Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), which brought experimental methods and narrative form to feminist concerns. But to what extent were other experimental films and videos by women acknowledged for their contribution to the new feminist counter cinema that Mulvey and Camera Obscura hoped to define? Searching among the rich body of feminist writings on women filmmakers dating from this period, by writers such as Teresa di Laurentis, Claire Johnson and Judith Mayne for example, it is striking that Mulvey’s article still remains one of the very few to mention directly, and in relation to a feminist discourse, films by women that fall outside the industrial structures of film production and distribution. Comparatively little scholarly publication with a feminist perspective can be found about the work of those who align themselves to the contexts and discourses of the visual arts, experimental music and popular culture, for example; or those who have explored the potential of moving image technology beyond celluloid, and who do not conform to the white and western orientations of either mainstream cinema or experimental film culture, and the notions of feminism often associated to it.

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Looking across the intervening years some exceptions appear under terms such as avant-garde, experimental film or video art, reflecting as Mulvey’s essay already did, the different ethical, formal and economic contexts of their makers as well as their writers. Contemporary to the Feminism, Fiction and the AvantGarde events, VèVè A. Clark, Millicent Hodson and Catrina Neiman were engaged in an exhaustive research project entitled The Legend of Maya Deren, which would draw together archival resources on Maya Deren to help illuminate her rich body of films and writings. Just one year later, the filmmaker Lis Rhodes found impetus in the translated biography of Alice Blanche Guy, a pioneering director of early French cinema, to write Whose History?, in which she used the provocative metaphor of a washing line to call for film history to be ‘a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head’.6 Rhodes published her article in the exhibition catalogue for the 1979 survey exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, Film as Film: Formal Experiments in Film, in response to the teleology of formalist film-making advocated in the exhibition. Although the essay appeared in the catalogue, Rhodes’ work did not: she, and other artists including Annabel Nicolson, withdrew their work in protest. Alongside her article, and a collective statement explaining the reason for this withdrawal, the reproduction of writings by Maya Deren, Germaine Dulac and Alice Guy emphasized not only the articulate engagement of an earlier generation of women making films in the first decades of the twentieth century, but signalled how writing and research during the 1970s was being fuelled by the desire to bring to light and advocate for artists passed over by cinema’s male-orientated histories. More recently, the desire to set the record straight is apparent in such exemplary publications as Linda Rabinovitz’s triumvirate study of Deren, Shirley Clark and Joyce Weiland, Points of Resistance, while Patricia Mellencamp’s Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video and Feminism chronicles the shifting theoretical grounds between feminism and avant-garde film and video practices in the US so that the psychoanalytic assertions of Camera Obscura and Mulvey might be placed in historical dialogue, or disagreement, with Jonas Mekas, P Adams Sitney or Gilles Deleuze and Walter Benjamin. The methodology for her volume echoes Rhodes’s washing line analogy when she writes of preferring ‘the spiral that allows revisions rather than a straight and dogged line’.7 At the same time, film-makers such as Barbara Hammer, and

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writers and programmers such as bell hooks and B Ruby Rich, have offered more first-person, but no less valuable, insights into the intersections between the women’s movement and film culture. Apparent in the title of Mellencamp’s book, these volumes also reflect the growing usage of video by women artists, as a medium more available to practitioners, not only within the community video contexts of feminist campaigning, but in the singular explorations of artists in the studio or gallery, where it offered a mode of practice less fraught with the technologically determined barriers defined by a male-dominated film industry. It could also be argued that the turn to video in the latter part of the 1970s impacted upon the discourse within which artists of the period were situated. It might be seen to deepen the division between, for example, those writers and artists who identified themselves to the materially inclined practices of the experimental film community, and those more aligned to the dialogues between body art performance and video documentation characteristic of gallery-based visual arts contexts. The result has been a more dispersed mode of critique and scholarship around the use of moving image by women artists who embraced both the visual arts context of the gallery and the art journal, alongside the systems of dissemination and review inherent to cinema. On a positive note, the emergence of video and its take up by women artists opened up new avenues of critique and visibility, but, negatively, it also had the effect of delineating artists working with the moving image into two modes of practice with different communities and forms of endorsement – where some were rendered invisible at the expense of others and valuable points of convergence and overlap were lost. The divisions between film and video that characterized the 1980s and 1990s are still visible in Robin Blaetz’s edited collection, Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks. Produced at the turn of the millennium, Blaetz’s volume is one of three anthologies focused on the moving image by a range of acknowledged scholars in the field of cinema studies. Blaetz, in particular, focuses solely on artists working with film, thereby introducing much-needed insights into figures previously marginalized in histories of North American experimental film culture, such as Marie Menken and Chick Strand. Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wexman’s Women and Experimental Filmmaking encompasses a wider reading of experimental practice, by making reference to

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narrative fiction, animation and documentary works by women, and including studies of artists already part of the feminist film discourse initiated by Camera Obscura, such as Sally Potter and Yvonne Rainer. And, like Rhodes and Mellencamp before them, Sophie (So) Mayer and Corinn Columpar’s 2009 anthology of feminist writing on women’s film and video practices Here She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond, admirably evades the trap of ‘historiographic continuum’ by inviting their contributors to explore ‘contiguities across eras, genres, and oeuvres that place women at the center of moving image-making’.8 What of those women artists who worked with film or video outside a North American experimental film context, under terms different from the historic monikers ‘experimental film’ and ‘avant-garde film’, and in studios and galleries rather than film labs and cinemas?9 So Mayer’s 2016 monograph Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema remains one of the few exceptions to address contemporary feminist film-making outside a Western orientation. But, alongside Mayer’s aforementioned anthology with Columpar, which encompasses the work of Australian artist Tracey Moffat and Iranian filmmaker, Samira Makhmalbaf,10 more geographically and linguistically dispersed scholarship on women’s moving image practices has not garnered the institutional research opportunities and publications of their English-speaking counterparts. There is the danger that this belies the rich and widespread activity of women working with the moving image internationally and in many different cultural and technological contexts. It also belies scholarship that illuminates and juxtaposes – as this publication does – practices from a diversity of national contexts, and that encompass moving image made as sculpture or on mobile phones and laptops and to be viewed online, as well as in galleries and film theatres. This absence in print but not in practice also raises the thorny question of how relevant the term ‘feminism’, with its associated discourses, practices and histories, is to this myriad of moving image work, not only in terms of its scholarly interpretations but for the intent of the artist herself. Although it may be argued that pioneer figures such as Deren were practising before the women’s movement had fully articulated itself in the post-war period, there are numerous examples of artists working with film and video since, from Sally Potter to Marina Abramovic, who have disavowed the term in relation to their work and their identity.

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Inflections, enunciations The reasons for this are various, and are worth briefly unpicking in preface to the illuminating scholarship collected in this volume. These occlusions suggest a problem of inflection and enunciation, of knowing where to look, and what to look for. It could be argued that research and writing on women’s moving image practices finds itself not only marginal to patriarchy’s approved canons but also, as the advent of video technology has already shown, caught at the interstices between cinema and art’s different cultural discourses, attendant technologies and modes of production. Camera Obscura’s attempt to define a feminist avantgarde film practice through psychoanalytic readings of cinema, for example, were remembered by some present as being at odds with the artisanal interests of the Co-op community.11 This was linked not simply to scepticism about the efficacy of theoretical discourse in relation to film and video, but a different way of identifying with their practices from their Camera Obscura counterparts. Jan Rosenberg’s term ‘Occupational Identity’, provides a useful means of getting the measure of this ambivalence. In her contemporaneous survey of feminist film practices, Rosenberg refers to the film-maker’s sense of ‘function and status in the occupational structure’ in their working lives.12 She surmises that the avantgarde film-makers who she interviews, such as Guvnor Nelson and Carolee Schneemann, identify themselves more directly towards ‘the world of avantgarde film and art rather than political feminism’.13 Resistance such as this to feminist interpretations or intent indicates not only the artist’s preferred alignment to individual modes of creative expression, but also resistance to the issue based and documentary films for which feminist film-making was predominantly known during the 1970s, which some felt to be limiting and reductive both in terms of their form as well as their message. Sally Potter, interviewed in 1973, reflects this tendency when she observes: ‘women’s lib films I have seen all use such outdated and archaic and also reactionary structures.’14 These contradictions suggest, as I have argued elsewhere, that women artists working with film and video in the 1970s encountered a double bind of marginality, which continues to haunt those working across moving image forms and technologies in the arts today.15 For while many may have been ambivalent about directly associating their practices to feminist concerns, alliances to art only exposed them, on the other hand, to the patriarchal marginalization at work

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in art’s modernist discourse of critical ‘disinterestedness’. Here, according to Amelia Jones, expressions of subjective experience, or representations of the body, must be ‘veiled’ in order to privilege ‘a pure relation between the art object and its supposedly inherent meaning’.16 The subtle forms of negation that these critical validations practised, exemplified for Jones in the marginalization of Carolee Schneemann’s expressive and visceral performances, were also found by the film-makers Lisa Cartwright and Nina Fonoroff in the ‘fratriarchy’ of experimental film born of industrial cinema’s patriarchy, yet which used similar methods to its visual arts counterpart, ‘with its own standards of “quality” to protect, with an absolute faith in certain principles and ideals, which themselves mirror patriarchal ideology’.17,18 It could be added further that the struggle that Cartwright and Fonoroff articulate is itself particular to the marginalization experienced from a white North American and English cultural perspective, and indeed, in a later 1992 preface to their original article they recognize Coco Fusco’s exposure of ‘the white middle/upper class conditions that tacitly underlie the self-designated film avant-garde’.19 Indeed, as recent habilitations of women’s experimental film and video practices show, there remains scarce acknowledgement of the contributions of women of colour, or of the part which class structures might play in the opportunities afforded to women artists, alongside the restrictions of gender discrimination.20 Yet a double bind of marginality might itself double as a space of convergence where creative practices falling between art and film cultures can afford profound insights into the relationship between art and feminism in both its historic and contemporary vein. The singular and intense engagement of the self-defined artist, which Rosenberg noted, reveals its feminism in the inconsistencies and ambivalences inscribed in individual lived experience, still tempered by patriarchy’s ongoing oppressions. Conversely, this has the effect of opening up Bergstrom’s notion of enunciation, and the question of ‘who speaks’ beyond the paradigms of either personal vision or non-narrative materialism once so ubiquitous to experimental film criticism and its fine art allegiances, to more complex causal and contextual enunciations. It could be argued that feminism exists in the moving image works of many artists as a discursive texture rather than a more overt activism, open for the scholar and the reader’s interpretation alongside the formative contexts and ‘occupational identity’ of its maker.

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Knowing where to look Returning to my earlier point about knowing where to look, it should be stressed that significant scholarship on women artists working with the moving image is often located outside volumes on experimental film, and in the pages of monographs and anthologies exploring feminist practices across art media, particularly video and performance,21 and in exhibition catalogues of individual artists. The strong presence of moving image works in ambitious feminist survey exhibitions since the millennium, such as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s, the extensive but controversial 2007 retrospective of feminist art from 1965 to 1980, initiated by the Museum of Contemporary Art, LA (MoCA), underline how video technology and the Women’s Movement came of age in parallel. Smaller spaces have, with less fanfare, also provided the opportunity to discover experimental feminist moving image practices in both an historic and a contemporary register.22 In these spaces of small non-profit galleries, festivals and salons, it is possible to discern an intersectional dimension, now more attentive to the nuances of colour, class and gender, then the feminism once noted by Cartwright and Fonoroff.23 As the essays in this collection show, it is vital that we read across these often divergent discourses in order to understand the nuance and complexities of the moving image work under discussion, and its relation to feminism. Mellencamp’s fragmentary close-to-the-ground approach seems fitting here: ‘Foraging through texts, picking and choosing ideas rather than marshaling great systems . . .’24 Furthermore, when considering the relevance of this publication’s gendered emphasis, it could be argued that scholarship on moving image practices in the arts is now established and widespread, with women artists garnering as much attention as their male contemporaries, without the need to be held apart by gender in a way that might appear limiting for practices that encompass and contemplate many diverse concerns. Indeed, as the notion of fixed gender comes increasingly into question, does the term women still have value as a prefix to artist – a term which itself requires challenging in the wide-ranging contexts of moving image making? With these shifts in gender identity itself, can feminist scholarship and feminist film practice, still have the agency that Mulvey expressed hope for at those London Film-makers’ Co-operative

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meetings in 1978? The essays and conversations in this collection confront these compelling and ongoing questions. Through their insights and interrogations, the writers featured here navigate and challenge the necessarily awkward and conflicted alignment of the volume’s three-fold title: Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image. Sharing the diverse and often provocative perspectives at stake in their research as scholars of feminism and the moving image, this book’s contributors demonstrate the depth and range of current discourse in a field of study still caught uncertainly between art and film, and the different conceptions of feminism that have fruitfully developed from these divergent, but often intersecting, paths.

A collection of voices The writers in this book come from contexts as diverse as the subjects of their essays. The invitation to contribute was extended to scholars working across the English-speaking field of art and film, from different points of reference and registers of feminist engagement. All were invited with an open brief, and the proviso that the experience should be generative and exploratory, and should allow them to investigate new areas of research or bring existing ones further into focus. Although the rich insights, revelations and argumentation contained in these contributions could be configured in a multiplicity of ways: three over-arching threads of feminist methodology suggest themselves. The essays that follow have been grouped accordingly under the following titles: Acknowledgements; Negotiations and Engagements; and Situations and Receptions. The titles of the sections take their lead from the questions raised in the texts but also refer to the historical precedents that I have touched on above, and the processes of inflection and enunciation that I have argued can help us to understand the contradictions and disavowals involved when bringing together the words feminism, artist, woman and moving image. The volume opens with two of feminism and film’s most pioneering voices of enquiry, with a foreword from Laura Mulvey and a poem by the artist filmmaker Lis Rhodes. Their contributions offer thrilling points of orientation and endorsement for the scholarship that follows. The essays in each section are also prefaced by conversations between artists and curators, in order to offer a

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different register of reflection and insight. Their insightful dialogues and conversations first open up, and then inscribe, within a more un-mediated form of address, the ongoing processes of practice central to this volume. The essays in the first section of the book, Acknowledgements, reflect and build upon the practices of recuperation that continue to play a vital role in feminist art practice and scholarship. They could be considered further voices in a strain of advocacy – already discussed in this introduction – that developed as part of the wider campaigning practices of the International Women’s Movement, as it burgeoned from the early 1970s. The section opens with the curator Irene Revell’s conversation with the artists Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz. The discussion explores how their compelling films bring iconic figures of feminist culture, such as Yvonne Rainer and Pauline Oliveros, to the centre of their work as score, performer or text, in a new strain of advocacythrough-acknowledgement. Reaching further back, Elinor Cleghorn’s research on Lotte Reiniger reminds us of how the interstitial nature of moving image scholarship, from its position outside more established discourses of cinema and the visual arts, casts the female artists associated to its histories in a further position of marginality. Cleghorn’s method of advocacy addresses the existing perceptions of a figure well-known for her intricate silhouette films of fairy-tale subjects. Exploring the subtle denigrations Reiniger experienced for working in a subject matter associated to the domestic sphere, Cleghorn’s research reflects the arguments of Cartwright, Fonoroff and Jones when she reveals instead a woman of wide interests and business acumen, battling modernism’s disinterested gaze in male peers of the 1930s. Although Cleghorn advocates for Reiniger as an under-acknowledged precursor to later feminist assertions of the value of craft,25 Catherine Grant re-evaluates a figure already wellknown to feminism, drawing out new readings from Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s film Riddles of the Sphinx in tandem with Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (2008), Emma Hedditch’s video examination of Mulvey’s foundational essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Like Baudry and Lorenz, Hedditch’s dialogue with Mulvey exemplifies how advocacy is imbricated into practice, as a generative way of understanding earlier feminist legacies. Striking for its articulation of her own personal investment with the film, as a mother and scholar herself, Grant’s essay eschews disinterestedness in favour of

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inter-generational engagement, asserting the continued relevance of work pioneered by Mulvey and her feminist contemporaries, while at the same time inscribing a contemporary dimension into their earlier scholarly advocacies. Through her deep engagement in the archives of the artist Marinella Pirelli, Lucia Aspesi, on the other hand, reveals an extraordinary and little-known talent at the threshold of sculpture, performance and film, and caught in the conflicts and discourses of the burgeoning feminist movement in 1970s Italy. Aspesi’s essay raises the complex question of those artists who do not seek recognition for their work, and – as in the case of Pirelli – actively chose to withdraw from their practice and the contexts surrounding it. In this way, Pirelli’s withdrawal troubles feminist scholarship’s narrative of patriarchal disenfranchisement with slippery questions of self-determination and creative agency. Problematizing the positioning of women artists within culture’s discriminating discourses is also central to Rachel Garfield’s delineation of the hostile conditions of reactionary government policy and societal prejudice in 1980s Britain, which shaped the films of artists of colour such as the Sankofa collective, Alia Syed and Ruth Novaczek. Their works are upheld, through Garfield’s advocacy, as spaces of resistance during this period of prevalent racism and sexism, countering it by their creative engagement with the emerging discourses of urban multi-culturalism and gender politics. By contrast, turning to the agency of song and choreography, So Mayer explores how Julie Dash’s 1975 film Four Women takes Nina Simone’s 1966 song ‘Four Women’ as the interpretative structure through which Dash and the choreographer Linda Martina Young might elaborate their own creative engagement with African American representation, in an inter-generational engagement which echoes Hedditch’s turn to Mulvey’s formative text. At the same time, their collaboration on this rarely seen film initiates new dialogues for Mayer between Dash and the film choreography of a long-standing touchstone for feminism: Maya Deren. The interlinked narratives of gender discrimination and gender identity that women artists have struggled with remain potent, not just in historical retrospect. The voices in the second part of the collection, Negotiations and Engagements, attest to how to navigate the nuanced terrain of patriarchal oppression, in relation to more specific identifications to place or practice. As

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Basma Alsharif explains to Maria Palacios Cruz, her engagement with feminism is imbricated into the purposeful disorientations of place and identity that her work sets in motion, where cinematic genres such as the horror film, in dialogue with gallery-based drawing, sound and still image, allow her to address the complexities and displacements of a Palestinian heritage lived outside its borders. Alsharif ’s reflections suggest how feminism might be better understood as inscribed within wider concerns of identity, history and place, contingent on the artist’s individual experience. Here it is discernible as a sensibility, more apparent to the scholar than the artist in question, and most identifiable when it surfaces at specific junctures through their material engagement with moving image technology. Attention to the corporeal – contested yet integral to feminist struggle and feminist discourse – threads through the essays in this book, often in ways that challenge feminism’s earlier hegemonic readings of the body as white, heterosexual and Western centred. For example, in her analysis of an early short by Penelope Spheeris, a film-maker more often known for films made at the heart of Hollywood, Erika Balsom identifies a riposte to the often ‘falsely universalizing category’ of female representation that concerned Spheeris’s feminist contemporaries during the 1970s. Instead, she finds a tender and timely portrait of ambiguous and fluid sexual identities in the story of Linda and Jimmie, where gender binaries are both in question and in dialogue. Imbuing these questions of corporeality with a visceral materialism shaped by the London Film-makers’ Co-operative’s artisanal film practices, Sandra Lahire’s poetic films, informed by feminist activism of the 1980s and its cultural discourses, suggest, according to Maud Jacquin, a ‘corporeal vulnerability’ where film skin equivocates human skin, and the chemical processes enacted upon the film evoke politically-enacted environmental contamination. Lahire’s inscription of political urgencies into the very material of film can also be traced in the Vietnamese artist Nguyen Trinh Thi’s found footage manipulations of Vietnam’s 1960s social realist cinema practice, where May Adadol Ingawanij finds an implicit feminism. In particular, the artist’s insistent freeze frame image of the actress Nhu Quynh explores the legacy of past socialist ideologies upon the female face. Trinh Thi’s focus on Quynh’s face also has the potential to unveil, in a frame of forgotten national cinema, the silenced female subject that Jones identifies in modernist discourse and its canons.

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On the other hand, it could be argued that Sarah Smith and Sarah Neely’s exploration of Rachel Maclean’s elaborate digitally-enhanced personas also challenges gender hegemonies; but ones that stretch beyond the human through a form of uncanny ventriloquism, as the artist morphs between male, female, animal or toy, always contained within the fabricated scenery of online space. As Maclean shape-shifts between the different avatars from online culture that characterize her films, she demonstrates an intense engagement with the materiality of digital technology and its cultures, which holds echoes of the fascination that earlier generations had with film and video technology and its processes. Whether digital algorithm or film strip, the corporeal ambiguities explored in this section, trouble again the question of who speaks. The contributors in the third section of this volume, Situations and Receptions, extend the sphere of their enquiry beyond corporeal negotiations of the self, to consider not who speaks, but who is spoken to, and spoken for. As part of the section’s emphasis on audience, Helena Reckitt, Selina Robertson and Sarah Wood discuss the role of curating as an inter-generational dialogue, which opens up the feminist archive to new readings and juxtapositions with contemporary practices. As founding members of the Club des Femmes film collective, Robertson and Wood see their programmes and promotions of feminist film and video artists, contemporary and historic, as a mode of feminist activism, while Reckitt’s 2015 curatorial project Now You Can Go draws on feminist activism of an historic period, bringing the writings and activism of Carla Lonzi and other Italian feminist collectives into a contemporary dialogue through reading groups, speakers, screenings and performance. Their dynamic and discursive events reflect the new models of intergenerational reappraisal to be found in the work of Grant, Hedditch, Boudry and Lorenz. And if Club des Femmes identifies itself as a model of feminist film activism, have contemporary artists overtaken the ambivalence of predecessors such as Potter, to more directly advocate for feminist campaigns in their moving image work? Catherine Elwes’ discussion of self portraiture could be seen to echo some of the ambivalence first raised by Lonzi and her contemporaries concerning self representation, but Elwes’ focus brings contemporary insights on how the artist’s presence registers as technological display, mediated to the viewer through the screen of the video monitor or multiple screens of the

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gallery installation. As Maeve Connolly and Maria Walsh both argue, on the other hand, the question of women’s labour conditions, an enduring issue of feminist campaigning, has been addressed by a number of contemporary artists, specifically the immaterial and dispersed patterns of female labour that reflect post-Fordist working conditions. The artists’ attempts to understand the complex, fragmented and diverse conditions of current female labour is seen in the utilization of archive material, fiction form, workshop participation, social media networks and smartphones. For example, Sarah Brown contacts remote homeworkers in the Shetland Islands through social media, while Lucy Beech reflects the activities of female centred pyramid selling schemes through moving image installation. In this sense, the ambiguous boundaries between paid work, affective labour and creative agency that Carla Lonzi and Rivolta Femminile had first identified in the 1970s and which films such as Riddles of the Sphinx interrogated, remain unresolved in the dematerialized conditions of the present.

Who speaks for whom? Melissa Gronlund’s provocative text ends the book, but takes it further, by returning to the enquiring note that I struck at the beginning. She begins her essay by posing the simple but searching question of whether gender is legible to the film viewer as a ‘particular approach to style, a particular sensitivity, a proclivity towards certain aesthetics or subject matter’, and whether gender is enough of a ‘signifying category’ to prioritize focus on some artists over others. With her emphasis on how gender signification affects the way we read a moving image work, Gronlund explores how the mediation and reception of ‘female’ artists in the sphere of art and artists’ moving image itself shows a ‘duty of care’ and ‘symptom of anxiety’ not to place emphasis on gendered identity, such as motherhood in the case of Laure Prouvost’s 2015 work We Will Go Far (On Ira Loin), over that of the artist’s professional status. Here it might be argued that modernist disinterestedness has been recalibrated as a form of inclusiveness, so that other readings of the work will not be shut out by references to gender alone, and thus, as Gronlund puts it: ‘consigning and restricting the contributions of female filmmaking to a separate and perhaps not equal realm.’26

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Gronlund’s essay, like all of the deeply-engaged enquiries and perspectives in this book, raises questions that remain necessarily open, rather than resolved. She ends on the suggestion that the limitations of a gendered definition might be combated by ‘rethinking the term “woman” from “a restrictive biological or relational construct” to a term “that could be as open and multiplicitous as the artworks themselves”’.27 The aim of this anthology can be read in this closing observation. It is imperative that we explore, not avoid, the significance of gendered identification in relation to artists’ moving image’s myriad practices, contexts and disseminations. By addressing these multiplicities we may more fully draw into debate and analyse the inconsistencies, conflicts and contradictions that continue to trouble the term, not simply for feminist film and art discourse, but for wider understandings of how we make, write or view the moving image. That the contributors to this volume, and the practices they examine, identify solely as women, should also not indicate a lack of feminist scholarship around the moving image from other genders,28 but the need for a more widespread institutional engagement with its meanings, which will bring a more assertive and intersectional feminist dynamic to the patriarchal research structures that still exist in the academy. It is hoped that the momentum provided by the texts in this collection can play a part in generating future scholarship from scholars and artists yet to be heard. In response to Bergstrom’s question of ‘who speaks?’, which opened my introduction, this anthology of reflection, insights and analysis answers that it is a multiplicity of voices that articulate resonant and variegated artistic practices at the same time as they raise timely and enduring questions about feminist engagement with the moving image. As the texts argue, many of the subjects under discussion do not identify as feminists, or are resistant to having their practices defined by their gender, even as they find themselves negotiating its terms of production and reception. Equally, the scholars who have contributed to this volume engage with feminist methodology in different registers: as activists and archivists, as advocates, agitators and provocateurs. Their writings – lucid, argumentative, incisive – transport the reader across diverse cultural contexts and geographical contours, addressing complex narratives of identity, representation and labour, while they juxtapose cultures of film, video and visual arts practice often held apart. For it is at the point where art, moving image and feminist discourse converge that a dynamic intersection

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of dialogue and exchange opens up, bringing to attention practices that might fall outside their separate spheres, and offering fresh perspectives and insights on those already established in its histories and canons. Lucy Reynolds

Notes 1 Mulvey’s lecture was later published in Jacobus, Mary, ed. (1979), Women Writing and Writing About Women, 177–95, Abingdon: Routledge. 2 Camera Obscura: 1979:3. 3 Janet Bergstrom, Constance Penley, ‘The Avant-garde, Histories and Theories,’ (1978) Screen 19. 3:127. 4 For a contemporaneous article addressing narrative form see Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell (1976) ‘Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu’ Screen,17.2: 41–73. Their arguments were later elaborated in Bordwell, David, Staiger, Janet, Thompson, Kristin, eds. (1988) The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, London: Routledge. 5 Mulvey, Laura (1978), Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde, 209. 6 Rhodes, Lis, ‘Whose History’, Film as Film: 120. 7 Mellencamp, Patricia (1990), Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 8 Columpar, Corinn and So (Sophie) Mayer (eds) (2009), There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond, 1, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 9 It is important to qualify here that women associated to the experimental film movement in North America were not exclusively working outside visual arts contexts. There are several examples, such as Carolee Schneemann, Joyce Weiland and Marie Menken, who came to film-making from visual arts contexts, and continue to work in this context. See for example, Ragona, Melissa (2007), ‘Swing and Sway: Marie Menken’s Filmic Events’, in Blaetz, Robin (ed.), Women’s Experimental Cinema, 20–44, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 10 Columpar writes on Moffat and SF Said contributes an interview with Makhmalbaf: ibid., 136–146 and 14?–163. It should be stressed that in their introduction, Columpar and Mayer acknowledge that their anthology only gives ‘limited recognition’ to women directors of the ‘global South’ or ‘women filmmakers of colour from settler communities’ and they pointedly see their anthology as a call ‘for an active audience to go looking beyond the book’s limits’. Ibid.: 7.

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11 See Felicity Sparrow’s recollections in interview with Katy Deepwell in Deepwell, Katy (July 2014), ‘Felicity Sparrow: forming Circles’, n.paradoxa, 34: 87. 12 Rosenberg, Jan (1979/1982), Women’s Reflections: The Feminist Film Movement, 25, Michigan: UMI Research Press. 13 Ibid., 41. 14 Glassner, ‘Interviews with Three Filmmakers’, 46. 15 See Reynolds, Lucy (2018), ‘Circulations and Co-operations: Art, Feminism and Film in 1960s and 1970s London’, in Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer and Amy Tobin, London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960-1980, 133–50, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University. 16 Jones, Body Art, 35. 17 Cartwright, Lisa and Fonoroff, Nina (1994), ‘Narrative is Narrative: So What is New?’, in Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar and Janice R. Welsch (eds), Multiple Voices in Feminist Film Criticism, 125, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 18 Ibid., 137. 19 Ibid., 127. 20 Jan Rosenberg is, however, an exception to this in her study. More recent scholarship by Siona Wilson also addresses the issue of class for women artists more generally in the context of British art and radical film practices of the 1970s. See Wilson, Siona (2015), Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance, Minneapolis and London. 21 Some examples might include: Amelia Jones’s 1998 book Body Art/Performing the Subject or more recently: Self/Image: Technology, Representation; Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance and the exhaustive compendium of feminist artists gathered in the publication she edited with Helena Reckitt: (20??), Art and Feminism, London: Phaidon Press, or Robinson, Hilary (ed.) (2015), Feminist Art Theory: An Anthology 1968-2014, London: Wiley. More recently, international collaborations such as Heartney, Eleanor, Posner, Helaine, Princenthal, Nancy and Scott, Sue (eds) (2013), The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium, Prestel, have considered contemporary practitioners in video and film within the wider context of feminist art discourse. 22 Exemplary of these small-scale discursive exhibition projects include the collaborative ‘Does Not Equal’, W139, Amsterdam in 2015, ‘Of Other Spaces, Where Does Gesture Become Event’, 2016–17, at the Cooper Gallery, Dundee University; ‘Orgasmic Streaming Organic Gardening Electroculture at the Chelsea Space’, University of the Arts, London (2018) and ‘In Whose Eyes? Dialogue in Practice’ at Beaconsfield, London, 2018. The emergence of these new generations of feminist curators has done much to encourage this vibrant culture both in the UK, Europe and internationally.

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23 Some examples of feminist activist and creative initiatives and collectives in recent years asserting a more intersectional presence include arts and culture platforms such as Framer Framed, Amsterdam, or the Kuntinuum salons for queer-female and non-binary gendered identified creatives in the UK. The artist Barby Asante’s ongoing performances ‘As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence. For Ama. For Aba. For Charlotte and Adjoa’ are one exemplar of an intergenerational and collaborative engagement with key feminist figures from earlier points in the movement, and could be seen as one among many burgeoning in this second decade of a new millennium. https://www.a-n.co.uk/media/52495871/ (accessed 10 October 2018). 24 Mellencamp, Indiscretions, pX. 25 See for example, Faith Ringgold or Miriam Shapiro. 26 page – see index. 27 See Melissa Gronlund, 246. 28 See, for example, James Boaden’s re-examination of Carolee Schneemann’s film Fuses in light of her friendship with Stan Brakhage; Federico Windhausen’s curatorial and scholarly advocacy of the Argentinian film-maker Narcisa Hirsch and Ricardo Matos Cabo’s curatorial advocacy of Soviet pioneer Esfir Schub.

Lis Rhodes – Certain measures

Spoken on the occasion of the conversation between Lucy Reynolds and Lis Rhodes at the ‘Abstract Art and Society’ symposium at Whitechapel Gallery on Friday 13 March 2015, concurrent with the exhibition ‘Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915 to 2015’. whatever the intention, depiction and meaning can’t be held in place the tale of intentions may be told but there is always another telling which unwraps the previous and questions its relevance but who is telling? Who is deciding what is relevant?

Figure X Lis Rhodes, Certain Measures: Index of Disbelief, 2016 (photographic still). Courtesy The artist.

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to begin with – though this is not the film – Light Music was motivated by the absence of women composers in European composition Light Music was first shown as a two-part fourteen-minute videotape at the Serpentine Gallery in the Festival of Independent Video (1975) one section was filmed from a video monitor that produced line spacings on the screen which varied according to sound signals produced by an oscillator the sound produced the image in its two-screen 16 mm version (1975) the original footage was made from line drawings the intervals between the lines register as differentiated noise – or notes the optical track becomes the score the image produced the sound it is more or less different every time it is screened thanks to the intervention of the audience the space between the two screens and four speakers allows the audience to move into and within the space of projection I thought the audience would move around – leave – return – and chat throughout and they do the film is the cause of the performance but the performance entails more than the film the performance takes the audience to itself the audience take the performance to themselves and now record and take away their own version and their own performance to the sound of a line and the space between.

Introduction: Certain measures

the version in this exhibition is single screen – in digital format literally Notes from Light Music which was first assembled in 1976 The film or ‘score’ is divided roughly into five movements within which the images determine the duration and pitch of the sounds So Light Music is on the screen of a monitor again can this still convey the initial intentions? and if it insists upon them would they be considered relevant now? because now is certainly not then yet then and now its initial intentions were that there would be no space for distortion between what is seen and what is said to be seen – between image and sound the sound is the image the image is the sound the one is the other intention and manifestation cannot be ripped apart in complete reversal of positions for a moment I would like to refer to Lucy’s choral work ‘A Feminist Chorus’ which can be heard in the basement of the RIBA this work – based on the archives of Glasgow School of Art draws on the fact that between 1880 and 1900 women formed a high percentage of students the present students name their historical predecessors recalling them to the present in the abstraction of their naming ensuring the manifestation of their presence in mind

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this brings to mind the group of women and the questions raised on the apparent absence of women in film history in an exhibition of film at the Hayward in 1979 I wrote a short article – ‘Whose History?’ – for the Hayward catalogue which is quoted in the catalogue to this exhibition ‘The image is history. The view through the lense may be blurred or defined – focussed or unfocussed – depending on what you think you know; what you imagine you see; what you learn to look for – what you are told is visible’ certainly the ‘Adventures of the Black Square’ has been carefully drawn the presence of women in this exhibition is quite different from that of 1979 things change – and so they do and so they don’t questions remain in whose frame within whose perspective are ideas arranged can a meaning be meant without other meanings intervening in the making? the making and reading of measurement is an attempt to separate sense from the senses sense from the possessive the measured are seldom the measurers the actual world becomes a reflection of these measures abstractions visible in the accumulation of wealth and the reproduction of loss through debt

Introduction: Certain measures

this fissure between a few and the many is the visible result of certain measures of self interest in division Amanuenis made in 1973 was an attempt to understand whether there could be ‘sound pictures’ of words by printing used typewriter tapes on to 16 mm film the results were not enthralling – but were very useful later intention was misleading but accidentally essential in the silence of reading the unreadable in Light Reading in writing the script for Light Reading made in 1978 connections became apparent between language and violence within English grammar the sentence is used to enforce a dualistic opposition of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ the critical problem is whether this grammatical positioning is a translation of actual social relations I mean – what do the abstract structures of grammar tell us about actual society? and there is still the generic use of ‘he’ as representing ‘she’ interestingly countered by Cate Elwes in her forthcoming book on Installation art in which the assumed pronoun ‘he’ is replaced by ‘she’ the more digitally abstract and monopolistic ownership becomes the more the pronouns ‘my’ and ‘I’ are used by global companies to deceive

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the actuality is that ‘we’ in the sense of our work and our information are to be ‘theirs’ and of course for this – you pay a monthly subscription the metaphor of the ‘Cloud’ needs no explanation but reality cannot explain itself language law economy politics might be measured in the abstraction of language but will dissolve into inequity depending on whose interests are being served in Running Light a film I made in 1996 from recordings that Mary Pat Leece and I made in 1985 of the conditions of migrant agriculture workers ‘only the permitted is really visible in a culture that equates “real” with “visible” the “unreal” becomes “invisible” I see is synonymous with I understand reality cannot explain itself ’ ‘different conflicting interests surround it it’s property’ it is the abstraction of the system that cannot be seen but will be seen in the actual world symptomatically the perspective defines the abstract the abstract reproduces itself as realism and this reality is imposed to be believed

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and impinges on people whose lives are determined by economic conditions conditions that are made to appear immutable which of course they are not Certain Measures which I am currently working on is an index of disbelief in the abstraction of law staged in the fiction of authority force erases law in the name of law ‘they promised to take our land, and they took it’1 the contemplation of the illegal aspects of legality pages torn from the last ten years and pasted on a screen Lis Rhodes, 2015

Note 1 from Brown, Dee (1970), Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, London: Vintage Books, 1991. they made us many promises, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it Makhipiya-lúta [1822 to 1909] Red Cloud

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Part One

Acknowledgements

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In conversation: MORE – Pauline Boudry/ Renate Lorenz with Irene Revell Irene Revell and Boudry/Lorenz have worked together in numerous capacities over the past decade: from the formal, co-commissioning new work, exhibitions and screenings; to the many informal exchanges. The following text emerged from conversations during a production residency at the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio in April 2016, and it is structured around a series of key objects after Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914).

A radio Irene The format of ‘the interview’ has been called into question in your work as a potentially hierarchical, sometimes aggressive structure. I am particularly thinking of your citation of poet and author Jean Genet in your film Toxic (2012). One of the two scenes in Toxic is an almost direct citation by Werner Hirsch of Genet’s confrontation with the film crew during his 1985 BBC Arena interview documentary, in which he accuses the crew of interrogating him ‘like police officers’. Renate If I think about your relation to our films I would suggest that you are not really in the position of an interviewer to our work anyway. Since you have come to Berlin each year and taken part in most of our film shoots – as a witness, as discussion partner, as chef, as prompter – you are already entangled in the process. Irene Furthermore, as we loosely take up a suggestion of hers we must implicate Lucy (the editor of this book). Referring to the main body of text in your recent monograph Aftershow, which is formatted as a series of letters to different ‘friends’, in accordingly different registers, deferring from the direct address of the reader and diffracting the text across all of these diverse figures, Lucy mentioned in passing Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Stein’s text is structured around a list of objects. She did not know that your home is named after Stein, with an inscription that reads ‘Gertrude’ next to the buzzer. Her suggestion immediately

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made me think of the glass vitrine of objects in Gertrude’s hallway, which we will come to later. Pauline In our films objects play a particular role as well. We like objects to enter the scene as agents that might inspire or haunt us. These objects have their own ‘life’, and this might allow us to move away from the position of authorship, in order to encounter these objects and follow the new connections they produce. Also, objects and props in our films enable us to disrupt notions of linear time. We like their ability to create some kind of anachronism. For example in our film N.O.Body (2007) (fig. C1.1), Werner Hirsch/Annie Jones, a bearded women in a dress from the nineteenth century, sits at the front of the auditorium on the table where in the nineteenth-century objects for scientific experiments were placed, and grabs a little yellow cube radio from the year 2007, and starts tuning it to different sounds of laughter and music, fragments of sound from the past. These voices seem to come back, haunt the film set, haunt the auditorium and haunt even the art space while the audience is watching the film. Irene

Should we speak about the microphone itself?

Figure C1.1 Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz with Werner Hirsch during the production of N.O.Body, 2007. Courtesy Boudry/Lorenz.

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A microphone Pauline Yes, we often use microphones in our films. They seem to refer to a direct ‘live’ address. A performer in the film holds a microphone, speaks into it and the voice re-appears out of the loudspeakers in the exhibition. Renate This seems to create a live aspect in the film, but in contrast, the fact that the performance is filmed allows a reflection on the filmic apparatus, such as the frame, and what is off-frame, or the gaze and how the performer interacts with the camera/film-makers, being looked at but looking back at the same time. Pauline In our film Silent (2016), there are a series of microphones like in a press conference, but the performer remains silent. The microphone always negotiates the question of the audience, you need it to reinforce your ideas and speak to a large audience. A performance of silence produces a tension between ‘being silenced’ and silence as a political tool of resistance. Irene The former might produce this notion of a world in itself, a world of desire, yet not always easy to access. Pauline This notion also is underlined by the loop. As most installations do, we also show the films as loops. We like to imagine that the performers in the film, delivering a political speech, performing a score (music or a drag performance), do not do it only once. Doing it again and again, they perform the hard labour of political maintenance work, specifically in Silent, where the performer is placed on a turning stage in the public sphere.

A clapper board Irene The clapper board – as the starting point of one of the long filmed sequences – is very often made visible in your films. Pauline Yes, it marks that what we are going to see is staged, framed and recorded.

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Irene Karen Barad introduces the term agential cut in the new materialist feminism laid out in her 2007 book Meeting the Universe Halfway. The agential cut marks a scientific experiment as a break, as a specific moment – and as not more than a specific moment – in an ongoing process of entanglement. The experiment could have equally taken place in many other different moments, with different parameters at stake: it is only one possible iteration. Renate Understanding our filmed performances as an agential cut, the clap might visualize that, as a viewer, you get only a small insight into an ongoing process that might take place before and after the shooting, or even outside the frame. We use other filmic means that underline the notion of a time and space beyond the filming, such as fast zooms or having parts, or even the most important parts of the performance happening off-screen. We like to address the space in our films as ‘backstage’, pursuing the idea that what you actually see is not ‘the performance’ but rather a time before or after. Irene The film then could also be understood as a punctuation in a more open process of research, a moment that marks one of many possible outcomes. I was particularly struck by how research on Toxic (2012) continued in London long after the film was completed. You had researched an extraordinary series of photographs of pédérastes taken in bourgeois commercial photos studios in the early 1870s, at the birth of police photography and before the establishment of the mug shot. These images from the Paris Police Archives informed the film itself and were presented in an archival display during its initial exhibition at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (2012). Then again, in London more research led to a later moment in the development of police photography, documenting the crime scene, and a series of photographs taken in the late 1920s during the raid of a secret gay soirée in London. These were displayed as an accumulating archive alongside the film at South London Gallery (2012 to 2013). Renate Taking up the image of an experiment and Karen Barad’s notion that you cannot separate the instruments and the course of the experiment from the objects of research: it makes me think of the look behind the apparatus, as Bertolt Brecht has proposed in his theatre of estrangement. In Toxic the

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camera turns and you see what happens outside the frame – the sound technician, a performer waiting for her scene, the directors of the film, Pauline and me – but then you realize that this is nothing more than another staged moment of the film, here as well, the show and the apparatus seem to be entangled. Irene For me this describes very well the tension that I experience in your films: there is always a drive to allow certain forms of identification. From the immediate pleasure of the image to more arcane identifications, like the figures that are referenced or even perform in your films – often figures of fandom in very specific subcultures, from Yvonne Rainer to Alla Nazimova, Wu Tsang to Lizzy Mercier Descloux, all within Salomania (2009), for instance – a potential for an intimacy with the audience opens up. And, very soon, or even at the same moment, another drive, this time of distancing, happens. For one thing, the distancing (spatial and temporal) that the film loop creates – not only the move from live performance into film, but also the literal seamlessness of the loop itself, eluding access, a world that may address the viewer yet continues oblivious.

Figure C1.2 Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz with Yvonne Rainer and Wu Tsang during the production of Salomania, 2009. Courtesy Boudry/Lorenz.

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A green Formica dinner table Irene There are various descriptions of the community of friends that coalesced around Derek Jarman’s film shoots and these make me think of your own way of working in this regard. In particular in Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks (2013), Toyah Willcox discusses her transformative experience in shooting Jubilee, a performance that you cite in your own film No Future, No Past (2011). Pauline Maybe you allude to us working with performers who are usually not professional actors, but artists, choreographers, musicians whose work we admire. It allows us to develop a shared dialogue not only during the shooting but over a longer period of time. Renate This allows discussions or even conflicts that might appear during the shoot to be embedded in mutual trust, which includes trust that it might make sense if your collaborator utters critique. This might still be difficult but maybe this is the most valuable part, even more than the more agreeable moment of having dinners at home on our dinner table with a great group of friends each night after the shooting. Irene I experience these shoots that take place in an almost cyclical loop every summer as a kind of world-building, with the type of utopian aspect that I think José Muñoz might have been calling for in his book Cruising Utopia (2009): a coming together and working towards . . . Pauline These moments are enabled also through very specific working relationships, not only with our performers with whom we work again and again, but also with you or Andrea Thal for instance: both of you have developed a kind of fidelity in curating, following an artist’s practice in a way that you literally become part of it. Conventions of curating most often mean that you work with an artist for only one project, and even if you like it, you have to move on and discover other work. Irene These conventions otherwise tend to work almost as a colonial practice: to discover an artist, place your flag or make your mark, and then go

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onwards. I think it is important to ask what new connections are made possible in this act of repetition. While on the question of ethics, I’ve long admired the fine attunement in your practice between work, rest and health, which feels intrinsically related to the works themselves, and related working experiences, for example the film shoots we’ve been discussing.

A vitrine Irene From memory it is a glass oblong tower at the entrance of your apartment, perhaps forty centimetres square at its base and more or less floorto-ceiling with multiple levels of glass shelves inside. It always includes an array of objects with special affinities: X-ray Spex´s first vinyl record, photographs of Yvonne Rainer’s dance performances, a clapper board, visiting cards by Adrian Piper, Bulgarian cinema journals, an art object mimicking Susan Sontag’s white strand of hair, a picture of a film by Ulrike Ottinger, the novel Zami by Audre Lorde, pictures of Kathy Acker and Carole Roussopoulos, a vinyl recording of Pauline Oliveros’ To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe et al. I always look forward to viewing its evolving contents. This relates closely to some of the above, especially the question of community, which seems to intrinsically include these additional figures in an array of orbits, some with relatively close contact (Yvonne Rainer or Pauline Oliveros), others further afield for a variety of reasons. In a sense this manifested in the letter-writing strategy in Aftershow but takes a different format altogether in your own semi-private museum.

Hair Pauline Hair and beards have special presence in our films. I earlier mentioned Annie Jones in N.O.Body with her extraordinary long hair and thick beard. We also recently worked with wigs: I want (2015) is a film inspired by an imaginary meeting between Kathy Acker’s literary work and the story of Chelsea Manning who exfiltrated possibly the largest secret military material in US history and sent it to WikiLeaks. We were interested in the connections between the military and gender/sexuality, since Manning published these important disclosures at the same time as she informed her superiors about her transgender identity.

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Renate In our film at one point the performer Sharon Hayes wears a coat made of blonde wig hair, and in the exhibition space a huge wig-tapestry blocks the entrance of the exhibition space. The visitors first encounter this Hair Piece, which is as much just material and refers to non-representational art, as it could be a backdrop for a show in a club. Pauline This again refers to the idea of backstage: in a way visitors enter the exhibition from backstage almost like performers and, then, have to first find their position in relation to the film installation. You might sit down on a structure to watch the film, which at the end of the film lights up, and you notice only then that you were sitting on a stage the whole time, an empty stage that almost invites you to take part. Renate The gigantic wig coat might highlight the performative aspect of negotiating subjectivity in the film. Using Kathy Acker’s poetic strategies, such as appropriation and switching/stealing of identities, performer Sharon Hayes alternates in claiming that she is Kathy Acker, Chelsea Manning, an agent of the SLA or Jackie Onassis. It might add to the notion of displacement that I want was filmed with two cameras. They were placed next to each other during the shooting and the two camera women had the task to film the performance in the same way, exercising the zooms and framings that we had developed together during the rehearsal. As a viewer, you might think in the beginning that the images in the two projections are just doubled, but then you discover small deviations. As the film proceeds, the cameras more often zoom in opposite directions. Pauline As a viewer you are placed as a third element, conscious of being between two almost similar versions of the film, literally between the two screens. You can never fully follow both projections although they show the same performance. Irene This sounds like it could be jarring, nauseating even. But in fact experiencing I want installed is neither, the two screens seem to have a fluidity, lyricism even in their dual composition, even as they err apart in sometimes jagged strokes. I find this an exciting proposition, to pick up on our previous discussion, what happens when there are now these two deviating ‘cuts’?

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More pleasure Irene I realize how productive the pleasure is that is involved in all of your films. Here I have a question that I have never asked: how do topics, the different references that become part of a project come to you? How do these connections relate to a research process? Are you both continually reading, encountering work, conducting research in archives or does this have a certain rhythm that perhaps relates to the projects/works? Pauline To come back to the beginning of our conversation – I think we are very often working with materials (a song, the beginning of a political documentary, a picture or a score) from the past that haunt us, that provoke us artistically, that make us want to be politically active, that ask for illegitimate conversations between different ways of thinking. And of course haunting works in a way that is not very organized or rational. Renate In the course of our ongoing conversation some of those ghosts become intrusive and at some point we submit and it becomes obvious that we are going to work with them.

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1

Elinor Cleghorn – In a tiny realm of her own: Lotte Reiniger’s light work

A pair of manicure scissors, handle-limbed, stride into frame before being retrieved by human hands and put to work extracting Cinderella from a piece of paper. The figure is formed in a flurry of snips as remnants of paper fall away; the hands retreat from the frame, and the scissors pull her upright. Cinderella grips the scissor blades in her outstretched hands: now she can move, and the story can begin. Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Reiniger’s silhouette film Cinderella is ‘told by a pair of scissors on a screen’.1 Made in 1922, it tells the Grimm Brothers’ tale of Cinderella – Aschenputtel – through the single-frame animation of flat, handcut, articulated figures, animals, birds and objects moving in staccato across magical depthless scenes. The film unfolds like a moving picture book. The frame’s jagged edges open to reveal the braying gestures of the ugly sisters, the bowed head of Cinderella sweeping and the flourish of the prince as he bows his knee. At intervals text appears, announced by exclamatory ‘snips!’. The pair of scissors is afforded the status of orator, and the derivation of this ‘fairy film in shadow show’2 is transported from the animator’s hands to the now enchanted facility of her enabling implement. In her writings, published in popular publications including Sight & Sound and the English literary journal Life & Letters Today, Reiniger often divulged the technical details of her practice of animating and methods of silhouette figure composition. Yet she had a tendency to modestly suggest that her abilities were something of a charm rather than a honed development of artistic technique, perhaps to supplement the premise that her silhouettes moved ‘of their own free will’.3 ‘I let the scissors do it’, she states, in an interview featured in Felicity Field’s 1983 documentary The Dancing Silhouettes.

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Figure 1.1 Lotte Reiniger, Aschenputtel (Cinderella), 1922, screen grab.

Rudolph Arnheim observed that with her ‘moveable silhouettes’ Reiniger conjured the ideal device to ‘make fairy tales come alive for the eye’.4 Indeed, the partial yet elaborately expressive quality of the silhouette figure, ‘not as close to reality as a three-dimensional thing . . .’5 invites the work of the viewer’s imagination while asserting its artifice, its separateness from ‘tangible reality’.6 Although Reiniger’s playful attribution of agency to the scissors situates Cinderella within an illusory realm preclusive of human weight and heft, she nonetheless insists that her viewer remains in thrall to how the trick is done. The interplay between hand, scissor and figure establishes Cinderella as the product of an accomplished gestural craft, and thus the proximity of Reiniger’s animating presence pulses across each contour of this strange flat fantasy. Reiniger invented the animated silhouette film. She is also one of the most prolific and technically innovative artists in the canon of experimental filmmaking; she made her first film in 1919 and continued to work until 1980, the year before her death. Across her life-long career she created more than seventy animations, meticulously detailed and choreographed interpretations for

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children and adults of fairy and folk tales, myths, operatic movements and Bible stories. Her dedication to the exhibition and distribution of her own work gained her continued artistic, commercial and industrial successes, and she remained unfailingly committed to developing and perfecting her genre. She made her earliest animations during the intensely experimental period of film production in Weimar Berlin, and shared studio space with contemporaries Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger and Hans Richter. In 1926, she completed and released Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), an imagining of a story from The Arabian Nights, which is credited as the earliest surviving full-length animated feature in the history of cinema. Reiniger is therefore by no means an unknown artist. In recent years, the 2001 restoration of Achmed from a nitrate-positive print held in the National Film and Television Archives at the British Film Institute (BFI) has offered new access to her work and precipitated a resurgence of interest and reappraisals at exhibitions, screenings and symposia.7 However, despite her contributions to the history of experimental film culture, and the enduring appeal of her work to audiences, Reiniger has remained largely overlooked in critical and theoretical discussions of the development of film art over the last century. In part, this is because Reiniger’s optic, attuned to love-worn stories, and reminiscent of the nostalgic fascinations of proto-cinema, resists the critical tenets of film experimentalism. Although theorists of the avant-garde such as William Moritz and Cecile Starr have acknowledged Reiniger’s ingenuity in histories of experimental animation,8 she is almost entirely absent within the major discourse. Despite Reiniger’s innovations, not to mention her unprecedented early successes, her contribution to this particular moment in film history remains undervalued, and as such she has been marginalized in dominant critical accounts of the period. There is no mention, for example, of Reiniger in Lotte H. Eisner’s survey of the period, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, and in R. Bruce Elder’s extensive discussion of the Absolutists in Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-Garde Art Movements in the Twentieth Century, she is mentioned only as an observer of the processes Ruttmann employed while making his first film Lichtspiel Opus I (1919).9 Although Reiniger’s techniques of cutting, choreographing and animating figurative silhouettes became more fluid and refined across her career, her

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animations remained essentially the same. Thus, discussions of her work in film historical contexts have tended to focus predominately on the timeless novelty and delicate ingenuity of her overall aesthetic. Reiniger’s work is no doubt deserving of considered critical attention; but re-situating it, especially in a feminist context, does not demand the work Patrice Petro describes as ‘historical recovery and retrieval’.10 As previously mentioned, projects of cataloguing and restoration by the BFI, among other institutions, have afforded Reiniger significant archival and distributional visibility, and as such she is held up as an exemplar of women’s film-making. However, it is important to examine the terms of her admittance to the historical canon in this context. Although she is frequently extolled for the virtuosity of her hand-made filmmaking processes and the charm of her works, such descriptions relegate her contributions to the margins of feminine-denoted craft practices. Using a feminist historical lens, the critical value of Reiniger’s hand-made film-making can be re-presented beyond what Alexandra Kokoli has recently described as ‘the implicitly gendered hierarchy between art and craft’.11 By exploring Reiniger’s role within experimental film culture of the 1920s and 1930s, and examining the embodied, durational labour of her film production, the value of her contributions to a feminist genealogy of film history can be brought to light. Born in Berlin in 1899, Reiniger grew up an obsessive cineaste, fascinated by the films of Georges Méliès and what she called the short ‘cabarettszenes and fearytales’ shown in Berlin’s small cinemas during the early years of the 1900s.12 She was intrigued by ‘fantastical things . . . which could not be shown by other means except film’,13 and the trick techniques behind such uncanny transformations and metamorphoses. Her childhood imagination was immersed in the reveries of play; she had a keen interest in theatre, and often acted out plays of her own devising for her family. Her family’s Berlin apartment was rather a restricted space, so she turned towards the miniature, by mounting scenes from Shakespeare in a shadow theatre with her silhouette marionettes.14 Reiniger’s film-making evolved from her aptitude for cutting paper silhouettes, a parlour pastime embedded in feminine traditions of story-telling and domestic decoration. As animation historian William Moritz notes, the art of Scherenschnitte or ‘scissor-cutting’ ‘. . . had become a popular folk-art form among German women’,15 and Reiniger displayed a preternatural facility for

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the craft: ‘I never had the feeling that my silhouette cutting was an idea . . . I could cut silhouettes almost as soon as I could manage to hold a pair of scissors.’16 The silhouette, a partial form in which detail is limited to profile, was indeed transformed by Reiniger’s scissors into a form capable of conveying, according to a 1931 essay by Eric White, nuances of emotion with ‘perfect justice and reasonable fantasy’.17 The shadow theatre marionette was a device capable of animating the flights of Reiniger’s childhood imagination. She was drawn to the latent liveliness embedded within its materiality, which takes form only when projected beyond itself as a shadow slinking on a scrim. In 1930 Béla Balázs discussed the inventiveness of the silhouette film with reference to Reiniger’s Achmed. He notes how the transposition of the silhouette into a filmic image is in itself a fairy tale. He writes of how, through the action of light, the ready-made form sheds its materiality, its ‘madeness’, and re-appears as one of cinema’s ‘absolute’ images.18 For Balázs, the silhouette figure represented a uniquely cinematic condition of otherness: ‘it’s not a matter of miracles intruding into our world. What we enter instead is an other world, one that operates according to self-contained but different laws.’19 Through their ‘relation to things unseen’,20 Reiniger’s silhouette marionettes are a point of transition that can inaugurate the viewer’s invitation to this realm of cinematic otherness that Balázs describes. Reiniger approached the activity of animating her silhouettes as an adaptation of the ministrations of shadow theatre, and as such she had an innate understanding of how to compose effective sequences of movement. She assembled her figures, objects and scenographic elements that she constructed from paperboard or soft lead and hinged with wire at the joints, into the desired composition on the tissuecovered surface of her glass-topped animating table. A sharp light source beneath the table cast the figures in relief and rendered their hinges invisible. Nudged into the necessary position by her fingertip or scissor blade, the scene was photographed on a rostrum camera mounted on an adjustable steel scaffold. Returning to the table, Reiniger inched her figures into their next position ‘and the whole would be photographed again. And so on . . .’21 (Figure 1.2.) In her shadow plays, the movement of the marionette’s image was limited to the performative manipulations she could extend through the puppet rods. Animation, on the other hand, offered the means to expand the

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Figure 1.2 Lotte Reiniger at her trick table, 1922, photograph taken from Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, Batsford Books (London, 1975).

potential of her figures beyond the temporal immediacy of her performance into further rhythmic variety and gestural nuance. Devising these patterns of movement required a ‘devilish lot of mathematical reflection’,22 and how the composition would actually appear when projected remained unknowable during production. In ‘Scissors Make Films’, published in Sight and Sound in 1936, Reiniger wrote: ‘there remains a good deal to say about the artistic problems of this type of film, about its future, and about its value.’23 Yet her feeling never wavered for the craft of silhouette art and its animation that she actively encouraged amateur artists and fledging shadow-players to try their hands at.

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Reiniger became keen to experiment with animating her figures while working as an assistant to expressionist director Paul Wegener, whom she met while studying acting with Max Reinhardt at Berlin’s Deutsches Theatre. To pass the time she cut silhouette portraits of fellow actors, which Wegener thought ‘showed a rare sense of movement’.24 In 1916 he invited her to create intertitles for Rübezahl’s Hochzeit, his feature based on the stories of the capricious mountain spirit of German folklore. Reiniger continued to assist Wegener on Der Rattenfanger Von Hamelin (The Pied Piper of Hamelin), 1918, where she learnt the principles of stop-motion photography by animating a plague of wooden puppet rats. Although she valued the experience of working with Wegener, Reiniger was determined to pursue a career in which her talents would not be limited to decorative handiwork or production assistance. Since the idea of animating silhouette figures was entirely peculiar to her, she recognized an opportunity to carve out a practice that she could facilitate entirely on her own. As she recollected, one could not ‘be an eighteen-year-old girl and want to be a film director, but with my figures I could do this’.25 During the early years of the Weimar period, animation was being inaugurated as a radical cultural form, an exemplar of cinema’s specificity as a visual art distinct from literature and theatre. The emergence of Reiniger’s animations coincided with the pursuit of the medium’s potential by artists such as Hans Richter, Ruttmann and later Oskar Fischinger, who were exploring the motile, temporal and perceptual possibilities of film through nonreferential shapes, curves and lines, pulsating forms and morphing colours. As Esther Leslie has shown, abstract or ‘Absolute’ film-making represented a rejection of Hollywood’s ‘narratives and naturalism’, which subsumed the pure kinetic elements constituting cinema as an art form.26 The social situation in Germany caused by the collapse of the post-war economy and the subsequent period of hyperinflation propelled artists to insist upon the visual and experiential re-composition of the world; abstraction in animation was a liberatory strategy, a means to incite new forms of consciousness through optical phenomena. As Leslie puts it, the ‘viewer was being worked on’.27 The crafted perfection of Reiniger’s shadow narratives seems to obviate any association of her art with the ambitions of her contemporaries. However, she became an attentive and committed supporter of the era’s developments in

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film art,28 and played a significant role within the social nexus structuring the creation and distribution of experimental animation in Berlin. Wegener was an important advocate of Reiniger’s talents, and in 1918 he introduced her to Hans Curlis, a documentarian and art historian who was opening a studio dedicated to experimental animation in his recently founded Institute for Cultural Research. Curlis founded the studio in collaboration with a group of artists and scientists including Ruttmann, film-maker Berthold Bartosch, and writer and director Carl Koch, who became Reiniger’s husband and animation assistant. She recalls that Wegener persuaded the group ‘. . . to let that silhouette girl make her silhouettes movable so as to make a silhouette cartoon’,29 and in 1919, with the studio’s trick-table adapted specifically for her purposes, she created the five-minute short Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Loving Heart). The film garnered commercial success in the United States, and brought Reiniger’s work to the attention of a pioneer of advertising on film: producer and director Julius Pinschewer. Her commissions with Pinschewer’s Berlin-based agency, which included The Secret of the Marquise (1922), an advertisement for Nivea skincare, enabled her to continue making films at the Institute. By 1923 ‘that silhouette girl’ had created four further animations, including Cinderella, which was screened in 1925 at the Film Society in London, and secured financial backing for Achmed. Amid the intensely experimental climate of film production during the Weimar years preceding hyperinflation, Reiniger’s animations were something of a curiosity. Her silhouettes seem not to speak to the modernism of the ‘Absolute’ screen but to such delights as nineteenth-century dioramas and hand-shadow pantomimes. The English art writer Olive Cook, celebrates Reiniger’s ‘exquisite silhouettes’ as a modern revival of the shadow play in ‘cinematic terms’.30 In Movement in Two Dimensions, her 1963 study of animated and projected pictures preceding the invention of cinema, Cook argues that the aesthetic of Reiniger’s early films resonated beyond nostalgia, and reflected Weimar cinema’s attraction to the metaphorical value of the figurative shadow. Marina Warner also proposes that Reiniger’s early films emblematize the turn of German cultural imagination towards the shadow side, and in particular to the symbolic density of shadows pulsing through a ‘body of fiction emanating from Romantic circles in Germany and Austria’.31 Such material held a particular force for directors of narrative cinema in the Weimar period, who saw the

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flatness of the filmic surface as the ideal support for visual phenomena that could only exist within the co-ordinates of the screen. Wegener and his peer Rochus Gliese,32 and later Robert Wiene and F.W. Murnau in Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) respectively, staged the walls and corridors of interior sets as projection screens for demonic shadow figures. Reiniger’s animations also reflect the era’s preoccupation with the specificity of cinema as an art of the moving surface, and moreover with flatness as the sustenance of an illusory premise. She configured the silhouette figure as a cinematic device at a time when the image of the cast shadow, the derivation of the silhouette form, emanated as the leitmotif of the Expressionistic conceit.33 In turn, her embrace of the ‘pure’ attributes of film expression, her use of the camera to transpose material forms into moving images, and her creation of qualities of motion specific to the screen, aligned with the ambitions of her contemporaries in ‘Absolute’ film-making to purge film of its anthropomorphic volume and institute the dynamism of graphic forms as the ‘. . . basis for a new visual language’.34. As Richter noted, Reiniger ‘belonged to the avant-garde as far as independent production and courage were concerned’,35 sharing with her male counterparts the belief that the artist’s individual will and spirit were paramount.36 But the fact that Reiniger’s innovations found form in the reveries of romantic tales and folklore meant that her work was perceived as having little relevance to the anxieties of expressionism or the ‘rebellious motivations’37 of absolutism. Siegfried Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler, his sociopolitical account of German cinema leading up to the early 1930s, dismisses Reiniger’s animations as a reflection of the era’s post-inflation thrall for historical pageantry: ‘just the right thing for small town people and salesgirls with warm hearts and nothing else. In a tiny realm of her own,’ he writes, Reiniger ‘swung her scissors diligently, preparing one sweet silhouette film after another’.38 Kracauer diminishes the relevance of Reiniger’s works by containing both their processes of making and spectatorial appeal within the implied limitations of the ‘feminine’ and childlike sensibilities. By yoking his perception of her animations as merely nostalgic to the activity of handcraft from which they emerge, he relegates her to the ‘absolutely different sphere’ reserved for women’s cultural practice within the ideological framework of patriarchal discourse.39 Kracauer’s attempt to curtail the value of Reiniger’s film-making exemplifies a

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broader tendency within modernist film history not only to entirely neglect the contributions of women artists, but also to marginalize the conditions of production and contexts of expression germane to women’s film-making. The ‘tiny realm’ Kracauer encloses her within, annexed from the cultural domain defined by male-dominated modes of film production, is a realm restricted by the limitations imposed on inherently feminine art practices, especially those originating in processes of craft.40 In her 1975 book Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, Reiniger stresses that the fledgling animator must maintain absolute concentration and avoid all interruptions while she is working. She writes, ‘Hang a notice on the door of your studio SHOOTING KEEP OUT . . . Don’t go to the telephone. Don’t let any visitor keep you company, to watch . . . Dedicate yourself solely to the ambition of creating a successful movement.’41 Throughout the book – part personal memoir, part scholarly account of the cultural history of shadow-art – Reiniger emphasizes the simplicity of the basic principles of the art form, and advises the beginner to experiment with ‘primitive’ materials adapted from the home: pieces of wood, a sheet of glass and odds and ends of hardboard, an old table and a lamp, any simple camera with a single-frame mechanism, black card and small pieces of wire for making figures. The book’s detailed illustrated instructions for the construction and playing of shadow theatres and silhouette marionettes, as well as explanations of each aspect of the animation process, from storyboard design and figure preparation, to the assembly of a trick-table and correct shooting methods, also have much in common with domestic hobby books published principally for women in the 1960s and 1970s. These, as Lucy Lippard describes in her essay ‘Making Something From Nothing: Towards a Definition of Women’s Hobby Art’, were designed, through their ‘modest credo’ and ‘emphasis on enjoyment’,42 to encourage creativity as a diverting expansion of the ‘busywork’ of keeping house. According to Lippard, hobby books appealed to the ‘visually sensitive woman’ to ‘change, adorn, expand’ the contained environment of her domestic labours. As she writes, such sensibilities were ‘often engendered by isolation within a particular space, and by the emphasis on cleaning and service’.43 Reiniger saw the conditions of production germane to women’s domestic crafts as ideally suited to the solitary servitude necessary for the creation of a silhouette film. Indeed, Reiniger consciously located her art as a mode of

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creative invention that could be cleaved out of everyday necessities, accessible to anyone familiar with the rhythms of domestic labour. As Marina Warner has discussed in her writings on Reiniger, her filmmaking was an extension of ‘women’s skills . . . from the home’.44 Certainly the make-do-and-mend tone of Shadow Theatres exemplifies this. However, the book subtly troubles the gendered insistence upon homespun productivity traditionally associated with what Kokoli describes as the ‘ “internal exile” of domestic femininity’.45 Reiniger is encouraging her readers to turn their keen eyes and deft fingers away from the cycle of making and mending towards the creation of objects of personal expression. She re-directs women’s handcrafts beyond the gendered space, to follow Kokoli, of reproductive labour and decorative production, into a realm of the imaginary. Reiniger’s silhouettes are not objects for practical use, but rather, projective devices and uncanny emblems of the subjectivity of their makers. Reiniger’s appropriation of kitchen table into studio, and paper into performers, however, was by no means intended as a mere replication of gendered handwork. She encouraged a radical transposition of the craft of domestic labours from duty to desire. The enclosure of the animation homestudio was not a space of isolation, but a generative space into which one could withdraw to work ‘like an artist paints his pictures’.46 Contained in her space of retreat and entreaty,47 absorbed in her intimate negotiations with her figures and marking time through touch, Reiniger developed a practice of filmmaking in which the ‘Penelopean rhythms’48 of women’s craft referred to by Lippard were transformed through the whims of play. Kraucauer’s pejorative dismissal of Reiniger’s art as a craft for the warm-hearted and simple-minded therefore reveals the profound inadequacy, articulated by Lippard and other feminist writers, of the terms defined by patriarchal discourse to accommodate the conceptual and theoretical intricacies of art-making that bespeaks women’s cultural histories, social realities and personal experiences.49 As Lippard has shown, feminist criticism such as hers opens up the ground for re-thinking the notion of innovation beyond its traditionally masculine locus in style and form.50 Reiniger was only too aware that her work, in both style and subject matter, negated the era’s dominant forms of experimentalism. Reiniger engaged Ruttmann to create background material for Achmed. During production he asked her what this fairy-film, abundant with flying

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horses and fantastic birds, had to do with 1923; ‘Nothing’, she replied, ‘but I am alive now, and I want to do it as I have the chance’.51 Although Reiniger recalls that she felt bashful asking such ‘serious’ artists to participate in the making of Achmed, her modesty belies her steadfast commitment to the realization of her ambitions. She was generous enough to support the endeavours of her peers, while at the same time remaining focused on sustaining a marginalized practice that centralized her technical and creative agency and prioritized her subjectivity. By the time of publishing Shadow Theatres, Reiniger had made more than sixty animations that through her own efforts had been viewed by an array of different audiences in a variety of commercial and industrial contexts. She continued to gain advertising work in the late 1930s and 1940s with the General Post Office and in the 1950s with the Crown Film Unit in London, and throughout the 1950s her fairy-tale films were regularly screened during the BBC’s Children’s Hour. In 1937 she contributed a shadow-puppetry sequence to Jean Renoir’s feature La Marseillaise, and in the 1960s she created backdrop material for theatre productions and pantomime performances in England and Scotland. Through her resilience and commitment, she single-handedly redressed the precarious future she had envisaged for silhouette animation in the 1930s. Yet despite her successes, she chose not to expend her energies countering, as she put it, the ‘suspicion’ her work was regarded with ‘by the film trade’.52 Rather, she promoted the marginal appeal of her art by celebrating it, in the public context of her published articles, documentary interviews and in her book, as a craft accessible to anyone with a degree of patience and inclination. Reiniger’s ‘tiny realm’ was neither a space of isolation nor of opposition, but rather a productive locus from which she courageously extended her compulsions ‘. . . from the inside outward’.53 Like many women artists working with film in the context Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman describe as the ‘artisanal conventions of the experimental mode’,54 Reiniger developed a practice distinct from that of her male contemporaries, initially because she perceived that a career as a ‘film-director’ would be inaccessible to her as a young woman.55 Also, like other women artists, Reiniger has been ‘deprived . . . of a historical context’,56 in Lippard’s words, at least in part because she had the bravery to forge, and the skill to sustain, a purposefully interstitial practice on

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her own terms. However, her relegation to the margins of the filmic avantgarde is perhaps more closely tied to the way her work centralizes traditionally female activities of making, doing and telling. By forging an entire genre of experimental film that extended the feminine-denoted craft of scissor-art into a distinctly feminist mode of filmic labour, her successes enlarged a critically neglected aspect of women’s social and cultural history into the public sphere of film. Defending montage in a riposte to Balázs in 1926, Sergei Eisenstein described scissors as the ‘defining instrument of film production’.57 In Reiniger’s hands, film’s very constitution as an art of motion, of temporal elision and expansion, of imaginative immersion and otherness, is re-imagined as a proliferation of tiny cuts, each constituting an intimate inscription of her animating body into the illusory scene of cinema. As Moritz rightfully acknowledges, Reiniger’s silhouette films constitute a ‘feminist validation’58 of the practice of Scherenschnitte: the act of cutting was for her synonymous with the art of telling. Her ‘little habit of producing films with scissor cuts’59 deserves to be celebrated as a profoundly feminist incision into the patriarchal folds of the filmic avant-garde.

Notes 1 Title sequence, Aschenputtel (Cinderella), dir. Lotte Reiniger, Institut für Kulturforschung (Berlin,1922), thirteen minutes, silent, black and white. 2 Ibid. 3 Reiniger, Lotte ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’, The Silent Picture, 8: 2, (1970). 4 Arnheim, Rudolph (1928), ‘Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette films’, in Film Essays and Criticism, 141, Madison and London, 1977. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 In the UK alone, Reiniger’s work featured in the Barbican Art Centre’s animation exhibition Watch Me Move in 2014, for example, and a screening of Achmed was accompanied by a newly composed live musical score at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum in 2014, following a similar event in 2011 as part of the Birds Eye View feminist film festival. Her art and influence were also the focus of a symposium and screening programme Framing Lotte Reiniger at Queen Mary University of London in 2017.

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8 See Starr, Cecile (1976), ‘Lotte Reiniger’, in Starr and Robert Russett (eds), Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art, New York: Da Capo Press, and also Moritz, William, ‘Some Critical Perspectives on Lotte Reiniger’, 14–19, 1996. 9 See Elder, R. Bruce, Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-Garde Art Movements in the Twentieth Century, 124–5, Ontario, 2008. 10 Petro, Patrice, ‘Reflections on Feminist Film Studies, Early and Late’, Signs, 30 (1) and Kathleen McHugh and Vivian Sobchack (eds) (2004), Beyond the Gaze: Recent Approaches to Film Feminism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1273. 11 Kokoli, Alexandra M. The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice, 2, London, 2016. 12 Reiniger, Lotte, ‘What I Remember of Film Development in Berlin’ (c.1930), 1. Eric Walter White Paper Inventory Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas at Austin. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Moritz, William (1996), ‘Some Critical Perspectives on Lotte Reiniger’, in Maureen Furniss (ed.) (2009), Animation: Art and Industry, 14, London. 16 Reiniger, L. (Spring 1936), ‘Scissors Make Films’, Sight & Sound, 5 (17): 14. 17 White, Eric Walter, Walking Shadows: An Essay on Lotte Reiniger’s Silhouette Films, 21, London, 1931. 18 Balázs, Béla (1930), ‘The Spirit of Film’, in Rodney Livingstone (trans), Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory, 170, New York and Oxford, 2010. 19 Ibid. Emphasis in original. 20 Ibid., 35. 21 Reiniger, L., ‘Scissors Make Films’, 14. 22 Reiniger, L., ‘Film as Ballet: A Dialogue Between Lotte Reiniger and her Familiar’, Life and Letters Today, 14, 3, 1936. 23 Reiniger, L., ‘Scissors Make Films’, 15. 24 Reiniger, L., ‘Scissors Make Films’, 13. 25 Reiniger, L., The Dancing Silhouettes. 26 Leslie, Esther, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and The AvantGarde, 45, London and New York, 2002. 27 Ibid., 40–3, 47. 28 Along with Richter, Ruttmann and Mies van der Rohe, Reiniger acted on the board of artists of the Deutsche Filmliga für unabhängigen Film (The German film league for independent film), founded in Berlin in 1930, which represented ‘all those who are seriously fighting for a renewal of the film business’, screened suppressed or unknown films, and promoted the ‘efforts of the avant-garde’ in

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Germany and beyond. See Janser, Andres and Arthur Rüeg, Hans Richter: New Living: Architecture. Film. Space, 28, Lars Müller Publishers, 2001. 29 Reiniger, L. Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, 84. 30 Cook, Olive, Movement in Two Dimensions, 80, London, 1963. 31 Warner, M., Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights, 398, London, 2011. 32 In 1913 Wegener directed Der Student of Prague, the first cinematic treatment of Adalbert von Chamisso’s 1814 novel Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geshichte (The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemiel), in which Schlemihl sells his soul (his shadow) to the Devil in exchange for a bottomless wallet. In 1921 Wegener’s peer Rochus Gliese made the feature Der verlorene Schatten (The Lost Shadow), for which Reiniger devised a title sequence featuring the animate shadow of an enchanted violin that plays in the absence of its musician (played by Wegener) who has exchanged his shadow for the instrument’s magical properties. See Warner, Stranger Magic, 398. 33 Film critic Lotte H. Eisner argues that Expressionist directors synthesized their actors’ movements to the linearity and ‘broken angles’ of cinema sets by flattening movements and gestures into qualities of distorted geometricism. See Eisner, L., The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, 145, London, 1969. 34 Leslie, E. Hollywood Flatlands, 56. 35 Hans Richter, quoted by Philip Kemp in ‘Reiniger, Lotte 1899-1981’, Screen Online, London: British Film Institute. Available at http://www.screenonline.org.uk/ people/id/528134/ (Accessed 2 March 2016). 36 Reiniger, L. Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, 116. Reiniger writes: ‘Animation is basically not so much a technical implement as the expression of the spirit behind it.’ 37 Lippard, Lucy R., From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, 6, New York, 1976. 38 Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, 128, Dennis Dobson Ltd, 1947. 39 Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, 44–5, London, 1981. 40 Ibid., 12. 41 Reiniger, L., Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, 84, London, 1970. Emphasis in original. 42 Lippard, Lucy, ‘Making Something from Nothing: Towards a Definition of Women’s Hobby Art’, in Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change, New York, 1984.

54 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image Lippard, L., ‘Making Something from Nothing’, 100. Warner, M., Stranger Magic, 392. Kokoli, A., The Feminist Uncanny, 106. Reiniger interviewed in The Dancing Silhouettes, dir. Felicity Field, UK, 1983. See Warner, M., Stranger Magic, 392. Warner also describes Reiniger’s film-making as an extension of childhood ‘games of make believe’, and likens her animating table to the ‘private interior world’ children dramatize ‘by activating lifeless and sometimes even invisible or non-existent things’. Lippard, L.,‘Making Something from Nothing’, 102. See Lippard, L., From the Center, 6–7. Ibid., 6. Reiniger, L., ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’, 3. Reiniger, L., ‘Film as Ballet’, 157. Reiniger writes; ‘I have always been regarded with much suspicion by the film trade . . .’ Lippard, L., From the Center, 7. Petrolle, Jean, and Virginia Wright Wexman (eds), Women and Experimental Filmmaking, 2, Urbana and Chicago, 2005. In his essay ‘Gender, Film, and German History: Filmmaking by German Women Directors from Weimar to the Present’ (in Frederiksen, Elke P. and Martha Kaarsberg Wallach (eds), Facing Fascism and Confronting the Past: German Women Writers from Weimar to the Present, 245, New York, 2000), Richard McCormick notes that the first record of a film being made or directed by a German female director is in 1913, when Olga Wohlbrück, an Austrian-German theatre actor, directed her screenplay Ein Mädchen zu verschenken (A Girl for Giving Away). As Julia Knight has shown in the introduction to her book Women and the New German Cinema (London, 1992, 2) women were able ‘to make only occasional and usually highly limited contributions as directors’ during the earliest decades of cinematic production in Germany’. As Knight explains, the contributions of the very few (although highly-prolific) German women film directors of this early period are almost entirely absent from film historical accounts: American-born silent film actor Fern Andra directed five films after moving to Germany in 1915, and Hanna Henning, who directed numerous films between 1911 and 1924, both formed their own film companies, although very little is known about the work of either, and the majority of their films are lost. It is almost certain that Reiniger’s perception of film directing as inaccessible to her as a young woman was shaped by her formative experience of cinema-going; she began compiling notes towards a book, which was never realized, based on her memories of the development of film and cinema in Berlin during the years

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leading up to the release of Wiene’s Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari in 1920. In her draft she reflects on the impact of seeing the early work of Wegener, along with trick and fairy films, but she makes no mention of any films directed by women. Ibid., 5. Eisenstein, Sergei (1926), ‘Béla Forgets the Scissors’, reproduced in Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds), The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents, 145, London, 1988. Moritz, W., ‘Some Critical Perspectives on Lotte Reiniger’, 15. Reiniger, L., ‘Scissors Make Films’, 13.

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Catherine Grant – Returning to Riddles

Reflecting on the 1977 film Riddles of the Sphinx in 2013, Laura Mulvey explains how she and Peter Wollen imagined it as a ‘theory film’.1 This might seem like a rather dry description, indicating a film to be endured rather than enjoyed. However, Riddles of the Sphinx (hereafter referred to as Riddles) is a film that utilizes the riddle of its title to draw viewers in, encouraging them to join in the numerous dialogues that take place across the film: dialogues with psychoanalytic models of subjectivity, modernist traditions of poetry, dreamwork, women’s oppression and the mother-daughter relationship. This complex, feature-length experimental film highlights its own construction with a structure that refuses linear narrative. Like a riddle, it has no clear climax or resolution. Seven numbered sections draw on numerous filmic and textual strategies, which, flanked by three shorter sections, embed at its centre a fictional story of a woman’s struggle to find her identity through motherhood, work and friendship. Made in the wake of second-wave feminist activism and theorizing, as well as the development of a ‘counter-cinema’, Riddles remains a rich resource for continuing questions about feminist politics, communities and artistic practice in the present day. The film invites the viewer into a series of relationships that challenge conventional notions of cinematic viewing, and foregrounds relationships between women. To explore how these temporally disruptive relationships continue beyond the film’s reception in 1977, I will draw on writings and interviews by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. Their collaboration undoes the assumption that feminist film-makers are always women, and underlines the dialogue between men and women during this period.2 In this article, I concentrate on Mulvey’s presence in Riddles, but the film explores their shared interests in how to represent issues around motherhood and childhood,

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channelled through their investment in avant-garde forms of film-making and in psychoanalysis.3 The joint authorship of the film and the conversations that contributed to its making are reflected in its form and address, as the viewer is encouraged to continue the dialogue and questioning begun in the film. Extending this focus on collaboration, I will draw comparisons between Riddles and a collaborative video entitled Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema made by Mulvey and the younger film-maker Emma Hedditch in 2007. Their rarely seen work can also be seen as a ‘theory film’, for its performance of Mulvey’s famous manifesto-essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975).4 Rather than seeing the political questions and experimental structures found in Riddles as relegated to history, I argue that both ‘theory films’ invite the viewer to take part in a questioning that continues in the present. In my return to Riddles, my own experience of viewing the film over thirty years after its release will complement the rich body of feminist writing on the film, which has previously focused primarily on issues of motherhood and psychoanalysis. Throughout Riddles, the figure of the Sphinx stands in for an alternative imaginary that is not structured around the patriarchal law, with the interweaving of images, memories and quotations producing a film that is evocative rather than didactic. As Mulvey tells us, the voice of the Sphinx that is heard throughout the film is a ‘voice off ’ rather than a ‘voice over’, as the Sphinx occupies a space outside of the city in the story of Oedipus, signifying the suppressed within patriarchal culture.5 The Sphinx is imagined as a female voice that resists patriarchy by inviting questioning, a learning that is politicized but open-ended. At the end of ‘Louise’s story told in thirteen shots’ the ‘voice off ’ becomes the voice of Louise’s daughter in the future, bringing together the Sphinx from the ancient past, the interior monologue of Louise and the daughter who is pictured in the film as a child but is now speaking as an adult from a moment in time that is beyond the film’s own making. This perspective is important when watching the film in the 2000s, as we inhabit the future proposed by the voice of the daughter.

A theory film Mulvey’s comments that, ‘Peter and I wanted to develop what we thought of as “theory films” ’, draws on Wollen’s response in an interview about their previous

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film Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974).6 Wollen had replied to the contention that their film required ‘an enormous amount of work’, with a discussion of different levels of political film, insisting that ‘just as when people read a book they are prepared to do further reading or they are prepared to encounter difficulties, so they should in a film’.7 His insistence is also related to the close links between film-making and theoretical writing, with Mulvey explaining how Riddles developed out of thinking around her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ and Wollen’s ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’ (1975).8 She explains how both the ‘collective perception that images of women were a political issue and site of struggle’ and the desire to ‘think practically about the possibility of an intellectual or theoretical cinema’ drove their films.9 Both Mulvey and Wollen were ardent cinephiles as well as theorists, and so their approach to film-making was fuelled by their desire to imagine a new form of cinema that would, in Wollen’s words, ‘struggle against the fantasies, ideologies and aesthetic devices of one cinema with its own antagonistic fantasies, ideologies and aesthetic devices’.10 Mulvey explains how ‘We were interested in trying to make a movie in which form and structure were clearly visible but which would also have a space for feeling and emotion.’11

Opening pages Riddles begins with the pages of a French film magazine (Midi-Minuit Fantastique) being turned, with the heading ‘Le Mythe de la femme’ opening the sequence, followed by numerous images and articles on witches, vampires, sirens and other hybrid temptresses from film and popular culture. Over these pages the introductory panels for the film flash up: first the title, then a quote from Gertrude Stein that indicates the posing of form as much as content that will follow, the list of section headings, including the title to the section that has just been seen: ‘Opening pages’ (Figure 2.1). Already the interweaving of research, history and fantasy that characterizes the rest of the film has been staged: the pages of the magazine prefigure the intercutting of historic images of the Sphinx with a text on her significance in popular mythology in the film’s second section, ‘Laura speaking’ (Figure 2.2), as well as literally presenting an encounter with a book as being as one with watching the film.

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Figure 2.1 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, screen grab. Courtesy Laura Mulvey.

Figure 2.2 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, screen grab. Courtesy Laura Mulvey.

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In the film, the act of reading instigates a series of questions and conversations. Numerous scenes include reading, and I will discuss just a few: Mulvey reading a text about the Sphinx out loud, a lecture for the viewers; Louise reading from her friend/lover Maxine’s notebook, which includes sections from H.D.’s Tribute to Freud (1956) and a surreal dream sequence; and the ‘voice off ’, which appears to be Louise’s daughter Anna remembering a book passage in a fragmented fashion. The use of reading to activate a community has parallels with the reading practices Mulvey was involved with through the women’s movement, as well as the debates around avant-garde film taking place in film journals such as Screen.12 As Mandy Merck has pointed out, the early 1970s in Britain were a period in which ‘feminist theoretical inquiry was largely conducted in reading groups, conferences, occasional extramural classes, and a variety of women’s and Left publications’.13 Mulvey has also repeatedly discussed this in relation to both women’s liberation and film: ‘It is sometimes forgotten that the cultural context that produced the theoretical essays and the experimental films, often themselves experimenting with theory, was not academic.’14 This was because the fields of women’s studies and politicized film studies were nascent or non-existent inside the university, and Mulvey was not working within academia in the early 1970s.15 In Riddles, Mulvey and Wollen reflect their political interests in using film as a space for creating theory for learning, for taking pleasure in joining a community that attempts to address questions without necessarily knowing the answer.

Laura speaking/Laura listening In section two, ‘Laura speaking’, Mulvey starts by explaining how: ‘When we were planning the central section of this film, about a mother and child, we decided to use the voice of the Sphinx as an imaginary narrator’, stating that the Sphinx represents ‘a questioning voice, a voice asking a riddle’.16 The staging of this speech is central in creating a viewer who is involved in the process of questioning, who can identify the voice of the Sphinx as one which has been used to speak of patriarchal fears around femininity and motherhood, but also as a voice that can be used to speak of women’s experience under patriarchy

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through means of riddles and questions. Mulvey presents herself as an authorial voice, but through her presence in front of the camera, she is also the embodied voice of the film-maker, interrupting the narrative with a discussion of the thinking behind it. She has described how she is a performer in this sequence, playing the part of ‘Laura’ rather than simply being herself.17 By presenting Mulvey reading to the camera, the film-makers explicitly present the film’s premise as a proposal, resulting from their enquiry into the role of women in the present and returning to history and myth to explore the psychic, as well as political, foundations of women’s oppression. Mulvey has explained how the importance of psychoanalysis came about through her involvement in a feminist study group, the History Group, part of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop: ‘We were reading great works by great men that were relevant to understanding the oppression of women but in which we could also find blind spots, symptomatic of misunderstandings.’18 The film also enters into this questioning by refocusing attention on the Sphinx as a blind spot in Freudian models of subjectivity. As Mulvey sets out in her on-screen lecture, the Sphinx represents what has been forgotten in Freud’s invocation of Oedipus, imagined in the film through a questioning voice, a feminist voice of women’s experience. The scene of the woman film-maker, reading about the myth of the Sphinx, presents the dissonance many women feel when confronted with patriarchal fantasies around femininity. ‘Laura’ is not a mythic creature but a calm presenter of historical fantasy, fantasies that continue into the present. Filmed against a black background, she has on the table in front of her a microphone and tape recorder as well as ‘two books, a child’s mug and a pencil sharpener in the form of a small globe’.19 She is both lecturer and film-maker, with the props suggesting an ironic presentation of authority, an address to the viewer that is a starting point rather than a conclusion. In section six, ‘Laura listening’, Mulvey is again filmed at the table, writing in her notebook. She stops writing, and starts to play her earlier speech on the tape recorder (Figure  2.3). She listens along with the audience, the reprised sentences foregrounding the figure of the Sphinx as a patriarchal myth. ‘Laura listening’ is a section that appears to be a simple repetition of ‘Laura speaking’ when watched through once. But when viewed with the closer attention that is possible with the publication of the script in 1977 in Screen, as well as the

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Figure 2.3 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, screen grab. Courtesy Laura Mulvey.

recent release of the film on DVD in 2013, a more complicated picture emerges. Like a riddle that only appears when the listener or reader returns to it repeatedly, or the embedded significance of words and phrases in dreams, the tape recorder actually plays a sentence that is not part of the first speech, although it sounds as if it could be. Mulvey’s voice begins by saying ‘. . . into a social hieroglyphic. Later on we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret . . .’20 A footnote in the script reveals this fragment to be a quotation from Karl Marx’s Capital. Taken from the section ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof ’ by Marx, the quotation obliquely references the film-makers’ debt to a wider Marxist discourse in relation to feminism, something made explicit in the workplace politics discussed in ‘Louise’s story told in thirteen shots’. Here Marx’s term a ‘social hieroglyphic’ is made to speak about women’s oppression, transposing Marx’s theory to a feminist reading. As Mulvey listens to herself quoting this phrase, the scene embeds the historical theories of oppression that Mulvey and Wollen invoke throughout the film. After this quotation, Mulvey’s tape-recorded voice is

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Figure 2.4 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977, screen grab. Courtesy Laura Mulvey.

replaced by that of the Sphinx, the ‘voice off ’, who recounts an ambiguous dream sequence. This new dream, which also does not appear in the rest of the film, tells of ‘looking at an island in the glass’ that is surrounded by ‘a sea of blood’.21 We are told that ‘[t]he island was an echo of the past’.22

Her friendship with Maxine has intervened This dream-image, with its ambiguous return to the past, is echoed in the way the sections of Riddles weave relationships between historical moments alongside relationships between (primarily) women. This framework situates section four, ‘Louise’s story told in thirteen shots’, as a case study, with the past as both personal history and the weight of patriarchal formations. Rather than Louise being an individual to be analysed (either in a psychoanalytic or political sense), it is her interactions with others that form the narrative’s shifts, beginning with scenes showing her with her daughter and husband, through

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to her entering the all-female workforce at a telephone exchange, losing her job through her campaign for childcare, and her relationship with Maxine with whom she moves in. The ‘voice off ’ also moves through different subject positions, with early sequences appearing to articulate the inner thoughts of Louise when engaged in everyday acts of care with her small daughter Anna. In these early scenes the ‘voice off ’ takes the form of poems, in which phrases are repeated and modulated, such as the emphasis on time in the first shot of Louise preparing food for Anna in their kitchen: ‘Time to get ready. Time to come in. / Things to forget. Things to lose. / Meal time. Story time . . . No time to make amends. No time for tea. Time to worry. No time to hold. / Things to hold. Things past. / Meal time. Story time.’23 Like the performance poem by Faith Wilding, Waiting (1972), a woman’s interior voice is imagined through a repetitious list that attempts to represent the tedium and cyclical nature of much domestic labour. In Riddles, the dream-like lists of phrases are joined by the famous 360 degree pans that constitute each of the thirteen shots, a literal cycle that returns to the beginning at the end, instigating a mode of viewing that does not need to look for the scene’s climax, and emphasizes the fragmented view that the camera captures on its way round. Similarly, Wollen and Mulvey stage the scenes of Riddles so that the viewer is made aware of the process of the film’s writing, which opens up various questions and chains of association. In the film, political or theoretical analysis cannot be disassociated from psychoanalysis, or what Mulvey terms ‘a space for feeling and emotion’.24 In a later scene, Louise’s interior monologue is returned to, and opened up, through reading and discussion, as she reads from Maxine’s notebook. The shared discussion of Maxine’s dreams and notes from H.D’s Tribute to Freud form a link between the feminist use of consciousness-raising and psychoanalysis as a technique to express a sense of self that is in dialogue with, but not defined by, Freudian structures.25 H.D. was a modernist writer whose use of history and psychoanalysis, alongside formal experimentation, was an important influence for Wollen and Mulvey. H.D.’s essay recounts her experience of being analysed by Freud, but rather than a faithful account of her experience, she utilizes writing to perform an act of analysis. Through Louise’s relationship with Maxine, her political consciousness grows, and their intimacy provides the space in which Louise finds the strength to create a sense of identity beyond that of wife and mother. First meeting

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Maxine as the nursery teacher for her daughter, Maxine presents an image of womanhood that is capable, in control and living independently. Although the nature of Louise and Maxine’s relationship is left ambiguously suspended between close friends and lovers, it is a catalyst for change. As one intertitle puts it ‘[Her] friendship with Maxine has intervened’ (Figure 2.4.). Both the Sphinx and Maxine are representations of womanhood that are not trapped by white heterosexual and bourgeois models of femininity, although the complex interracial dynamics and fantasies that the mythic figure and actual woman evoke are not explored. The subject positions of the Sphinx and Maxine are instructional for Louise, her daughter Anna and the viewer. Maxine’s identity as a black woman is not explicitly discussed in the film, but her strength and emblematic presence draw links with the figure of the Sphinx as an ‘othered’ feminine identity, with Louise’s position as a white, bourgeois mother brought more sharply into focus through the comparison between the two. Their questioning of the role of women could be seen to be doing some of the work bell hooks proposes in her famous essay ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’. hooks’s essay critiques feminist film theory for the lack of discourse on race, and explores what it means to be a black female spectator, contending that this means to ‘participate in a broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels’.26 Maxine is a less realized character than Louise, but her presence both as Louise’s guide to finding a more feminist life, and the erotic relationship between the women that is implied in the film, particularly through the memory of the daughter Anna, is often left unremarked, and warrants further analysis.

And, in her mind, she flung herself through the air In the final scene of Louise’s story, she is filmed visiting the Egyptian rooms at the British Museum with her daughter Anna. As they hold hands and walk through this patriarchal, imperialist institution, the ‘voice off ’ reminisces about a dream she has read about in a book, a dream she tries to reconstruct but fails. For much of Louise’s story, the ‘voice off ’ appears to vocalize Louise’s thoughts. In this section, however, as the voice continues with memories from the speaker’s childhood, the viewer realizes that this voice is now speaking from

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the perspective of the daughter Anna, at a point in her adult future. When I watched this film for the first time, I realized with a shock that I was, in effect, living in the future that Anna speaks from. Born in 1975, I would have been two in 1977, the age of Anna in the film. Watching the film in 2010, aged 35, and with a young daughter myself, I related in a visceral manner to the questions around motherhood, work and how to create feminist communities and histories. Just like the cyclical links made between past and present in the film, the problem of feminist consciousness and agency looped forward from the time of the film to the time of my watching, joined by the ‘voice off ’ that spoke from this imagined future moment. Anna’s ‘voice off ’ again focuses on the process of reading and writing, as well as the memory of drawing acrobats, symbols of ‘bodies at work’.27 The ‘voice off ’ ends with her remembering another part of the passage she has read, about the voice of the Sphinx, a voice she realizes that she has heard all her life. Her monologue ends with the sentence: ‘The voice was so familiar yet so fatally easy to forget. She smiled and, in her mind, she flung herself through the air.’28 This described image, of imagining flying through the air, embodies the way in which the viewer is urged to use the film as a space of learning and of possibility: an engagement with the different material at hand that moves from facts to questions to possibilities in the mind’s eye. One way to imagine the Sphinx’s voice and its questions is that it instructs the characters in the film, and the viewer of the film, about the possibilities of feminism. For Louise, as for her daughter, and for us, the future as a potentially feminist future can be only be imagined if the past can be understood and learnt from, and its questions heard.

Mulvey’s Manifesto In 2007, another film draws upon Mulvey’s thinking, this time made in collaboration with the film-maker Emma Hedditch. Like myself, Hedditch draws on the unfinished questions from second-wave feminism that continue to resonate in the present, in an art practice particularly attuned to the creation of feminist and queer communities through various strategies of collaboration and sharing. As the future of Anna points to the continuing conversations between different historical moments in Riddles, the film Visual Pleasure and

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Narrative Cinema returns to Mulvey’s famous essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Thirty years after she reads a theoretical text in Riddles, Mulvey again performs to camera, filmed by Hedditch in her office at Birkbeck, University of London. Hedditch explained that initially she wanted to film Mulvey teaching the essay, but then discovered Mulvey never did this. She has described making the film as ‘a way of learning about the essay’.29 As in Riddles, the process of reading is paired with memories, as Mulvey stops between sections to give an explanation of the ideas and political context that informed her writing the essay in the early 1970s (Plate 1.3a). Her comments were intriguing to me, and began these thoughts about how films can imagine and instigate the process of learning just as much as theoretical texts or critical analysis. This short film reflects on, and brings to life, the ways in which Mulvey’s classic feminist text had come into being. In the film, Mulvey presents her essay as a necessary intervention in a moment in time, but what also becomes clear is that her strategies are still applicable to the present. As an artist, rather than a scholar, Hedditch worked with Mulvey to create a collage of textual fragments, memories and film clips through which the viewer hears and sees the original essay’s text, alongside its political and filmic inspirations. Hedditch ensures that this essay can be listened to and read afresh, as an act of creative research and film-making that brings Mulvey’s theory out of the textbook and onto the screen. Mulvey has commented on how the essay was designed to work visually on the page, something that Hedditch stages for the viewer (Plate 1.3b).30 Mulvey’s embodied commentary on her own words gives specificity to her ‘manifesto’, as Mandy Merck has so aptly called it, when, for example, the close-ups of the text draw the eye to phrases such as ‘Psychoanalysis is thus appropriated here as a political weapon’.31 The clips from Hollywood movies, chosen by Mulvey, form another layer of visualization, giving the viewer instances of the fetishistic and sadistic gaze upon the female body that Mulvey has been so famous in theorizing. Like the interplay of shots in Riddles, of filmic sirens in the opening pages of the magazine and Mulvey reading, here Mulvey’s straightforward address to the camera provides an implicit contrast to the plethora of seductive fantasies found in the clips. The echo of Mulvey’s earlier address to camera in Riddles provides an extra-filmic point of departure, so that the two films sit alongside each other as complementary discussions, with the later film focused

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on the essay that was begun before Riddles, and partly inspired it, again creating a circularity that refuses a linear notion of historical progression. Hedditch does not replace Mulvey as the film-maker now in control of discourse, but instead remains behind the camera, taking up the position of listener and interlocutor, just as in ‘Laura listening’ in the earlier film, or the ‘voice off ’ articulating Anna in the future (which is Hedditch’s present). The film collaboration Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is a very modest production compared to the BFI funded, feature-length Riddles. However, the later film articulates present desires to continue the political projects and questions embarked on in the earlier ‘theory film’. Rather than being an act of reverence or nostalgia, Hedditch’s collaboration with Mulvey stages the younger film-maker’s process of learning about ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, as well as her affinity with the historical and political situation from which it emerged. Although this might seem a small gesture, I would propose that this process of learning through close reading, listening and discussion is one that is key to feminist theorizing and practice across the decades. Hedditch does not try to update Mulvey’s work, but instead pays close attention to it, to hear and see its specificity, and keep it alive as an important statement within a particular moment in feminist history. Hedditch has been committed to keeping the history of feminist activism and art alive by reinvigorating collaborative modes of art practice as well as being one of the working group running the women’s film and video collection Cinenova, after its future seemed highly vulnerable in the early 2000s. Although they speak to each other from different historical moments, Mulvey does not take the position of all-knowing elder or exasperated pioneer. Instead, the film extends the feminist community imagined in Riddles and continues it in the present. The film also represents a wider practice that Mulvey has consistently and patiently adhered to following the success of her theoretical and film work in the 1970s, of making her words and memories available in interviews and essays, continually questioning and responding to their importance to the changing contemporary moment, something that Wollen has also been attentive to.32 This is the archive that this essay has drawn on, aware that in this practice of remembering and questioning, these essays, interviews and films continue to produce a space of learning about feminism and its relationship to identity, history, community and creative practice. For Mulvey in particular,

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her attention to speaking, writing and letting herself be read, and conversed with, like the voice of the Sphinx, shows that she is aware of how it is ‘so fatally easy to forget’ the questioning that took place during the 1970s. In spite of this, she still encourages us to fling ourselves through the air.

Acknowledgements This text was developed in conversation with a number of people. Thanks to: Lucy Reynolds, Ian Hunt, Nadja Milner-Larsen, Hilary Robinson, Flick Allen, Helena Reckitt and Jo Stockham. The work of ‘the other Catherine Grant’ at Birkbeck, University of London has been a fantastic resource, with the bibliography referring to her work as Catherine Grant (b. 1964) and my own scholarship as Catherine Grant (b. 1975). And finally, thanks to Laura Mulvey and Emma Hedditch for their support of this research.

Notes 1 Mulvey, Laura (2013), ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’, essay in Riddles of the Sphinx DVD booklet, 11, London: BFI. 2 See Wilson, Siona (2015) Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, for more mixed gender collaborations during this period. Peter Wollen also contributed an essay ‘Thirteen Paragraphs’ to Mastai, Judith ed. (1997), Social Process/Collaborative Action: Mary Kelly 1970-1975, 25-31, Vancouver: Charles H. Scott Gallery, which gives more evidence of the intricate dialogue between artists and writers during this period. 3 See Wollen, Peter, ‘Thirteen Paragraphs’. 4 Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in (2009), Visual and Other Pleasures (second edition), 14–27, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 5 Mulvey, Laura and Peter Wollen (1977), ‘Riddles of the Sphinx: A Film by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’ (Script), Screen, 18 (2): 61–78; 61–2. 6 Mulvey, L. (2013), ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’, 11. 7 Wollen, Peter in Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, interviewed by Clare Johnston and Paul Willemen (1974), ‘Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons’, Screen, 15 (3):

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120–34; 131. See also Wollen in Friedman, Lester D. (Summer 1979), ‘An Interview with Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey on Riddles of the Sphinx’, Millennium Film Journal 4/5: 14–32. 8 Laura Mulvey interviewed by Scott MacDonald, November 1990, in (1992), A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 334. She looks at the importance of other essays by Wollen in her ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’ essay in the BFI DVD booklet. 9 Mulvey, L. (2013), ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’, 8. 10 Wollen, Peter (1972) ‘Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est’ (1982), in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies, 79–91; 91, London: Verso. 11 Mulvey interviewed by MacDonald, 334. So Mayer explores similar issues: ‘ “A narrative of what wishes”: Laura Mulvey’s and Peter Wollen’s adventures in the essay film’, Riddles of the Sphinx DVD booklet, 1–5. 12 See Wollen, Peter (2002), ‘Knight’s Move’, Public 25: 54–67. Available at http://public.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/public/article/view/30199/27735 (accessed 24 April 2016) and Mulvey, L. (2013), ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’. Both Mulvey and Wollen discuss this context in the numerous interviews cited here. 13 Merck, Mandy (2007), ‘Mulvey’s Manifesto’, Camera Obscura 66, 22(3): 1–21; 3. 14 Mulvey, Laura (2015), ‘Introduction: 1970s Feminist Film Theory and the Obsolescent Object’, in L. Mulvey and A. Backman Rogers (eds.) Feminisms Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, 17–26; 17, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. There is a very detailed video interview with Mulvey that also covers this historical context: Catherine Grant (b. 1964), ‘Fieldnotes: Laura Mulvey interviewed by Catherine Grant’, The Society for Cinema and Media Studies: Fieldnotes, University of Sussex, Brighton, 13 October 2015. Available at https://vimeo.com/151814726 (accessed 22 April 2016). 15 See Wilson, S. Art Labor Sex Politics for more on the British context. 16 Mulvey, Laura and Peter Wollen (1977), ‘Riddles of the Sphinx: A Film by Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’ (Script), Screen, 18 (2), 61–78; 61–2. 17 Mulvey, Laura. Video interview on Riddles of the Sphinx DVD. 18 Mulvey, L., ‘Introduction to second edition’, Visual and Other Pleasures, p. xv. For more information on the History Group see Nixon, Mignon (June 2015), ‘ “Why Freud?” asked the Shrew: Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Post-Partum Document, and the History Group’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 20 (2): 131–40. https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2015.2 (accessed 1 July 2016). 19 Mulvey and Wollen, ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’ (Script), 61. 20 Mulvey and Wollen, ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’ (Script), 77. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid.

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Ibid., 63–4. Mulvey interviewed by MacDonald, 334. H.D. (1956), Tribute to Freud, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985. hooks, bell (1992), ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, in Black Looks: Race and Representation, 115–31; 128, Boston: South End Press. 27 Mulvey and Wollen, ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’ (Script), 76. 28 Ibid. 29 Emma Hedditch, discussion after screening of Riddles of the Sphinx at Goldsmiths, University of London, 31 March 2010. I discuss this film and Hedditch’s comments in (2011), ‘Fans of Feminism: re-writing histories of second-wave feminism in contemporary art’, Oxford Art Journal, 34 (2): 265–86. 30 Mulvey, in ‘Fieldnotes: Laura Mulvey interviewed by Catherine Grant’. 31 Merck, ‘Mulvey’s Manifesto’. 32 See particularly, Wollen, ‘Knight’s Move’.

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So Mayer – ‘Being a together woman is a bitch’: An ‘African American woman’s film’ genealogy of Julie Dash’s Four Women (1975)1

‘Being a together woman is a bitch’, Toni Cade Bambara has Marcy Johnson tell her sisters in her 1972 short story ‘The Johnson Girls’.2 In just seven minutes, Julie Dash’s experimental choreocinematic short Four Women, made three years later, expresses the multi-dimensionality Bambara narrates: the complex struggle to negotiate racist stereotypes; the necessity of code-switching within a racist culture; the imperative of internal decolonization; all while refusing to adhere to a European Enlightenment concept of the stable, unitary self. Twenty years later, Bambara would contribute to the book documenting Dash’s first feature: Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film; the persistent connective tissue between their work being their participation in African American womanism, the powerful theoretical, practical and aesthetic counter-current that challenged the dominant whiteness of second-wave American feminism.3 ‘Being a together woman’, for Dash – as for Bambara – is a racialized mode of being and creating as much as a gendered mode, what Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify, the year before Daughters of the Dust was released, as ‘intersectional feminism’.4 As Clyde Taylor observes, the key to Dash’s films is exactly this intersection, whose historical formation her career traces: her observation and creation of African American women ‘having an existence for themselves’, echoing Nikki Giovanni’s argument that Black women ‘are . . . the only group that derives its identity from itself ’.5 The depiction of such an existence remains vanishingly rare for Black women in Euro-American screen media, and when it does appear, it still does so through reference to Dash’s work as the definitive touchstone of self-defining Black womanhood, as Miriam Bale argues in her

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review of Beyoncé Carter-Knowles’s album and supporting feature film Lemonade (2016).6 ‘There’s something witchy about this gathering of women’, notes Bale, drawing out the uncanny power of Beyoncé’s invocation of Dash, which depends itself on Dash’s invocation of African American women, across times and archetypes. Dash is Four Women’s auteurial presence, already exhibiting her signature ‘ritual of dedication to truths untold [through . . .] tak[ing] flesh’.7 Yet from the title onwards, the film announces both its multiplicity and its togetherness, as a collaboration of (at least) four women whose intersections offer an intersectional feminist genealogy. Invoking Nina Simone’s 1966 song of the same title, it showcases the skill of African American dancer and choreographer Linda Martina Young, and looks back to the under-represented history of African American women in the avant-garde. Thus, the film both articulates and advocates for collaboration in the moment between Black women, as realized through historical continuities, and vice versa, challenging the persistent whiteness of American feminisms and their historicization. Ayanna Dozier, in the only scholarly article dedicated to Dash’s short film, notes that she: ‘turn[s] to Black feminist philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s 1992 critique of (white) film criticism, ‘Re-thinking “Aesthetics”: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice’, to argue that Black women’s experimental cinema is a heterogeneous praxis that delinks individuals from . . . Eurocentric knowledge systems to engage with epistemic disobedience using film’s form in dialogue with their embodiment and culture.’8 Dozier notes that Black women’s ‘film practices are informed by Black feminism’s expansive and rich ideology on the corporeal’, so that Dash’s aesthetics and affect are both rooted in bodily labour.9 Following Dozier’s critical reframing of the film, I investigate and contextualize the corporealities that (in)form the film, placing them in an aesthetic and affective genealogy of Black womanisms/feminisms. Shot in colour on 16mm, Dash’s second film is a choreopoem set to Simone’s song. Made the same year as the first music video, Dash’s film could be also read as a prescient vision of the significance that videos, often emphasizing narrative choreography, would come to have for R&B and hip-hop. Shot simply on a black box stage, the film could also be read as a performance documentary, as Janet K. Cutler suggests, with the cinematographic and editing choices determined by Young’s movement in response to Simone’s song that plays on

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the soundtrack.10 Lighting and framing are further shaped by Young’s changes of costume and hair design, which are shaped in their turn by Simone’s focus, in her lyrics, on the self-presentation of her ‘four women’ through skin shade, hair and bearing. According to Allyson Nadia Field, Dash devised the idea for Four Women while attending the American Film Institute in New York, but didn’t direct it until she moved to study Ethno-Communications at the University of California, Los Angeles, working within the group of black film-makers who became known as the L.A. Rebellion or Collective.11 As Clyde Taylor, who named the Rebellion, notes, in the early 1970s, ‘a group of UCLA film students were plotting to reframe the image of Black people in the world’, informed by faculty such as Taylor himself, Teshome Gabriel, and Elyseo Taylor, whose work made moving image resistance central to the African diaspora studies being formulated by Molefi Kete Asante at UCLA.12 The editors of the first book-length study of the Rebellion argue that ‘the label “L.A. Rebellion” reflects the assemblage of these artists as a particular, politically charged place and time in which they attempted to speak truth to power’.13 Ntongela Masilela notes that: ‘Moving from the East Coast to the West Coast, Dash was not deliberately aligning herself with a particular aesthetic ideology within the Los Angeles School, but rather, she ideally situated herself within its experimental environment of film language.’14 Dash’s film practice and language thus emerged within a specifically and highly politicized Black and Afrocentric environment. Yet Four Women remains invisible even within experimental film studies – including accounts of the feminist avant-garde – despite Dash winning the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award in 1993. David James notes an L.A. genealogy of dance films from Deren to Dash’s Four Women in a passing observation, but does not draw out the confluence of their work, or attest to the ways in which Dash’s choreocinematic focus hybridized the Africanist language of ritual and gesture of other L.A. Rebellion film-makers such as Barbara McCullough with the (white) New York avant-garde tradition of Deren and Shirley Clarke.15 For Cutler, writing specifically about Black women’s cinema, ‘ “invisibility” allows independently produced, alternative documentaries to remain remarkably unencumbered in their ability to challenge conventional media versions of reality, especially in areas like the representation of race.’16

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It could be argued that Four Women’s relative invisibility allowed Dash to develop the film language that Bambara describes, with reference to Daughters of the Dust (1991), as ‘the maturation of the L.A. Rebellion agenda’.17 Although few theorists have related Dash’s short to her signal work, the story of three generations of a Gullah family preparing to leave the island where they have made their home post-slavery, it could be argued that the many, and multi-faceted, African American women of Daughters’ family ensemble – Nana Peazant, Yellow Mary and Trula, Viola, Eula – are latent in the characters choreographed and danced by Young in Four Women. As their names suggest, in some ways they are developments of the archetypes Simone narrates in her lyrics, and Young dances in Four Women: Nana Peazant, ‘strong enough to take the pain’, is a corollary for the song’s Aunt Sarah; Yellow Mary, who has left Ibo Landing to work for mainland whites, encompasses Simone’s Saffronia and Sweet Thing; and Eula, the rape survivor, expresses and heals the bitterness espoused by Simone’s Peaches. From Simone’s song, Dash develops what Bambara calls Daughters’ ‘woman validation ceremony’, in which the daughters of Ibo Landing can find unison.18 That ceremony is rooted in the experimental and embodied language Dash found through her previous film, in face-to-face collaboration with dancer/choreographer Young, and ancestral collaboration with singer/songwriter Simone and film-maker Deren. Historically, Simone is the first ancestor invoked, through the song that appeared on Wild is the Wind (1966), the only self-authored song Simone included on the album. It is considered her second major protest song after ‘Mississippi Goddam’ (1964), and – like the subsequent ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’ (1969) – was inspired by her friendship with playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who had worked with W.E.B. DuBois in her youth and introduced Simone to Black activism in New York. ‘Although Lorraine was a girlfriend’, Simone wrote, ‘we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk’.19 It’s a witty comment that indicates the necessary political radicalism of Black women that would be later expressed in the 1977 statement made by the Afrocentrist Black feminists known as the Combahee River Collective, one of the most successful and influential statements of Marxist feminism.20 Malick Gaines notes that, from this intellectual companionship with Hansberry, Simone derived her theory of the ‘together

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woman’, what he calls a ‘quadruple consciousness, a dexterous deployment of authorship, presence, and voice that exceeded the prohibitions of race and gender while performing those terms . . . a performance position that marshals paradoxical and simultaneous differences to present a provisional form of subjectivity’.21 Simone’s genius – being herself an historical figure, and containing multiple histories by expressing them in her range of musical styles – has given her selfauthored songs a particularly vivid life beyond her recordings and performances. As Marcyliena Morgan notes in her reading of Talib Kweli’s revisioning ‘For Women’ (2000), Simone’s song has persisted into the twenty-first century through its use in urban music and dance programmes: designed to teach artistic skill and cultural knowledge, as well as to teach young women to know ‘their worth’ . . . [which] often occurs with the interpretation and performance of Nina Simone’s seminal ‘Four Women’ . . . [which] is particularly significant because it is presented in the first person, as though it is Simone’s life. In this sense Simone is all four women.22

Performance, at once polysemic and invocatory, allows Simone to square DuBois’ ‘double consciousness’ and find a precarious self-expression that Patricia Hill Collins calls ‘the power of self-definition . . . offer[ing] to the listener, not sadness and remorse, but an anger that leads to action’, by which Black feminists resist the erasure of intersectional oppression.23 For Gaines, ‘in “Four Women,” the place of affect is not located in an individual consciousness, but emerges from the tensions between each of these women, the specific audience, and Simone’s performing body’.24 Ruth Feldstein notes that some rare critics at the time articulated this shifting, multiple consciousness: ‘According to a critic in Down Beat, “Four Women” got better over time because Simone was “more fully into the characters . . . Nina is Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet Thing, Peaches and a lot of other people when she chooses to be. She is not only history, she contains it”.’25 Daphne A. Brooks argues that, therefore, ‘Simone’s performance [generates] the kind of “massive itinerancy” that Fred Moten traces, the kind of “fugitivity” that announces itself in shifting subject positions.’26 Behind Moten’s and Brooks’s thinking on the complexity of a multiple subjectivity lies the Africanist principle of ubuntu, the Bantu principle of communitarian interconnection, whereby to be human is to be first and foremost connected to and responsible

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for others, both the living and ancestors and descendants, as theorized as a philosophical and legal principle by Mogobe B. Ramose.27 Africanist and Afrocentric theories (and the debate between them) formed the framework of the curriculum at UCLA, and Masilela argues that, in Dash’s work, ‘Africa is not only a historical construct for political reference and import but also a metaphorical construct of ontological inquiry and cultural identification’ palpable in her use of Simone’s song to restore and reconnect African and African diaspora history across the break of slavery, through the embodiment of all four women in a single dancer.28 Dancer/choreographer Linda Martina Young, the third woman creating the film, reflects on her long-term critical thinking about African American culture in her recent PhD, with a chapter on Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987). This explores the disruptions perpetuated by slavery, and the possibility of a womanist genealogical continuity across them.29 She opens the dissertation with a reference that sets her project within an Africanist frame that mirrors the discourses about dance and ritual that were being shaped at UCLA in the 1970s: Alphonse Tiérou, an African dance specialist and a historian of the Ouenon people of the Ivory Coast, suggests that ‘the evolution of man is symbolized by a spiral, [a] snail’s shell . . .’ The sense of the round in Tiérou’s description is a ‘spiral’. The relationship is circular. All things are made in the image of a round in a moving dynamic.30

Young intimates a shared sense of meaning with Dash about dance and the circle, and there is a close harmony between the choreography and the film’s rhythms, which can be read in the choreographic sequence itself. Dozier observes that the film does not just record Young’s choreography, but mobilizes it as a Black feminist genealogical trace of resistance and survival, ‘tap[ping] into the rich reservoir of Black expressive culture to evoke the corporeal dynamic that Black women historically have had in using their bodies as a mode of communication’.31 Although Young’s choreography draws freely on a wide range of dance languages, her initial crouching stance and hipled movement refer strongly to African dance, in which ‘dancers danced in a circle, and individuals performed solos in the center before returning to the surrounding circle of community. The circle helped to keep everybody involved,

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Figure 3.1 Julie Dash, Four Women, 1975. Courtesy Julie Dash.

active, and interdependent’, expressing ubuntu in motion.32 As Cutler observes, the ‘performance aspect of Dash’s narrative and documentary work is linked to her interest in cultural tradition, especially in collective experience; in her films, performance often expresses group experience rather than personal or individual subjectivity’.33 As Dash describes in her conversation with bell hooks about Daughters of the Dust, specific embodied memories of cultural traditions handed down through an African diaspora female genealogy – associated, in the film, with Nana Peazant – are the primary motivation for her narrative and aesthetic practices.34 Young’s invocation of African dance, coupled with Dash’s introductory use of African song from the Ethnomusic Library at UCLA, indicates that we should read Young’s soloist as performing in the centre of a circle of dancers, musicians and audience, past, present and future, always off-camera; her dance invokes their presence, transhistorically. Kariamu Welsh Asante refers to this as one of the seven aspects of African dance, calling it ‘dimensionality’: ‘ “something extra that is present in harmony with the music, dance, or sculpture”. It is the dimension audience members create as they reverberate with the dancers and musicians in the moment of performance’, according to

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Gena Dagel Caponi.35 Manifesting what Alessandra Raengo terms ‘black expansiveness’, Young ‘empower[s her] body to overcome its own limitations, even when various racial and gender-specific forms of oppression coalesce around it . . . [She] acts out and through the various characters described’, entering the space/time ritual in which connections and continuities are summoned.36 The film opens with a figure who is suggestively like the Unborn Child of Daughters: Young is wrapped in a gauzy cloth, and initially crouched and pulsing in a foetal position. As an African song plays, Young stands up into a wide-legged crouch, then springs to arabesque, bringing together the earthy, expansive shapes of African dance with the upthrust linearity of ballet. Although the song’s trills are interrupted by the crack of a bullwhip, the camera holds on a long shot of Young, her whole, tall body in the frame as it struggles under the gauze. Against water and whip sounds that evoke the experiences of the Africans kidnapped and shipped to America, Young is shown in a series of superimposed shots, stretching through different floor-based positions, connected to the earth and/or fallen.37 There’s a cut to black before Simone’s song begins, then a medium close-up for the first time brings us close to Young’s expressive face, followed by a long shot showing her costume, a long skirt and shawl in earth colours. Her repeated gesture for Aunt Sarah is a self-hugging stance with her head cast back, conveying trauma and healing at once. It fits with Simone’s use, on the word ‘pain’, of what Melanie Bratcher identifies as a traditional African modality called Ciret (downward bending notes). ‘The Ciret motion energetically and actively points to a historical dimensionality. The Ciret also points to a stable and mindful epic memory of Black womanhood. That memory of the suffering that Black women experience from skin colour stereotypes has run, and still runs, deep’.38 That is immediately contrasted by Saffronia, whose poses are sideon to the camera, almost hieroglyphic, as elegant and stylized as her black cloche with its net half-veil. Saffronia’s backbend, when Simone sings that the white man ‘forced her mother late one night’, is fierce and dynamic, again containing a duality: of the rape, and of resistance to it. But Young’s sharper movements for Saffronia’s verse become fragmented in her choreography for Sweet Thing. The sequence opening with a close-up of her hands, then of one pointed foot, with an ankle bracelet dangling. When Dash cuts to a level, frontal shot, Young has her back to the camera as she

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shakes her hips (as Simone describes). In a high angle shot, Young once again uses the backward tilt of her head, this time running her fingers sensually through her hair, which is loose in a natural way. Peaches, by stark contrast, has her hair in fine cornrows, gathered in a complex knot at the back of her head. Peaches’s section has the most complex camerawork and editing, with gestures seen from multiple angles. There’s a dynamic exchange between low angles and high angles, particularly in a sequence where Peaches appears to punch down into the camera lens positioned by her knee. When the same angle observes her a few shots later (as Simone proclaims she’s ‘awful bitter these days’), images of her other selves are superimposed, reinforcing their unison. Before Simone sings the final word, a sustained call of the name ‘Peaches’, there is a high angled shot from above Young as she tilts her head up and back, but it cuts just before her eyes meet the camera. Instead, the declaration of ‘Peaches’ accompanies a long shot of Young’s wild leaps, which – for the first time – are accompanied by the shadows she casts on the walls of the performance space. The final, superimposed shots of a powerful side extension, seen from different angles and distances, mirror the drama of Simone’s final piano flourishes, and are also reminiscent of one of the core works of choreographic cinema: Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945), which Cutler suggests as the origin point of the ‘performance documentaries’ among which she numbers Four Women.39 As Hannah Durkin notes, Study was defined by the collaborative development of choreographer and dancer Talley Beatty’s physical language of arabesque extensions and leaps in mutual relation to Deren’s use of straight cuts between shots in different locations. Durkin argues that the ‘film should thus be read as a collaborative, cross-cultural celebration of black cultural practices and artistry that combines a visual interpretation of Caribbean ritual form with Beatty’s balletic technique and breaks down racialized-looking relationships by implicating the viewer in the psychological intensity and virtuosity of his dance’.40 Deren met Beatty through Katherine Dunham, the African American choreographer and dancer – one of the first to undertake ethnographic research into the survival of African dance in the Americas – who gave Deren her first job in the arts, as the Dunham company secretary. Despite their highly influential working relationship – Deren also cast Dunham company dancer Rita Christiani in Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)

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– Durkin notes that: ‘Analyses of the impact of Dunham’s work . . . on Deren’s films [has] so far been extremely limited.’41 Following Durkin’s lead would place Dunham at the root of avant-garde American cinema, reshaping the conventional narrative of medium-specific, masculinist anxiety of influence. Dunham’s presence is palpable in Dash’s film through her work with Young as well as her use of the genre founded by Deren, proposing not only a revisionist history of African American female representation on screen, but a radical reconceptualization of the history of avant-garde film that would not only centre feminist genealogy, but demand that it be intersectional. That is literally embodied in Young’s role in the film, as inheritor of Dunham’s legacy. Beatty was still a prominent presence in African American dance in the 1970s, collaborating on restagings of Dunham’s work, and choreographing Your Arms Too Short to Box with God (Vinnette Carroll, 1975) in 1980, with Young in the chorus.42 Dunham and Deren are, together, the fourth woman in Dash’s Four Women, not least as it brings together the fragmented selves Deren depicts in Meshes of the Afternoon (1942), wherein she also dances four instances of herself. Tayana Hardin notes Dunham’s ‘assertion of the generative, reproductive quality of black dance and its capacity to narrate – to conjure and restore previous acts through story – and subsequently become both the one and the many’, seen in Deren’s dance work as in Dash’s.43 Dash rewrites the script through the historical – call it quadruple or Ciret or together – consciousness of Black women. In doing so through Africanist choreography, Dash reconnects experimental feminist cinema to its roots in Dunham’s work. She thus invokes what Toni Morrison calls ‘the presence of an ancestor . . . timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom’.44 Although Lucy Bolton’s landmark study Film and Female Consciousness established the centrality of an Irigarayan feminist genealogy in female-helmed fiction feature films such as Jane Campion’s Deren-influenced In the Cut (2003), Dash’s work – contextualized within Africanist and Afrocentric practices – suggests a specific Black expertise in constructing such genealogies as resistance, and within traditions of ancestor-led spiritual practice, from which feminist practices, including feminist film studies, could learn.45 ‘Being a together woman is a bitch’ but it is also a tradition of spiritual resistance: continuing an African American womanist genealogy celebrates the idea that black women exist and persist across time, in connection to one

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another. Four Women is a glimpse of the women Dash observed in Afrofuturist novelist Octavia Butler’s work, ‘female characters . . . who are escaping and transforming . . . taking on new bodies [in . . .] a spiritual dimension’.46 Four Women traced the future of Dash’s film-making, which continues to represent the future of African American women’s film, but it also escapes from and transforms the history of experimental cinema, giving it a new body: Black, female, multiple and dancing ubuntu with the presence of an ancestor.

Acknowledgements With thanks to Irene Revell of Cinenova for distributing Four Women in the UK and making it possible for me to see the film; thanks also to Grace BarberPlentie and Maria Cabrera of Reel Good Film Club, for important conversations about the ongoing legacy of Black womanist cinema.

Notes 1 I use Black, black, and African American at different points throughout the essay, acknowledging the shifting signification of the term(s) over fifty years, between 1966, when Nina Simone wrote ‘Four Women’ and 2016, when Beyoncé directed Lemonade. Dash refers to Daughters of the Dust as specifically an ‘African American woman’s film’, which highlights the African(ist) Gullah Geechee culture of the characters. 2 Bambara, Toni Cade (1972), ‘The Johnson Girls’, in Bambara, Toni Cade. (1984) Gorilla, My Love, 169, Women’s Press. 3 Bambara, Toni Cade (1992), ‘Preface’, in Dash, Julie, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film, xi–xvi, New Press. 4 Crenshaw, Kimberlé (July 1991), ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review 43: 1241–99. 5 Taylor, Clyde (1986), ‘The L.A. Rebellion: new spirit in American film’, Black Film Review 2 (2): 29; Giovanni, Nikki (1971), Gemini, 144, Penguin. 6 Bale, Miriam, ‘Critic’s notebook: Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” is a revolutionary work of black feminism’, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 April 2016, available online, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/critics-notebook-beyonces-lemonadeis-887240.

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7 Taylor (2015), ‘Once upon a time in the west . . . L.A. Rebellion’, in Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart (eds), L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, xxi, University of California Press. 8 Dozier, Ayanna (2017), ‘No happy returns: aesthetics, labor, and affect in Julie Dash’s experimental short film, Four Women (1975)’, Feminist Media Studies, 17 (4): 617, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2017.1326561; citing Wynter, Sylvia (1992), ‘Re-thinking “Aesthetics”: Notes Towards a Deciphering Practice’, in Mbye B. Cham (ed.), Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, 237–79, Africa World Press. 9 Dozier, A., ‘No happy returns’, 617. 10 Cutler, Janet K. (1999),‘Rewritten on film: documenting the artist’, in Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet K. Cutler (eds), Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, 198, Indiana University Press. 11 Field, Allyson Nadia (2015), ‘Rebellious unlearning: UCLA project one films (1967–1978)’, in Field, Horak and Stewart (eds), L.A. Rebellion, 109. 12 Taylor, ‘Once upon a time’, xiii. 13 Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, (2015), ‘Emancipating the image: the L.A. Rebellion of Black filmmakers’, in Field, Horak and Stewart (eds), L.A. Rebellion, 2. 14 Masilela, Ntongela (1998), ‘Women directors of the Los Angeles School’, in Jacqueline Bobo (ed.), Black Women Film and Video Artists, 32, Routledge. 15 James, David (2005), The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, 249, University of California Press. 16 Cutler, ‘Rewritten on film’, 202. 17 Bambara (1993), ‘Reading the signs, empowering the eye: Daughters of the Dust and the black independent cinema movement’, in Manthia Diawara (ed.), Black American Cinema, 122, Routledge. 18 Bambara, ‘Preface’, xv–xvi. 19 Simone, Nina, with Stephen Cleary (1991), I Put A Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone, 87, Pantheon Books. 20 Originally published in 1978 as a pamphlet, the statement was reprinted in Smith, Barbara (ed.) (1983), Home Girls, A Black Feminist Anthology, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, and is available online at http://circuitous.org/scraps/ combahee.html. For more on the influence of the Combahee River Collective, see Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta (ed.) (2017), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, Haymarket Books. 21 Gaines, Malik (2013), ‘The quadruple-consciousness of Nina Simone’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 23 (2): 249, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 0740770X.2013.825428.

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22 Marcyliena, Morgan (2009), The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground, 140, Duke University Press. 23 Collins, Patricia Hill (1990), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 105, Unwin Hyman. 24 Gaines, ‘The quadruple-consciousness’, 259. 25 Feldstein, Ruth (2013), How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement, 109, Oxford University Press, quoting Bill McLarney, ‘Caught in the act’, Down Beat, 23, 23 January 1969:34–5. 26 Brooks, Daphne A. (2011), ‘Nina Simone’s triple play’, Callaloo, 34 (1):181, quoting Fred Moten (2003), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, 202, University of Minnesota Press. 27 Ramose, Mogobe B. (1999), African Philosophy Through Ubuntu, Mond Books. 28 Masilela, Ntongela (1998), ‘Women directors of the Los Angeles School’, in Jacqueline Bobo (ed.), Black Women Film and Video Artists, 23, Routledge. 29 Young, Linda Martina (2007), Where Grace May Pass: A Poetics of the Body, 166, PhD dissertation, unpublished, Pacifica Graduate Institute. 30 Ibid.: 2, quoting Alphonse, Tiérou (2013), Dooplé: The Eternal Law of African Dance, 33, Routledge. 31 Dozier, ‘No happy returns’, 625. 32 Caponi, Gena Dagel (1999), ‘Introduction: the case for an African American aesthetic’, in Gena Dagel Caponi (ed.), Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin’ & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture, 25, University of Massachusetts Press. 33 Cutler, ‘Rewritten on film’, 199. 34 bell hooks and Julie Dash (1992), ‘Dialogue Between bell hooks and Julie Dash, April 26, 1992’, in Dash, Julie, Daughters of the Dust, 40–3. 35 Caponi, ‘Introduction’, 25, quoting Kariamu Welsh Asante (1990), ‘Commonalities in African dance: an aesthetic foundation’, in Molefi Kete Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante (eds), African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity, 77, Africa World Press. 36 Raengo, Alessandra (2015), ‘Encountering the Rebellion: liquid blackness reflects on the expansive possibilities of the L.A. Rebellion films’, in Field, Horak and Stewart (eds), L.A. Rebellion, 299. 37 Masilela, ‘Women directors’, 31. 38 Bratcher, Melanie E. (2007), Words and Songs of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday and Nina Simone: Sound Motion, Blues Spirit, and African Memory, 121, Routledge. 39 Cutler, ‘Rewritten on film’, 198. 40 Durkin, Hannah (2013), ‘Cinematic “pas de deux”: the dialogue between Maya Deren’s experimental filmmaking and Talley Beatty’s black ballet dancer in “A Study in Choreography for Camera” (1945)’, Journal of American Studies, 47 (2): 386. 41 Durkin, ‘Cinematic “pas de deux” ’, 391.

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42 Emery, Lynne Fauley (1988), Black Dance: From 1619 to Today, 258, Dance Books; Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. (1993), A Century of Musicals in Black and White: An Encyclopaedia of Musical Stage Works By, About, or Involving African Americans, 386–87, ABC-CLIO. 43 Hardin, Tayana L. (2016), ‘Katherine Dunham’s Southland and the archival quality of Black dance’, The Black Scholar, 46 (1): 47, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 00064246.2015.1119635. 44 Morrison, Toni (2008), ‘Rootedness: the ancestor as foundation’, in Carolyn C. Denard (ed.), What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, 61–62, University Press of Mississippi. 45 Bolton, Lucy (2011), Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women, Palgrave Macmillan. For Deren’s influence on Campion, see Mayer, Sophia (2013), ‘If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution!: Tracing the Revolutions of Maya Deren’s Dance in Jane Campion’s In the Cut’, Screendance, 3: 22–37. 46 Dash, Julie. Interview with Octavia Butler, June 1995, available online, http:// juliedash.tv/2016/04/18/julie-dash-interviews-octavia-butler/.

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Lucia Aspesi – Film Esperienza. The work of Marinella Pirelli

Every beginning is the desire for and pleasure in an adventure; adventure understood as something to be discovered – through doing – and then because the purpose is not yet a project, nor is the project the artwork, despite what conceptualists think. So let’s look at what I’ve done, when there’s a lot or a little, because that’s my possible truth.1 Marinella Pirelli was a unique figure in the Italian art scene during the 1960s and 1970s. At the crossroads with the artistic experiences of Arte Povera and Arte Programmata, and moving between the different mediums of painting, drawing, film and light installation, she is one of the few Italian women artists who worked inside experimental film production. However, Pirelli never participated in the discourse connected to the creation of the Italian Film Cooperative (CCI),2 exploring instead a personal path that questioned the very intimate consciousness of an artist responding to the major cultural and societal changes happening in Italy at that time. As she explained: An artist shouldn’t say much, shouldn’t provide any explanations: the question you often hear is ‘what does that mean?’, ‘what’s its significance?’, even when the work in question is the most elementary still-life and provides no answer for the artist above and beyond the artwork itself. Expressing a theory is easier than making something – and the intention is partly made of desire. Thought is quicker than doing . . . and intuition is lightning speed. I understand the quick gestures of Pollock. And Faust. Freeze the moment. I can understand the choice to remain inside a language – to build in limits – but by nature the artist (and am I one?) . . . here, let’s say ‘given my nature,’ this is not possible.3

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After completing her studies in Literature and Philosophy at Padova University, in 1950 Pirelli settled in Rome, where she worked as an animator for the cartoon production house Filmeco. In 1953 she married Giovanni Pirelli, a significant figure in the political and cultural environment of Italy at that time. Her works, which touch on numerous themes connected to the body, the gaze and the cinema apparatus, came to a dramatic end in 1973, when her husband died in a tragic car accident. She then decided to completely change her life, leaving the urban environment of Rome and Milan to start a farm in the north of Italy. Her silence covered almost thirty years, during which time she decided to cut off all contact with the art scene, removing herself from the public sphere. It was only during the 1990s that Pirelli started to look back at her work, especially the years in which she was working with film and was concerned with the use of light in her practice. This led to her decision to show her works again through retrospective exhibitions and publications.

Invisibility Foreshadowing her later withdrawal from art, almost all of Pirelli’s cinematographic work interacts with different forms of invisibility, both within the work itself and within its reception. Most of her film-making remains still completely unknown, even though at that time she was familiar with the artistic scenes of Rome in the 1950s and Milan in the 1960s. Following her work as an animator, it was only at the beginning of the 1960s that she began experimenting with the potential of projected light as an installation form, while in the years before she was more interested in painting and drawing. During the 1960s she worked specifically on celluloid and explored the interaction between space/time/movement through the means of film projection, attracted by its ability to register different moments of luminosity. Through her attentive observation of Norman McLaren’s animation works, Pirelli began to research the aspects related to building movement and light transformations that lie at the foundation of the cinematic dispositif. In short films on 16mm such as Luce Movimento [Light Movement] (1967), images of light reflections and flashes are edited together with shots of flames, or in Nuovo Paradiso

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Figure 4.1 Marinella Pirelli, Appropriazione A propria azione Azione propria, 1973. Courtesy Archivio Marinella Pirelli, Varese.

[New Paradise] (1968-69) the projection becomes an interactive space because of the play of reflections of light and shadows on the screen surfaces. As these earlier film experiments show, her works often develop around the tension between the apparent objectivity of the film technology and the subjective experience it is connected with. This happens, for example, in the black and white film Appropriazione, A propria azione, Azione propria, Sole in mano [Appropriation, one’s own action, proper action, sun in hand] (1973) (Figure 4.1), in which an image of the film-maker’s hand superimposes itself playfully upon the horizon of a countryside landscape. In an almost infantile manner, Pirelli’s hand attempts to grab the sun, which has the appearance of a small, white ball within the frame. The work presents the viewer with the artist’s unfolding experience, in which every gesture of her hand is rendered as her unmediated perception of the present moment. Here, Pirelli used film performance as a way of testing her own fugitive presence, reflecting also on the subjective aspects that are part of everyday life – as in this case the simple act of staring at the sun.

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The centrality of the human body As Appropriazione, A propria azione, Azione propria, Sole in mano shows, Pirelli’s own body plays a central role in her work, often mediated through her use of the film image, words and drawings. In a manner that prefigures later developments of the 1970s in video and performance art, the films of Pirelli explore the repetition of an action, giving shape to a metaphorical journey that foregrounds performance and spontaneity in the form of a film diary that depicts life unfolding as a subjective and fragmented happening. This is clear in the film Narciso [Narcissus] (1966–1967), in which fragments of Marinella Pirelli’s private life are part of a broader reflection on her presence as a woman artist within the Italian cultural sphere in the 1960s. Another important change that took place during this period was Pirelli’s gradual abandonment of painting for film, and her consequential focus on subjects more closely related to subjective experiences. Up until that period Pirelli had been linked to artists she had known and grown up with since her childhood, such as Mario Mafai who, starting from the second half of the 1930s, abandoned references to reality in order to make room for pure chromatic textures. An encounter the artist had in 1965 with Carla Lonzi, founder of the group Rivolta Femminile, proved crucial for a number of different reasons. Lonzi was an emblematic figure in Italian feminism during the 1970s, and was also an important art critic in Italy’s cultural circles during the 1960s. The close relationship between Pirelli and Lonzi went beyond the artistic sphere and was based on their recognition of shared experiences and identification with their roles as women in Italian society. Pirelli affirms it as: ‘. . . a blend of affections, where affection is a mutual sensation: we had similar problems, sexual and conjugal frustrations, misunderstandings . . . all the things that later on were defined as the vindication of recognition of women’s autonomy . . . And Carla was able to find not only the words but also the natural behaviour.’4 The years that preceded the meeting between Pirelli and Lonzi can be traced back to the period of the ‘Italian economic miracle’5 (1950 to 1960), a time during which Italy, in the wake of the Second World War, experienced dramatic technological and economic development, which was already producing at the beginning of 1962, a slowdown in the growth of female employment and the

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beginning of the period of ‘golden housewives’.6 During these years, the model of a happy, modern, young and elegant woman spread from one side of the Atlantic to the other, broadcast in houses through television, cinema, picture stories and – in daily life – with the foundation of the first magazines destined for female audiences, for example Amica and Grazia. Italy’s economic miracle opened a new relation between women and the market, generating a vast sense of emptiness and frustration behind the illusory happiness of aesthetic pleasures. During these years a number of different Italian artists, among them Ketty La Rocca, initiated a deep, far-reaching investigation into the role of technological communication and the consumer dynamics for which new media such as television were being used. La Rocca employed language, collage and poetry to ironically highlight the mechanisms Italian women felt themselves the victims of. Other contemporaries delving into forms of experimental film-making included Pia Epremian – the only female member of the Italian Independent Cinema Cooperative – who realized a provocative intervention around the theme of body politics, together with the painter Gigliola Carretti, with the performance Dissolvimento [Dissolution] (1970), Although their piece could be seen as a feminist manifesto about transgressing the boundaries of gendered spaces, others such as Rosa Foschi with her film Amour du Cinema (1968), made with pop art inspired collages from photographic portraits of female stars, seem to pay homage to the avant-garde of Francis Picabia and Rene Clair. In contrast to peers such as Epremian and Foschi, Pirelli’s reflection on the role of the woman artist within Italian society runs throughout her films as a continuous, implicit background presence. Through Lonzi, Pirelli met a young generation of artists based in Italy, including some of those appearing in Lonzi’s book Autoritratto,7 and her body of work started to become more embedded in narrative processes and situational scenarios, involving actions with the surrounding environment, mingling both the social and the utopian. Appropriazione, A propria azione, Azione propria, Sole in mano, together with Il Lago (soggettivo-oggettivo) [The Lake (Subjective-Objective)] (1964–1965), Narciso [Narcissus] (1966) and Doppio Autoritratto [Double Portrait] (1973–1974), could be seen to explore the emergence of female consciousness on the issues connected to the social changes of that period, which formed the critical context on which Pirelli’s

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work is based. The body was also one of the primary focuses of the early Italian feminist movement: where it was seen as the privileged place of dialogue between being a woman and her relationship with the world. Understood as physical presence and maternal evocation – it was precisely in this period that it became increasingly concrete or materialized in Pirelli’s work. Nevertheless, the centrality of the artist’s own embodiment in her films assumes full expressive autonomy only rarely, manifesting through her scrutiny of her body mediated by a dialogue with the camera. The films she made during the late 1960s saw the beginning of a long, hardwon shift from the search for an image based on visual rhythm, luminous tonality and the timing of gestures to an investigation of being and the self. For example, in Inter-vento (1969) the accelerated images of several wildflowers blown back and forth by the wind are set in motion in relation to the tranquil movement of clouds. In her early film Il Lago (soggettivo-oggettivo) [The Lake (SubjectiveObjective)] (1964–1965), a woman scrutinizes the natural environment, seeming to survey the remains and sediments of material such as debris or remains within a swampy landscape, followed by a series of close-ups on her eye, which appears on one hand to gaze out at the horizon, and on the other to stare directly into the camera lens. The relation between the female body and the landscape is at the very core of this film, which aims to combine travelling shots with the punctuation of still images focused on her eyes to create a more fragmented rhythm. The years from 1965 to 1968 represented a substantial development in how Pirelli produced her artwork, by introducing a greater reflection on the time and processes of her lived experience. Narciso, made in 1966, is the most significant work of this series. Made in one take, with no editing, Pirelli films her own naked body in dialogue with her internal thoughts, reflecting on her identity as a woman, a mother, a wife and an artist. Details of her body, at times barely perceptible because of the close proximity of the camera lens, are accompanied by an introspective monologue. Expressing thoughts in flux, in relation to the vivid relationship she had with Carla Lonzi, Pirelli’s words touch on her subjective experience to become a fragmented inquiry into the meaning of a relationship between two persons, whether lovers or strangers. Pirelli wasn’t looking for an authoritative language or definitive statement, but a more suggestive formulation of image, thought or artistic gesture. ‘So here is the

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adventure: the making of a thought, the approaching of the day, the entering of the darkness.’8 The dialectic between word and image, upon which this artwork is based, is however silenced in Indumenti [Clothing]: a short film that captures a gesture by the artist Luciano Fabro, enacted upon the body of Carla Lonzi. Similar to Narciso, Pirelli uses close-up images that show parts of the body such as Lonzi’s breast, shoulders and the nape of her neck. The close ups on these details, and on the gestures and actions of Lonzi and Fabro, are conveyed using in-camera editing over the duration of one roll of 16mm film, one of the few times she used this method.9 Made in 1967, Pirelli’s simple film-making approach reflects the contingency and spontaneity of the situation, and encapsulates the spirit of experimentation taking place among the artistic community in northern Italy during that period. Indumenti illustrates the modest approach that the artist adopted towards the technical characteristics of the film apparatus, such as her in-camera editing process. Like a form of film-documentation, Indumenti records the development of an experience in its intimate details; representing its social interactions through the relationship between the two figures. Her attention to the constraints of the film apparatus produces a shift from a process of pure documentation to a revelation of the interrelationships between the performers, depicting both Luciano Fabro’s acts upon the body of Lonzi and Pirelli’s own movements around them, while shooting the action with her camera. The attention to detail is seen as the camera zooms in to a hair clip, and the frames showing Fabro’s hands in close up while drawing on Carla’s breast express the tactility and gestural movement of Pirelli’s camera. Indumenti is part of a series of short film ‘documents’ displaying moments of daily life as part of the artistic community of 1960s Milan, recording art exhibitions and works of art. Classified by Pirelli as Documenti [Documents], all four were made with the same simple technique and immediacy. These were connected to her relationship with the artists of the time, and the spontaneous collaboration between an art critic, an artist and a film-maker, the diaristic quality of the Documenti series shows a less visible aspect of her practice in relation to the film installation works she would later develop. In these records of convivial situations, such as an exhibition opening,10 the experience of the viewer unfolds at the same pace as the film-maker. In his essay ‘Notes on Gesture’, Giorgio Agamben observes: ‘In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures

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seeks to re-appropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss.’11 The margin between acquisition and loss, between vision and concealment, and the contradictions connecting with this, are fundamental to the film’s form. In a sense it is this paradox of recording – of absence made present and presence made absent – that is the key to understanding Pirelli’s definition of the work Indumenti.

Light and movement Pirelli’s work took an unexpected route when, in February 1969, she presented Film-Ambiente12 [The Environmental Screen] (Figure 4.2) at Galleria de Nieubourg in Milan. One of only a few examples of Italian expanded cinema, the artwork is composed within a modular spatial structure, upon which the artist projected the film Nuovo Paradiso,13 based on the sculptures Nuovo Paradiso (1968) by Gino Marotta – depicting exotic animals and plants made in coloured meth-acrylate. Film-Ambiente consisted of a completely transparent environment that permitted visitor access to all points around the perimeter of its structure, crossing over its margins made of strips of vertical plastic attached to the upper level of the structure. The work is formed by screens laid out according to a modular lattice that could be adapted, based on the focus point of the lens and the size of the space ready to host it. This creates a sort of dynamic object situated within a luminous flow of images that seem to expand out into the space surrounding the screen. The rhythm of the projection is conceived for transparencies and image reflections onto the screen surfaces, in which the resulting image derives from a continuous superimposition of multi-layered projected images. The continuous impression of the image displayed on the fragmented screens creates a visual rhythm that alternates moments of vision with moments of darkness and obscurity. In this manner, the structure of the screens and the multiple projections of Pirelli’s environments rethink the cinematic dispositif beyond the screen’s two-dimensional rectangle of projection; to become a more expanded dimension of film as space-volume. In Film-Ambiente, the interplay of the two main elements of the film apparatus – camera and projection – opened up to the active participation of the spectator, whose presence interrupted and altered the image. The projected

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event was also accompanied by its own soundtrack, designed by the composer Livio Castiglioni. Through a system of photosensitive cells embedded within the structure, on-screen images were translated into pre-recorded sounds – such as electronic noises, acute rings and buzzes – to create an immediate auditory correspondence with the image projection. The technical processes of film projection in Film-Ambiente collide with the perceptual encounter of the viewer-participant, to unhinge classic forms of cinematic narrative. The artist draws the film out of the static two-dimensionality of the screen, employing it as an additional editing element, both for images and for sound. Its regular and modular form contrasts the multiple trajectories of images that are created

Figure 4.2 Marinella Pirelli, Film-Ambiente, 1969. Courtesy Archivio Marinella Pirelli, Varese.

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during the projection and which occupy the space in an entirely chaotic manner. Film-Ambiente is about relationships of proximity, transitions and dispersions of the image. Its projection is built around the balance and exchanges between the installation structure and the visitor’s subjective experience. The artist described this relationship through two actions: ‘direct images for transparency, images brought for reflections.’14 And it is precisely within the continuous movement between these two extremes that the artwork can be perceived and defined as a total experience. In commenting on FilmAmbiente, Tommaso Trini has written: ‘It is the body everywhere, illuminated while wandering, darkened in the folds of a labyrinth, as a ghostly presence; it passes varying and modulating, closed on the recondite and sonorous trace of self.’15 In order to protect her invention of the Film-Ambiente system, Pirelli had applied an industrial patent: ‘no. 12550 A69’ named schermo composito per proiezioni luminose con effetto spaziale (composite screen for luminous projections with spatial effects). The idea of placing a patent on the screen was definitely related to her experience working as an animator within an industrial context, and wishing to reflect this in her practice as an artist. Demonstrating her ability to move between these commercial and artistic spheres, Pirelli wished to advertise her ‘invention’ in the publicity for Film-Ambiente, as a system that could be reconfigured commercially for use in other cinematic contexts besides her own. Within the Italian context, artists such as Umberto Bignardi were also making similar explorations about the use of spatial contexts beyond the cinema, employing billboards as screens, in his series media-trovati-modificati [founded-modified-media] (1965). Like Pirelli’s FilmAmbiente, Bignardi’s pieces also reflected on how artists were instrumentalizing the language of advertising, in his case referring back to its origins in the urban environment of the city street, in a desire to engage the audience in a more direct relationship to the film image. Rather than taking her influence from the experiments with film action and multi-screen projection occurring elsewhere in North America and the UK, it could be argued that Marinella Pirelli’s interest with the screen as an object, and not just part of the cinematographic apparatus, can be better understood as part of this wider engagement with the role of advertising among Italian artists.

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The figure of Marinella Pirelli is quite unique in the Italian cultural art scene of the 1960s. Not only was she one of the few women then working as a professional animator, but she also transformed her practice to become an artist and film-maker. With works such as Film-Ambiente, which explored, at the end of the 1960s, the possibilities of creating a film experience in three dimensions, she could also be seen as a pioneer of the first forms of sculptural expanded cinema in Italy. Her importance was beginning to be recognized internationally when, for example, she was invited to participate in the prestigious and influential exhibition ‘Prospect 71’. Unfortunately, endorsements such as this coincided with her withdrawal from the artistic scene. Her presence in the cultural debates today is still very marginal because of the continued lack of discussions on the emergence of experimental film-making in Italy at that time, and the presence of female film-makers in its histories.

Notes 1 Handwritten notes conserved in the Marinella Pirelli Archive. (The notes are not dated.) 2 Born of the influence of the New American Cinema, the CCI was an important attempt to create a platform for the spread and promotion of independent Italian cinema. It matters little that the effort would fail just two years after it was founded. What survived of the CCI expanded in a capillary manner around Italy, forming a drive toward a search for new environments useful for the reception of artworks, finding in the cultural ferment of those years the terrain most fertile for its development. During this period, the visual experience rejected recognized artistic canons: cinema itself became the object of experimentation aimed at restructuring the participation process for the creation of the image. 3 Handwritten notes conserved in the Marinella Pirelli Archive. (The notes are not dated.) 4 Marinella Pirelli, Autobiography (never published). The text is conserved at the Marinella Pirelli Archive, and is undated. 5 To learn more on this subject, see Crainz, Guido (2005), Storia del miracolo italiano, Culture, identità, trasaformazioni fra anni cinquanta e sessanta, Rome. 6 Please refer to Di Raddo, Elena (2015), ‘ “Non è tempo per le donne, di dichiarazioni.” Ketty La Rocca e la questione di genere’, in F. Gallo and R. Perna (eds), Ketty La Rocca Nuovi studi, 104, Milan.

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7 Autoritratto is a book based on the montage of a series of conversations with fourteen artists (all men except for Carla Accardi) recorded between 1965 and 1969. Published in 1969, the book was also a farewell: in 1970, the birth of Rivolta Femminile marked Carla Lonzi’s definitive departure from the world of art. 8 Handwritten notes conserved in the Marinella Pirelli Archive. (The notes are not dated.) 9 In-camera editing was also used for the film-documentation made by Pirelli of the exhibition ‘Al di là della Pittura’ at San Benedetto del Tronto in 1969, curated by Gillo Dorfles, Filiberto Menna and Luciano Marucci. 10 Archival work is still being conducted to ascertain the locations and details of the exhibitions recorded, with the exception of ‘Al di là della Pittura’. 11 Agamben, Giorgio (1996), Mezzi senza fine. Note sulla politica, 5, Turin. 12 The artwork was also presented with the name Schermo Ambiente (Environment Screen). 13 Nuovo Paradiso, (1969), 16 mm, colour, sound, 8 minutes. 14 Gualdoni, Flaminio (1997), Vita intensa e luminosa di Marinellia Pirelli, Milan. 15 Trini, Tommaso (August 1969), M’illumino di film, in Domus, 477: 36–39.

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Rachel Garfield – Prescient intersectionality: Women, moving image and identity politics in 1980s Britain

The early 1980s was a period when film-makers forged new languages to voice their exploration of a range of counter-hegemonic identities in the UK. In this text I will contextualize and analyse works by the film collective Sankofa and the artist film-makers Ruth Novaczek and Alia Syed. I will posit them as interweaving film works that formed part of a wider negotiation and establishment of expression from diasporic and immigrant communities in the UK. I will argue that their perspective as women gave rise to a transformation away from the singular address and representation of community of earlier films such as Horace Ove’s Pressure (1976), towards a multivalent film language that was constituted through the complexities of a lived experience of diaspora. I will argue that this, in turn, was to have a profound effect on contemporary moving image work and the much-needed processes of normalization of the non-white speaking voice in art.1 The 1980s was an era of an emergent multiculturalism in Britain. Through this decade multiculturalism was embraced by local government funding of culture, and was only later critiqued as a way to contain or control communities by funding them in what was often their most benign form. The debates in the 1980s also had yet to be superseded by the debates on faith groups or extremism directed at the Muslim communities that were heralded by the post 9/11 era and that are now the common currency in the popular press. This period could be seen as the last gasp of a model of modernity predicated on the tenet of universalism, where equality was expected without recourse to ethnicity, gender or sexuality, which were considered secondary to class politics. The emergence of multiculturalism in the 1980s was at least an acknowledgement

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of the limits to this over-determinant vision of coherence, resulting eventually in the recognizable genre of identity politics that continues to operate within the art world today. The process of this journey from invisibility to visibility is in some ways described here. However, visibility has brought its own problems in the guise of a certain sort of hypervisibility, which was outlined by Jean Fisher, Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer and many others in the last twenty years, so much so that artists who are not white are interpellated foremost through their ethnicity. The films examined here offer a loose trajectory of some of the first film practices to address the issue of this ‘new’ subjectivity in the context of 1980s Britain. The strategies that helped to make diasporic voices heard took a number of forms during this period of the 1980s: foremost the activism and protest of the black communities;2 the politicization of a generation through the interlinking of music and anti-fascist activism, and a recognition within government of the need to support the communities living under their aegis. From the vantage point of today it is hard to remember the systemic and almost total marginality that many communities (including the Irish and Jews) experienced on a daily basis in the post Second World War period. Similar to current demonizations of Muslim communities in the UK, racism was fuelled by a right-wing British press, and a public imaginary that foregrounded false narratives of an erstwhile homogeneity, coupled with negative stereotypes of immigrants and their implied effect on the status quo.3 Although these narratives are sadly ongoing,4 they lack the pervasive consensus that they had in the 1970s and the early 1980s, regardless of the efforts of anti-racist activism by many individuals on the Left at that time. Furthermore, earlier decades such as the 1970s defined the framework for the future steps taken in the name of inclusivity that many have claimed are tokenistic, and have helped foster the ghettoized practices that the curator Richard Hylton outlines in his 2007 book The Nature of the Beast. Hylton observes that: ‘today, many of the initiatives pertaining to cultural diversity in the arts, not least the construct, “culturally diverse arts” uncritically reprise (thirty year old) notions of “ethnic arts”. This in turn has a legacy, predating not only new Labour but also the arrival of Thatcherism.’5 And yet the 1980s was a transitional moment for the post-colonial subject in the UK, which saw a growth in confidence and visibility, exemplified by the group Soul II Soul,

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formed in 1988, and their ability to gain absolute dominance in pop culture at the time; just as the 1980s also saw an increasing acceptance towards the immigrant citizens of its former colonies settled in the UK, such as those from the Caribbean, India, Pakistan and East Africa. There were a number of reasons for the shift in attitude. The Scarman Report brought decisive legislative change,6 largely in response to the riots in the inner-city areas of Notting Hill, London in 1976, and Toxteth, Birmingham and Brixton, London in 1981. The incremental effect of ongoing anti-racist activism and community resistance to police brutality were also prime causes for the fight for widening acceptance of post-colonial communities in the UK. Rock Against Racism was another factor and a massively successful campaign group who organized rallies and gigs7. It was a significant part of a popularization through live music that encouraged the widespread normalization of the UK’s diverse and complex community.8 It harnessed the younger generation in the expectation of equality and multiculturalism, even if equality still remains an aspiration. A key reason for the relative proliferation of work by black artists and filmmakers in the 1980s, alongside wider movements in black activism and protest, could be attributed to the opening up of new funding streams. Responsive to the changing nature of the British community, possibly through left wing antiracist activism,9 two young officers in the Arts Council, Robert Hutchinson and John Bustin, commissioned Naseem Kahn to research the cultural needs of ethnic minorities. Despite their good faith, the funding officers were naïve in their expectations of the scale of the issue. What they envisaged as a parttime six-month project for one person took four people eighteen months to produce.10 In 1976 Khan published the report for the Arts Council entitled, ‘The arts Britain ignores: The arts of ethnic minorities in Britain.’ Painstakingly researched,11 the report argued for the need to fund, foster and support the arts produced by ethnic minorities in Britain. The report had a slow but increasingly expansive effect on funding patterns as it became apparent that metropolitan and local authorities had an imperative to fund the arts produced by minority communities in the UK.12 Other developments in UK culture also occurred. The ACTT Video Workshop Declaration in 1981 helped the coalescence of black film collectives, such as Sankofa, Ceddo and Black Audio Film Collective, through localized and national funding from the Greater London Council (GLC) and Channel 4: organizations that were committed by then to ‘encourage

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diversity’.13 For example, the film collective Sankofa, founded by Isaac Julien, Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Nadine Marsh-Edwards and Robert Crusz, was to benefit from both Arts Council and GLC funding for the production of their first film Territories (1984). The films of black artists and film-makers to emerge in the 1980s differed from earlier work about the diasporic experience by film-makers such as Horace Ove and Menelik Shabazz.14 Where Ove and Shabazz’s films aimed to represent the lives of their communities in the UK, the 1980s generation that followed were intent on changing the very expectations of the diasporic cinematic voice. Ove’s feature Pressure (1976) is a slice-of-life film narrative, which shows the pressures of a young black man and his milieu in West London. What is to be noted about this film is twofold: firstly, the way in which Ove used the language of realism to portray a coherent representation of his community in West London and secondly, that this is an overwhelmingly male milieu. The film fulfils the realist traditions that Kobena Mercer identifies as important for his generation: transparency, immediacy, authority and authenticity that pretended to be neutrality.15 As an early film about the community within racist narratives of influx, danger and turmoil, this film was also an important statement of the presence of the West London Black British community.16 Importantly, it spoke of the wider perception of young black men in West London, acting as a counter to the mugging narratives that prevailed.17 As a key commentator of the period, Mercer posited the newness of Black British film and discussed its production and reception.18 Mercer argues that the films to emerge from collectives such as Sankofa constituted a new black vernacular in opposition to the implied neutrality embodied by the realist narrative films of the previous generation. The Passion of Remembrance (1986), Sankofa’s second film, can be seen in contrast with the unequivocally male focus of Pressure (1976), which The Passion . . . conversely questions through an intersectional understanding of the processes of racism, and of the varied construction of the black community.19 Arguing against the assumption that the sources of Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa were Godard or other such Eurocentric influences, Mercer posits the limitations of the earlier filmmaking generation such as Ove, who speak from the community for that community. He argues that although the realism of films such as Pressure could

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be considered normative and transparent enough for the community to understand, they constitute a false opposition redolent of Eurocentric coding, taken from the hegemonic conventions of Hollywood. Although, conversely, Judith Williamson, another commentator in the 1980s, points out that: ‘The black British work that has been taken up most widely in the world of theory, most written about and most picked up at festivals, on tours and so on, is the work that fits most obviously into that category avant-garde . . . the reception in somewhere like New York of Black Audio’s or Sankofa’s work has as much to do with it being formally inventive or for want of a better word avant-garde as to do with it being black,’ rather than the less formally disruptive documentary or realist tendencies such as Ceddo’s film The People’s Account (1986).20 Certainly, the generation of film-makers involved with film collectives such as Sankofa emerged through university and art school. They benefited from the avant-garde debates within the film world, as well as the debates about black identity as framed through Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha. At the time, arguments such as these over provenance and reference may have overly dominated the argument for a black vernacular. But, retrospectively, it is clear how the dialectical power of this combination was significant for offering a transformative and self-reflexive film aesthetic: not just in terms of the confidence it gave to black artists of this period, but also in terms of forging a language that subsequent generations of artists could take for granted.21 Building on these debates, I would argue that a key differentiating factor not explored by Mercer or Williamson is the focus on gender. If there was a need for the voice of blackness to develop away from white hegemony, a nonpatriarchal language is also required. This is not to essentialize either black or white experiences but to acknowledge that to visualize experience is in itself a defining force of self-interpellation. That is, to gain control of how you are seen you need to take control of how you envision experience. Sankofa proudly presented the viewpoints of women, of homosexuality and of the young, both in its production and its representations on screen.22 For these film-makers it is through the filmic representation of lived experience that a women’s voice emerges. Furthermore, Sankofa came together as a collective of homosexual and lesbian film-makers, and it was their sexuality that formed an integral component in their intersectional approach, which did not give a hierarchy to the different operations of racism, sexism and homophobia.

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Figure 5.1 Sankofa, The Passion of Remembrance, 1986. Courtesy Isaac Julien’s Studio.

Unlike Pressure (1976), The Passion of Remembrance (1986) constituted its visual language within a fragmented schema that speaks to the multivalent experiences of communities, as perceived through their subject position as women and as gay. In these ways I would argue The Passion . . . is a testament to the counter-hegemonic position of black homosexual subjectivity.23 The conversation in The Passion . . . was not just about racial stereotypes but also the elision and suppression of women within the black anti-racist activism of the previous generation, as well as about homophobic prejudice within the black community. In some ways I would suggest that this could be seen to be a work that is trying to look towards both a specialist experimental audience and a ‘community’ audience, spurious as those perceived divisions may be.24

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On the one hand, the film contains realist vignettes of a Caribbean family in a London inner-city estate, presenting the conflicts between the immigrant and British-born generations in an episodic way, as if in a soap opera. On the other hand, in sequences interspersed between these vignettes, a man and woman conduct a heated meta-debate on gender relations and black activism, in what might possibly be a sand quarry. Conducted in a landscape that is out of time and place, the camerawork is different from the rest of the film, composed around portraiture, focusing on the protagonists’ faces. These scenes appropriate a stylistic motif from science fiction that allows for a metaconversation of gender relations and activism within the black communities. In contrast to the slice-of-life vignettes informing the rest of the film, the science fiction landscapes are a moment of estrangement, yet they also take control of the narrative presented in the realist vignettes. Another layer that moves through this film is of mediated imagery of black and Asian involvement in trade union action and street protest. An extended passage of this footage opens The Passion . . . and punctuates moments in the film like a spine, reminding us of the central position of media representation in how the sense of self is constituted. Later on, a key female character (Maggie) puts on a VHS tape and watches the protest footage. This shift transforms the film from an ever-unfolding reportage and lived experience to history and representation, which Maggie is looking at, and so implicating gender and generation into the footage as an active and critical device. Later still, looking is shown as a tool for existential self-reflection for young adults, when her friends and a youth leader at the community centre join her. Thus, the multilayered fragmentation within the film, like a chorus of different voices, doesn’t just represent, but also urges the viewer to interrogate the mores of the‘community’ through its foregrounding of gender and sexuality. Ruth Novaczek studied at St Martin’s School of Art, in the year below Julien.25 Her undergraduate degree show film Tea Leaf (1988) shares some visual confluence with the Sankofa film Territories (1984), and like Julien, she explores the intersection between race and sexuality. That is to say, both employ a number of formal devices – coming from their avant-garde and art school contexts – in order to convey political points. Both Territories (1984) and Tea Leaf (1988) distort the image and heighten the colour of their hand-held documentary footage. Although Handsworth Songs (1986) by Black Audio Film

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Collective also uses this device, Novaczek and Julien both employ it to intensify the image so that it fuses sexuality with politics. Julien slows down the footage of black civilians and white police, in order to accentuate the visceral effect of the master-slave dialectic of desire and power in which their bodies are held together. Similarly, Novaczek uses road movie footage shot from a car with montaged and fragmented close up movements – a methodology that she continued through many of her later films. It is a device that denounces the transparency or authenticity of the documentary image, deploying representation as a fiction, which can be repurposed to liberate the image from the containments of stereotype. Tea Leaf is about the abuse by an older woman towards a younger woman and its impact. Although the authenticity of the narrative for the film-maker is not in question, the music and pace acts as a distancing device, which lends a sense of farce to this story of abusive relationships. Novaczek cut Kodachrome and Ektachrome Super 8 (two kinds of super 8 colour film) onto two rolls and refilmed them on top of each other, thereby montaging ‘double consciousness’ into the structure of the film. The film’s coloration is produced through refilming and through the techniques of both under and overexposure.26 The two main protagonists are continually fleeting across the screen in different configurations: in the supermarket, on the street, dancing. Both brutal and beautiful, Tea Leaf interweaves Jewish identity and sexuality. Through an absurd disjunction between the narrative of child abuse and speedy upbeat klezmer, reggae and calypso music, it explores how abuse, self-esteem and relationships are bound up with power relations in the world; that of poverty, sexism, racism and anti-Semitism. It shows how the personal and political intertwine on a range of levels.27 (Plate 1.6.) Novaczek’s films have been elided within the focus on identity among her peers. The possible reason for this is because Jewishness does not equate with the post-war diasporic idea of an immigrant community, built around the idea of the post-colonial, or the second generation diasporic ideal of proclaiming difference instead of assimilation.28 Indeed, her main preoccupation between 1986 and 2000 considered Jewish and black identity in dialogue. Rootless Cosmopolitans (1990) continues to draw links between different minority groups as an aspiration towards a coalition of diasporic communities, instead of communities competing in a hierarchy of victimhood. The film begins with the question: ‘What is it to be a Jew?’ Filmed in black and white, people’s colour

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and origin are questioned as a condition of possibility. The narrator tells the viewer, by way of introduction, that the two central women characters are friends, and the film quickly moves to a conversation between them, questioning who looks Jewish and who looks black. Importantly, the characters state that these terms are not mutually exclusive, but as forms of identification across the groups.29 The protagonists typify contradictions, such as the identification of Ashkenazi Jews with whiteness and, on the other hand, the well-known anti-Semitism of Farrakhan.30 In the ease of discussion between them, the film sets up a counter-narrative to the identification of black antiSemitism and Jewish racism the characters cite. There are multiple voices in Rootless Cosmopolitans, disconnected from the image to make equivalences between people and communities. As another way of challenging the authority of the singular voice and the singular narrative translation, the narrator becomes a minor player as multiple voices begin to tell their stories: ‘She comes from a travelling family. Jews they live here then the borders change [. . .] I came here in ‘39. I just earned a living . . .’ The subject represented speaks but the voice is disconnected from the image of her smoking, talking and walking with her daughter. Identified as Lily by the unnamed narrator, she then moves back to the existential questions, talking about accepting her Jewishness and what it means. In this movement from the existential to the personal and back again, the everyday and history are intertwined. In a later passage Lily tells the story of her grandmother getting elocution lessons and the film shifts between images of two elderly women, one in European dress and the other in a white hijab. The story being narrated could apply to either woman and thus confounds assumptions about community, belonging and identity, at the very moment that it identifies them. So, unlike The Passion of Remembrance that aims to qualify community within a framework of self-interpellation through representation, Rootless Cosmopolitans (1990), through play and indeterminacy, aims to confound expectations of what anyone might look like, and what that might say about the communities to which they might belong. Although the previous films explicitly made big existential statements, Syed’s Fatima’s Letter (1992) is a quiet, intimate and poetic film that reflects the diaspora experience through the juxtaposition between a narrative of ritual, playing the game of Karim31 and visual footage from Whitechapel Underground station in London. The film is also about the fusion of the everyday with the

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existential. Syed used to pass through Whitechapel station every morning on her way to the Slade School of Fine Art, where she was a student, and the film reflects this daily routine in its production.32 The Urdu narration of Syed, and the out-of-sync English subtitles that operate as image, produce a disjunction similar to the indeterminant narratives in Novaczek’s film, although the artists didn’t know each other at the time.33 Both Syed and Novaczek use abstraction as a metaphor, such that the viewer cannot tell exactly where they are standing in terms of how to read the ambiguous images. Where Novaczek uses multivalent montage, Syed uses the movement and the windows of the London Underground trains to produce a multilayered rectilinear fragmentation, which forms the composition of the film. Momentary glimpses of bystanders, such as the turn of a young woman’s head towards the camera and children getting off the train, are in counterpoint to the imagined letter from Fatima, recounting an intimate evocation of rituals and habits from another place. The lack of specificity is part of the poetry of the film, which doesn’t say where this other place is. This is a different kind of cosmopolitan displacement to the one proposed by Novaczek. In contrast to the exaggerated disjunctures of Novaczek’s film, Syed’s manner is understated, with a poignant and wistful focus on the mise en scène of Whitechapel station and its history of immigrant associations – currently the Bengali community – and the Jewish and Irish communities before it. In that space of limbo analogous to the landscape of The Passion . . ., the film explores a subjectivity that is caught between the present and the past, in stasis between where you are from and where you are going to, and where the necessity of the past must play out before a release can be made into the future.34 Following several decades of an exploration of identity in art practice, and at a time of resurgent interest in the politics of cultural identity, gender, sexuality and activism, it is important to reframe some of these British pioneers who worked within a climate of relative hostility and isolation. Many of the tropes that they developed to assert intersectionality in the 1980s and 1990s – such as the use of multivalent voices – have questioned singularity and stereotype to become the common language of current moving image work. On the other hand, artists such as Novaczek and Syed still sit in the shadow of more visible successors such as Steve McQueen, Zineb Sedira or the Otolith Group. It is hoped that, in this renewed climate of interest concerning the question of subjectivity in art, film works such as The Passion of Remembrance,

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Figure 5.2 Alia Syed, Fatima’s Letter, 1992. Courtesy the artist, LUX, London and Talwar Gallery.

Rootless Cosmopolitans and Fatima’s Letter will begin to be given the place they deserve, in pioneering new languages of art to address the diasporic experiences of people within the UK in the late twentieth century.

Notes 1 Since the 1980s there has been an expectation and willingness by some curators to develop the careers of black artists who are still woefully under-represented. There has recently been a re-invigoration of interest in black artists in the UK but it is still not a ‘normalization’. 2 I am using the term ‘black’ throughout the essay as it is most appropriate to my argument and its context of the 1980s in the UK. 3 Hall, Stuart (1991), ‘Reconstruction Work: Images of Post War Black Settlement’, in Jo Spence and Patricia Holland (eds), Family Snaps: The Meanings of Domestic Photography, 152–64, Virago.

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4 The recent outrage and subsequent reversal of policy over deporting the Windrush children without papers is a testament to the change in attitude of the country since the 1970s, and the normalization of the presence of Caribbean communities in the UK, https://www.amnesty.org.uk/blogs/yes-minister-it-human-rights-issue/ seventy-years-after-windrush?&gclid=CjwKCAjwq_vWBRACEiwAEReprIAYHnED-GfwSf7dAj7YPPMA75FZFkUDGKJXtGgMxQ96JVSe8Il3RoCwmA QAvD_BwE or https://news.sky.com/story/windrush-scandal-theresa-mayaccused-of-running-institutionally-racist-government-11342346. 5 Hylton, Richard (2007), The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector – A Study of Policies, Initiatives and Attitudes 1976–2006, 11, Bath: ICIA. This book gives a thorough analysis of the pitfalls of the models established to capture and foster ‘identity based’ art. 6 Scarman recommended changes in training and law enforcement, and the recruitment of more ethnic minorities into the police force, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Scarman_Report (accessed 25 May 2015). 7 Interview with Syd Shelton, 12 February 2016. 8 That is normalisation in the imaginary of the non-black communities. See also, Gilroy, Paul (2002), There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, 155–56, London: Routledge Classics. 9 Searchlight, founded in 1964, was a magazine that collated information about racism. Run by Gerry Gable as a monthly magazine in 1975, it was a hub for anti-racist activism, https://www.northampton.ac.uk/the-searchlight-archives/. See also Gilroy, 2002. 10 Telephone interview with Naseem Kahn, 18 April 2016. 11 Khan, Naseem (2005), ‘Choices for Black Arts over Thirty Years’, in David A Bailey, Sonia Boyce, Ian Baucom (eds), Shades of Black, 117,“the data painstakingly dug up by primary research”, USA: Duke University Press/Iniva. 12 Kahn, ibid., 119, “There were also many criticisms from the artists about the need for local authorities to contain and control funding to black artists.” 13 http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/521843/ accessed 3 May 2016. 14 Some of this history is covered in detail in Diawara Manthia, ‘Power and Territory: The Emergence of Black British Film Collectives’, (ed.), Lester Friedman (2006), Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, 147–60, UCL Press. 15 Kobena Mercer, ibid. 16 Also, Shabazz, Melenik (1977), Step Forward Youth. 17 Hall, et al. (eds) (1978), Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Critical Social Studies, Macmillan. 18 Mercer, Kobena (1994), Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions In Black Cultural Studies, 53–66, Routledge.

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19 That is, of the way in which race, class and gender intersect to create inequality, the argument being that conditions of inequality are not created by one state of being, see Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1991), ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43 (6): 1241–99, attributed with being the first statement on intersectionality. 20 Mercer, Kobena (1988), Black Film, British Cinema, 35, ICA Documents. 21 Establishing a black aesthetic was a key debate in the 1980s, ibid. Coco Fusco. 22 The Passion of Remembrance was directed jointly by Isaac Julien and Maureen Blackwood with an overwhelmingly female team edited by Nadine MarshEdwards, Maureen Blackwood, Stella Franciskides, produced by Martine Attile, Nadine Marsh-Edwards and GLPolice Support Committee and Channel 4, http://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b6e51d523, accessed 25 May, 2016. 23 Isaac Julien stated that Sankofa would discuss everything very intensely all the way through until the film was made, and in this way they were a true collective. Tate Britain talk, 7 September 2015, Rewind: Sankofa. 24 I would note that this is a problematic assumption but one that was prevalent in the 1980s within both the debates on community needs and the burden of representation. e.g. ibid., Black Film British Cinema and Chambers Eddie, ‘Mainstream Capers: Black Artists, White Institutions’, Run Through the Jungle: Selected Writings by Eddie Chambers, in IVAnnotations 5, 1999, 16. 25 Interview with Novaczek (2014). 26 From interview with Novaczek, 29 May 2018, Novaczek was reading Fanon at the time. 27 Novaczek has recently re-edited Tea Leaf, not wanting the original to be shown. She sees this as taking back control of an incident where she had no control. Novaczek would also argue that the new soundtrack is more true to the sound that was relevant to her at the time (from interview 29 May 2018). 28 The Irish are subject to a similar historical positioning. For the Jewish experiences see Brodkin, Karen (1999), How Jews Became White Folks And What That Says About Race in America, New York: Rutgers UP; Bauman, Zygmunt (1988), ‘Exit Visas and Entry Tickets: Paradoxes of Jewish Assimilation’, Telos, 77: 45–77; Steyn, Juliet (1999), The Jew: Assumptions of Identity, Continuum and Stratton, Jon. Coming Out Jewish, London: Routledge. 29 To be clear, some people are both black and Jewish, some might look either or both. 30 The Anti-Defamation League, a key Jewish organization in the USA that monitors anti-Semitism has produced a report on the anti-Semitism of Farrakhan. http://www.adl.org/anti-semitism/united-states/c/farrakhan-nation-of-islam-noiin-his-own-words.html. This is merely one of many instances cited of Farrakhan’s well-known anti-Semitism.

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31 https://www.mastersofgames.com/rules/carrom-rules.htm. 32 Fatima’s Letter was Syed’s MA film, from a telephone conversation, 15 April 2017. 33 Syed stated that she was very isolated and trying to find a language to how she was feeling. She did say that Isaac Julien came to show his films at the Slade while she was there. Telephone conversation, 15 April 2017. 34 Syed stated that this film was made at a time when she was getting to know her grandmother and making peace with her father and Pakistani origins, which may offer a reason of sorts for the wistful sense of stasis in the film. Telephone interview 15 April 2017.

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Negotiations and Engagements

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In conversation: Maria Palacios Cruz interviews Basma Alsharif The work of Basma Alsharif (b. 1983) resists narrow categorizations. Working across media – though predominantly with the moving image, whether video or analogue film – she moves with ease from the gallery to the cinema and across continents. Her practice is often characterized as multifarious and nomadic: born in Kuwait, brought up in France and the United States, she has lived and worked in Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Paris and Los Angeles. Of Palestinian origin, her work consistently questions ideas around nationality and identity, more precisely the cultural construction of the notion of ‘home’, as well as an individual’s agency in relationship to history and collective memory. Her films and videos explore the subjective experience of landscape as political, proposing a new visuality for Palestine. This is one that looks forward, beyond today’s ruins, shifting the focus from the present and the past to a ‘postmemory’, which Marianne Hirsch has described as ‘the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up’.1 The following conversation took place over email between January and April 2016, while Basma Alsharif was travelling between Los Angeles, Arizona, Dubai, Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, Florida and South Korea. It follows two screening projects and public conversations that Basma Alsharif and Maria Palacios Cruz staged together in Ghent and London in 2015. Maria Palacios Cruz (MPC) Your work is generally described in relation to your nomadic upbringing. Can we start by talking about your childhood? Basma Alsharif (BA) I have been giving two lectures that involve my autobiography in two fairly different ways. One is more performative,2 the other more academic. In both I detail my nomadic upbringing in almost unnecessary detail – mainly to unpack the idea that being bound to history, to our pasts, somehow gets in the way of our agency. Of course, this isn’t always true but it’s a way to talk about how we perceive ourselves in relation to a

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history we didn’t directly experience. It’s also a way for me to free myself from my past. I am Palestinian only because I can’t live in Palestine. Not belonging anywhere is always present for me. I was born in Kuwait, I spent my first eight years in Brittany, France, the rest in the Midwest, United States, until moving to Cairo in 2007 and beginning to live fully nomadically: without a base, without a place to return to. It was a great – albeit difficult – way to live for a while, to develop my practice and understand the ideas I wanted to explore, because it was a full and voluntary embrace of the condition of displacement. That decision helped me to establish that I didn’t want to belong anywhere, that ideas of nationalism and collective memory were a kind of indebtedness to imperialism. Art-making seemed to offer a way out of that – though obviously different art contexts are inextricably linked to nationalisms and national identities. I found that contextualizing my upbringing – which is a kind of performance of the self, was not a way to explain my work but to propose that subjective experience is ultimately fallible, untrustworthy and that assuming agency over this and engaging an audience through their own fallible, untrustworthy perspectives was a way forward. MPC Many of your videos – and perhaps most explicitly Home Movies Gaza (2013) – deal with the notion of ‘home’ and that home being Palestine. You’ve now chosen to set your base in Los Angeles, as far away from Palestine as you’ve ever lived. Has the notion of home changed through that process? BA Curiously, it hasn’t at all. I imagine that moving a lot makes one super apt at settling just about anywhere: an ugly hotel room, a friend’s house, a small studio, a relative’s place. I’ve been curious about the idea of home in its supposed relationship to normativity, especially since the way we individually conceive of our idea of home and how this actually manifests in our lives – emotionally, physically, psychologically – is radically different across cultures, between partners, room-mates and within families. The representation of ‘homes’ in a few of my works is linked to my interest in accessing familiar spaces, images, sounds, as a way of disrupting how we understand the world, and what we take for granted. To make a ‘home movie’ in a place that is suffering constant militaristic violence and state oppression (as in Gaza) is a way for me to unpack the very layered and complicated

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existence of its population, specifically because existence has been reduced to survival. What does domesticity mean in the midst of all of that, and how does it generally reflect on the human condition? If I shift my gaze to my current environment, I will find different questions. I live in this great little house now, in Los Angeles. I sometimes wake up confused as to how I ended up there, when the decision to even return to the United States began, or why. Even if I can explain it practically, it’s probably uninteresting, or generic and ultimately, it’s personal. What has changed is my perspective. I’ve said this often because it helps me to remember how I see the world: I started by looking at Palestine through the world, and now I’m looking at the world through Palestine. I don’t have to be there, in Palestine, it exists inside me not out of choice but because of a personal history I can’t erase. We carry our home inside ourselves and it has little to do with an actual place. To propose that our home is where one is raised is antiquated and nationalistic – it also takes away our agency. To propose that someone is away from home is to insist on that person to remain a foreigner, an alien, a ‘migrant’; it implies being a guest in a place, not having the same stakes in the land, not having the same authority or rights. I believe we are finally beginning to move away from such limited ideas of citizenship, slowly but surely.

Figure C2.1 Basma Alsharif, Home Movies Gaza, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farés, Paris.

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MPC For a long time, you resisted being labelled as a Palestinian artist who made work about Palestine – resisting also the idea that any work that you made would have to in some way address the situation in the Middle East. And then you started describing your work as ‘Post-Palestinian’, and engaging more explicitly with the situation in Palestine, and more particularly in Gaza. Can you explain what you mean by Post-Palestinian and how you came to that position? BA It was Eyal Sivan who first called my work ‘Post-Palestinian’ when we met at the Flaherty Seminar in 2013.3 We spoke about it at length and I found that I finally felt like I had an answer to what it was I was after with my work. I wasn’t trying to represent Palestine, I wasn’t interested in making political documentaries, or work that was about a direct call to action (and not because I don’t respect this kind of work). I wanted to make work that would slow an audience’s thinking down and give it time to reflect. I wanted art to do to Palestine what art can do generally: to change the way that people see things. This is the kind of political action I am personally interested in participating in because I also want my mind to be changed. I want to continue to find ways to see things differently, to have my perspective changed, to be aware of the mechanisms that allow me to reach conclusions and then have that disrupted, broken down, reinforced, whatever. This is Post-Palestinian. It has to do with having the privilege of distance to address something other than the present or the past, and to instead get to think about the future: the post. MPC This conversation is for a book on women artists, feminism and the moving image. Can you talk about feminism in relationship to your practice? What does it mean more specifically to be a Palestinian (or Post-Palestinian) female artist? BA To describe myself as a feminist is like having to make the point that every day, I drink water. It’s funny to consider it a choice. Shouldn’t we all be on the side of equal rights, against violence, oppression and objectification? Ever since the moment it first sunk in that I was being treated differently because of something I had no control over, I didn’t think I had a choice because I understood this inequality was affecting us all.

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What’s the alternative? To accept these conditions would mean to quietly suffer the repercussions. I imagine that choosing not to actively participate in some form towards equality has everything to do with privilege. Perhaps those who have never been harassed, never been talked down to, objectified, raped, beaten, paid less, denied a job or ignored, perhaps those people are lucky and perhaps they are selfish. Or maybe they have been brainwashed into thinking this is how things are, the way they will always be; that inequality is acceptable when preserving tradition; that individuals are not as important as ideologies conceived hundreds or thousands of years ago, and which are still used today as excuses to perpetuate violence and oppression. To say that I am a Palestinian feminist would mean that I am addressing the issues that directly concern women’s rights in that part of the world – and there is only so much I can do from afar – so I inherently deal more specifically with issues that concern gender inequality in the United States. Some time ago, I decided to commit to never getting married – which wasn’t so difficult since the idea never appealed to me to begin with – but specifically because it is literally forbidden by law in various ways to be a woman with any sexual relationships out of wedlock across the Middle East. I decided to insist that this choice be public. That what I want to do with my body or who I share a house with would not be kept secret, lied about, or hidden: neither from my family living in the West or those in the Middle East. A women’s right to live freely and openly, to be with whomever she chooses and as many people as she chooses, is a severe taboo in that part of the world – one that can sometimes lead to horrific repercussions. Even all the way over in Los Angeles, thousands of miles away from Palestine and the rest of the Middle East, it has been a painful, tumultuous struggle to convince my privileged, upper class, educated and well-travelled family of this because of a dedication to traditional values – though for others it has been very easy to accept. And, while on a larger scale this is a very insignificant action that could also be seen as juvenile to those living in the territory, who are living nuanced and layered existences and find alternative ways to resist or adhere to tradition, I see my position to at the very least offer another perspective. MPC Deep Sleep (2014) is your first film to fully assume a ‘Post-Palestinian’ position. You’ve talked about it in relation to bilocation and the impossibility

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of being in Palestine yet being there (through the medium of film),4 but I was wondering if you had been thinking of structural film while making it?5 The colour separation and the scene with the horse always reminds me of Berlin Horse by Malcolm Le Grice (1970), although I know that’s not an important reference for you. BA It’s not, but I make work that I hope references familiar images for others that may be unbeknown to me so that my work will engage an audience that has no prior interest in the subjects or ideas that I am personally invested in. Deep Sleep (Plate 1.7.) is definitely my most ‘experimental’ piece and is such for what may be very classical reasons linked to the history of this practice: I wanted to make a work without language, or text that had an alternate temporality. I wanted to focus on a non-linear sequence of images that would speak to the fractured landscapes, the ruins, of the places I was shooting in. I wanted my hand (literally and figuratively), and my body, to be present, and I wanted all of that to happen through lush and beautiful imagery. I wonder if that’s not essentially what structural film-making can do. MPC Deep Sleep also marks the beginning of a more cinematic orientation in your work (which up to that moment seemed more comfortable in the language of video and installation), when I’d shift from referring to your works as ‘videos’ to calling them ‘films’. Can we talk about your relationship to cinema, and to the process of film-making and the medium of film? Did you and do you work with 16 mm? BA I used 16mm film in my very first moving image work – it was mixed in with video and I have used it throughout my practice on and off. It was logistically more difficult to use in the Middle East, so I relied more on video, but even then, I managed to find ways. I think a notable shift in my work began with an interest in making a longer narrative film: a feature. I began to consider 16mm film on its own: its weight, its history. I began to try things out in short films as a way of developing the ideas of the longer film, and I think the work moved away from the language of video and installation as you say. I feel like I have stepped into a different medium than the one I had

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been using, a different world, system and way of engaging with work, and this has been a gift. One that I can bring back into installation and also keep separate. MPC You are currently working on a feature-length film project;6 what’s the relationship between your gallery work and that which is conceived for the cinema? Can you see yourself directing fiction in a few years? BA Moving into longer form has helped me to distinguish what kind of moving image work I want to make that fits a white cube, and what is for the cinema, and what work I make that is in neither space! I’m working on an installation now based on a trompe-l’oeil of a trompe-l’oeil that includes archival images, large mural-sized photographs, a sound piece and perhaps an animation or drawing.7 All this could change in a week as it is still in process, but so could a lot of my answers for this interview! In the last couple of years since beginning to work with a gallery, I’ve started shifting away from putting moving image in the gallery and returning to a studio practice that involves drawing and photography. I think I have worked a lot with the moving image because it was easily accessible, and it fits the lifestyle I was in of moving around a lot, of making work in the environments I was in, relying on archives, amassing material before I even knew what I was making . . . So, it is definitely an important medium, but among a mix of other ones that I am slowly shifting back into. I started with the moving image in a room: a slide projector with still images. And then, the images began to move faster, and got larger. I will just as easily slow them down, turn them into drawings, or sounds, if that’s what feels right – what I arrive at – for what I want to do next. The desire to make a feature came out of a desire to make a film that would dislocate a viewer’s sense of chronology and place to create a story about survival based on the human condition. I wanted to make a story that was based on the idea of the eternal return, structurally modelled as such: you begin where you end. The narrative is that of a broken-hearted character learning to love again in a story that collapses the Gaza Strip, Pasolini’s Italian landscape,8 a thirteenth-century castle in France, and Southern California into one place and ends with a Native American present.

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I have a strong personal desire to make a proper horror film at some point. So yes, I very much can imagine directing a fiction film in a few years. MPC Speaking of horror . . . This ‘cinematic’ dimension I was referring to in Deep Sleep is really amplified in A Field Guide to the Ferns (2015), in your referencing of the horror movie genre, which could be understood as a form of super emphasized, cinematic experience, and by that, I mean that everything that narrative cinema does – such as suspension of disbelief, identification, emotional manipulation, etc.—horror movies need to do even more. BA The film referenced in my own film, Cannibal Holocaust by Ruggero Deodato (1980), is technically a cannibal/exploitation/horror film. I was drawn to Deodato’s deep investment to create a kind of social commentary about truth, reality and the documentary practice as it relates to ideas around ethnography, filming violence, manipulating the truth, controlling your subjects, reframing an event. There is a pretty clear critique and questioning of who has a right to make what images and to what extent. So, on the one hand, I am drawn to the visceral quality of that genre generally speaking, and on the other hand, I feel the film is using some of the basic functions of cinema to make a political statement, specifically about the kinds of images that are deemed to be ‘real’ or essential to our understanding of other cultures. A Field Guide to the Ferns is somehow the most cathartic film I’ve ever made, though it likely comes off as the least personal one. I was in a residency in New Hampshire, in the middle of the woods. Every artist or writer in this residency has a private cabin out of eyesight of any other cabin. You spend the entire day alone until a communal dinner is served. These cabins have no internet and are out of cell phone range. I happened to be there in the middle of a major offensive that was raging in the Gaza Strip. I was glued to the internet in the library of the residency, watching horrifying images of bloodshed and carnage uploaded on YouTube, or broadcast on news websites. I was very deeply and painfully affected by the images. When I would return to my cabin, suddenly the peacefulness of where I was would erase what I had just seen, and it felt as though I was cannibalizing the footage for the sole purpose of feeling bad. I linked it to Susan Sontag’s statement in Regarding The Pain of Others where she writes:

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Figure C2.2 Basma Alsharif, A Field Guide to the Ferns, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farés, Paris.

The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the faraway sufferers – seen close-up on the television screen – and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue [. . .] So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence [. . .] To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering [. . .] is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.9

It was easy for me to read this dynamic into other situations of witnessing police brutality violence, watching beheadings and executions. I think A Field Guide to the Ferns was about looking, and being watched, about a couple living in an environment haunted by their own apathy.

Addendum Two years after first writing this text, I am revisiting it in light of two further public conversations that Basma Alsharif and I have had at LUX and the

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Mosaic Rooms in London. Both primarily concern the feature film that she was preparing at the time of our interview, and which has since been completed and released, Ouroboros (2017). Continuing some of the themes, ideas and positions in A Field Guide to the Ferns – namely apathy and violence – this film also represents a shift of direction in Alsharif ’s practice. It is, in many ways, a harsher and less easily pleasing work, from which the artist has attempted to remove herself as much as possible. Even if the narrative and the locations are somewhat guided by the artist’s biographical connections to Gaza, France and Los Angeles, her body, her subjective, embodied gaze, so distinct in other works (such as those discussed herein) is gone. At the talks in London, Alsharif spoke about her mistrust of dates and facts, and of how she believes that the way forward for Palestine is to forego its attachment to the recounting of its history, and to look to a future that is perhaps disconnected from its past and from its present. From London, she departed for Cairo, where she plans to resettle. After years living in Los Angeles, away from the Middle East, trying to deal with Palestine from a distance, she is moving back, in order to be closer to her subject matter.

Notes 1 Hirsch, Marianne (2012), The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, 5, New York. 2 Doppelgänging, performed first in 2014 at the Berlin Documentary Forum 3, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin) and was curated by Hila Peleg. 3 The Flaherty Seminar is a yearly week-long event dedicated to independent, non-fiction cinema, which brings together film-makers, curators, scholars and film lovers for intensive screenings and discussions. Founded in 1955 by Frances Flaherty – Robert Flaherty’s widow – it now takes place at Colgate University, with each edition programmed by a different curator. Alsharif took part in the 2013 Seminar, curated by Pablo de Ocampo, around the theme ‘History Is What’s Happening Now’. 4 Basma Alsharif writes: ‘Restricted from travel to Palestine, I learned autohypnosis for the purpose of bilocating. (. . .) Deep Sleep is an invitation to move from the corporeal self to the cinema space in a collective act of bilocation that transcends the

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limits of geographical borders and plays with the fallibility of memory’ (VDB Distribution catalogue). Shot in ancient sites in Malta and Athens, Deep Sleep offers the experience of ‘being’ in the Gaza Strip, connecting the ruins of the past and those of the present. Referring to an emphasis on the material qualities of the film medium predominant in experimental film practices from the late 1960s. For contemporaneous definitions see Sitney, P. Adams (1969) ‘Structural Film’, Film Culture, 47: 1–10 and Gidal, Peter (1975) ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/ Materialist Film’, Studio International, 190: 189–96. Ouroboros premiered in 2017 at the Whitney Biennial (New York, USA) and the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland). Trompe l’oeil, Installation, 2016. Italian film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini originally intended to shoot Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew) in Palestine, and made a film there while scouting for locations in 1963 Sopralluoghi in Palestina. Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo was instead filmed in rural Southern Italy, with the region of Basilicata ‘standing in’ for Palestine. Sontag, Susan (2003), Regarding the Pain of Others, 91–2, London.

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Maud Jacquin – ‘Overexposed, like an X-ray’: The politics of corporeal vulnerability in Sandra Lahire’s experimental cinema

‘Overexposed, like an X-ray.’ This line is borrowed from a poem by Sylvia Plath whose life and writings have had a considerable influence on Sandra Lahire’s oeuvre, even inspiring her final trilogy Living on Air (1991 to 1999). It crystallizes some of the formal and thematic concerns at the core of Lahire’s films by expressing a sense of profound vulnerability through an image that evokes the intersection of the body with technology. Sandra Lahire was one of Britain’s boldest and most important experimental feminist and queer filmmakers. Like many of her contemporaries who started making films in the 1980s, she entered the world of experimental cinema through the recently established and truly innovative film and media departments at Central St Martins and the Royal College of Art in London where she studied with such ground-breaking film-makers as Malcolm Le Grice, Lis Rhodes and Tina Keane. Simultaneously, she started working in the context of the London FilmMakers’ Co-operative (LFMC), an artist-led organization founded in 1966, which brought together the activities of film production, distribution and exhibition. Despite the relatively small corpus of work that she left behind – she made ten 16mm films between 1984 and 2001 – Lahire expanded the boundaries of what feminist cinema could be by challenging established categories (in particular the separations between personal and documentary, narrative and non-narrative, the body and language), forging a singular film language that fused formal experimentation with socio-political commentary. In her work, and particularly in her films from the 1980s, which are the focus of this essay, Lahire examined the many ways in which the female body is exposed, trapped and infiltrated by the colonizing forces of our technological

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and patriarchal culture. Through a deep engagement with the materiality of both body and film, she explored the vulnerability of women’s bodies to various forms of patriarchal violence and vigorously denounced this violation of their bodily integrity. In addition, I will argue, her own experience of pain and bodily suffering led her to recognize the ethical and political value of acknowledging corporeal vulnerability as a shared aspect of human, but also non-human, life. Lahire’s first film Arrows (1984) explores both the artist’s own experience of anorexia and the cultural causes of an illness against which she struggled for many years until her untimely death in 2001. The film’s effect depends upon a metaphorical parallel, established from the first sequence, between the artist’s suffering body and images of caged birds. Other images such as those of Egyptian mummies or of the artist screaming in anguish like the vacanteyed character of Edvard Munch’s iconic painting, also convey a sense of imprisonment and suffocation, one heightened by the frenetic and often overwhelming rhythm of the editing and rostrum camera work. This sense of imprisonment not only evokes the anorexic’s relation to her body and to her condition, but also the oppression of a patriarchal society that pressures women into conforming to masculine desires. Many scenes in Arrows indeed underscore the role of the media in women’s body-image disorders, such as when magazine cut-outs of female models are animated to the rhythm of aerobic instructions. In addition, the gruesome depiction of invasive medical procedures such as liposuction, combined with the recurrence of grid-like patterns throughout the film, point to the complicity of medicine and science in the shaping and disciplining of women’s bodies. Lahire’s second film Edge (1986) expands on this idea of the infiltration and fragmentation of the female body by science and technology. A collage of excerpts from poems by Sylvia Plath recounting experiences of hospitalization and surgery (The Stones, 1959, The Surgeon at 2am, 1960–61 and Facelift, 1960–61) serves as the inspiration – and voice-over – for a fractured film that conveys, in a profoundly visceral way, the violent breach of bodily integrity entailed by the technologization of society. The film abounds with measuring and cutting instruments (compasses, rulers, razor blades, knives, etc.) and with female body fragments often shown through the screens of medical machines or among an accumulation of surgical tubes, gauze bandages and viscous materials evoking oozing wounds. Here, the female body is exposed in all its

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Figure 6.1 Sandra Lahire, Edge, 1986. Courtesy LUX, London.

vulnerability in the literal sense of the term – the word vulnerable indeed stems from the Latin word vulnus meaning wound (see Figure 6.1). Women’s corporeal vulnerability and exposure to techno-patriarchal culture is also at the heart of Lahire’s four films on nuclear power, which, with their focus on female workers, echoed the feminist discourses circulating in women’s anti-nuclear activism in the 1980s.1 Whether they are operators at nuclear power stations (Terminals, 1986 and Plutonium Blonde, 1987) or uranium miners in Canada (Uranium Hex, 1987 and Serpent River, 1989), the women workers in these films appear to be ensnared in technological apparatus of exploitation and control, as figured by barbed wire fences, looming helicopters, overpowering drilling machines or walls of computer screens. This sense of claustrophobic entrapment is conveyed through the images but also through the restless camera movements and the unnerving sounds of electronic machines and industrial work. In addition, Lahire’s anti-nuclear films call attention to the very real and harmful effects of computer screen rays and nuclear radiation on women’s bodies. In all of them, voices of women and children describe their heightened exposure to the risks of lung cancer, miscarriage, Down’s syndrome or neurological damage, while deeply affecting images and sounds attempt to give tangible form to this intangible threat. In Terminals, for instance, the film-maker draws the names of radioactive elements, as well as arrows pointing at her breasts on her own vulnerable

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Figure 6.2 Sandra Lahire, Terminals, 1986. Courtesy LUX, London.

naked body (see Figure 6.2). In Plutonium Blonde and Uranium Hex, the acidhued smoke clouds appearing near people and the incessant crackling noises on the soundtrack materialize the chemicals’ invisible circulation and their contamination of workers’ bodies. In Lahire’s films on nuclear power, the ‘overexposure’ of Plath’s poem quite literally becomes that of the women’s bodies affected by radiation. But this term also evokes light’s inscription of the image onto the celluloid and thus the material processes of film-making. As I mentioned earlier, Lahire was part of the LFMC, where she worked alongside film-makers such as Jean Matthee, Anna Thew and Tina Keane with whom she collaborated on several occasions. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, the LFMC was the anchor of a vibrant film-making movement, characterized by a shared commitment to experiment with the language of cinema and, for a majority of film-makers, to explore the nature and materiality of film. In her work, Lahire arguably adopts the vocabulary of this material exploration of cinema – superimposition, re-filming, colour inversion, changes of speed, etc. – to articulate her own conception of film as a body, itself subjected to various intrusive interventions and exposed in its vulnerability. Here, the exposure (both literal and figurative) of the film’s body comes to reflect the female body’s exposure to patriarchal power.

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In Edge, for example, Lahire’s style of editing cuts like the scalpel of a surgeon. Images follow one another at a frenzied, spasmodic rhythm; the body of the film is sliced to pieces, left in a state of dismemberment. Several times, the screen is entirely covered with gauze bandages as if to protect the underlying image. Accompanied by the sound of a heartbeat as heard through a doppler machine, the film-maker’s hands appear over the dressing and make an incision, letting some blood flow out. The body of the film becomes one with that of the female patient, as the protective surface is breached, and the boundary between interior and exterior dissolves. In the nuclear trilogy, film is also conceived as a vulnerable body but this time through the act of being burnt rather than cut up. Echoing the way that the nuclear workers are harmed by penetrating radiations, the filmstrip is constantly overexposed, eroded to the point of the image’s neardisappearance. Finally, through the negative and acid-coloured shots that recur throughout, Lahire’s 1980s films evoke the imagery of X-ray and MRI machines. Actual radiographic images also appear in several of the films, and once again present a form of bodily exposure not only to electromagnetic radiations but also to the penetration of the medical gaze – a theme taken up explicitly in Edge but that traverses Lahire’s entire oeuvre. Through her singular use of experimental film techniques, Lahire thus conveys a visceral sense of women’s embodied vulnerability to various forms of patriarchal (and technological) violence. In so doing, she hoped to help ‘the silent scream become audible’ and encourage the fight for women’s rights to control their own bodies.2 But there is something else at work in Lahire’s films that resonates with a different (and not necessarily contradictory) feminist position on vulnerability that has emerged in recent years: an intuition, presumably connected to her life-long suffering from anorexia, that the genuine acknowledgement of one’s own bodily vulnerability can become the ground for an ethical relationship to the other.3 In Undoing Gender and Precarious Life, both written in 2004, partially in response to the United States’ highly militarized reactions to 9/11, Judith Butler argues that the experience of corporeal vulnerability does not only imply an acute sense of powerlessness and dispossession – one that can generate pain, fear and rage – but also the visceral recognition of the co-implication and mutual exposure of bodies. Without denying the traumatic impact of terrorist attacks and other violent actions, she contends that one’s capacity to viscerally extrapolate the vulnerability of others

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from one’s own experience of vulnerability can prompt an ethical response and become the foundation of a different kind of politics. Butler writes: Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for nonmilitary political solutions, just as denials of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery [. . .] can fuel the instruments of war. We cannot will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability itself.4

To ‘attend to’ and ‘abide by’ her corporeal vulnerability is precisely what Sandra Lahire did in Arrows, exactly twenty years before Butler wrote these lines. And like the American philosopher, this experience seems to have enabled her to recognize that the fragility and porosity of her body ‘establishes a field of ethical enmeshment with others and a sense of disorientation for the firstperson, that is, the perspective of the ego’.5 Indeed, through language and through elaborate montages of images and sounds, Lahire manages to convey an embodied understanding that her own corporeal vulnerability is a channel to other suffering bodies – anorexic bodies like hers, but also less close ones who suffer from famine, war or the inconceivable horrors of the Holocaust. ‘I am so aware of my body. It hurts . . . If only I was not alone in this big empty skin. If only you could enter and comfort me.’6 Uttered by Lahire in the film’s voice-over, these poignant words express a piercing need for a bodily communion with another. Importantly, these words are not those of the filmmaker but of a teenager named Kate who responded to Lahire’s letter published in a feminist magazine in which she invited women to share their experiences of anorexia. In borrowing the words of another, and simply ending her reading with the sentence, ‘Dear Sandra, I’m Kate, seventeen, just getting over anorexia’, the film-maker expresses more than just the awareness that anorexia is both a personal and a political condition. She also performs something of the bodily encounter, the slippage between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ that the anorexic teenager so urgently calls for. This slippage between self and other is also reflected in the images. In one particularly striking sequence accompanying the voice-over reading of Sylvia Plath’s poem The Thin People, close-ups of Lahire’s emaciated body – her jutting spinal column, exposed ribs and raw-boned face – alternate with a blurry scene of a ragged woman staggering among what looks like

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barbed wire, a grainy newspaper photograph of a man’s face in agony and various images of Egyptian mummies. Like in Plath’s poem, and through the skilful use of visual parallels, Lahire’s own thinness is made to resonate with that of other vulnerable bodies.7 Judith Butler describes corporeal vulnerability as the condition of ‘being given over to the touch of the other’.8 In an almost literal manifestation of this idea, an animated scene shows photomaton portraits of Lahire being manipulated and later engulfed by large drawn hands. But in Arrows, the image of touch is also used to express the physical reaching out to the other that the recognition of this vulnerability might entail. During the sequence described above, and also during the reading of Kate’s stirring words, silhouettes of hands appear over the images to slowly touch and caress them. Here, Lahire’s recognition that our bodies expose us to one another fosters an attitude of care and empathy. As intimated by another appearance of a hand, but this time pressing under the transparent surface of the image, this physical reaching out also extends to anyone engaging with the film, whether the filmmaker or the film’s viewers. Indeed, and this is something that can be generalized to Lahire’s entire oeuvre, both the act of making and of viewing Arrows seems to emphasize the co-implication of bodies, their connection through surface contact. In the words of Sarah Pucill, Lahire’s fellow filmmaker and partner: ‘[I]n Sandra’s films, closeness is arrived at through focusing on texture, through the surface. Then, the inside and the outside are that much closer. The surface of the body is so much closer to the surface of someone else’s body.’9 In her films, Lahire uses an array of experimental film techniques such as colourization, time-lapse and multiple superimpositions done incamera or on the optical printer to create richly-textured, multi-layered surfaces. This emphasis on texture not only suggests a very physical, handson engagement with the material body of the film from the part of the filmmaker,10 it also appeals to the viewer’s sense of touch, activating what Laura U. Marks has described as a mode of ‘haptic visuality’ in which ‘the eyes themselves function like organs of touch’.11 In other words, Lahire’s focus on the film’s surface, on what Marks has called ‘the skin of the film’, establishes a sensuous or tactile exchange between the bodies of film, film-maker and viewer, thus underlying the fact that they physically impinge on and transform one another.12

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In Arrows, Lahire thus manages to convey a sense of her corporeal connection – or intercorporeality – with other vulnerable bodies by working with and through the material of film. The ethical nature of this connection is made even clearer in her subsequent films on the human and environmental cost of nuclear power. In these experimental documentaries, Lahire always puts herself in front of the camera, sometimes making brief appearances (as in Plutonium Blonde or Serpent River), other times playing a more central role (as in Uranium Hex). This refusal to maintain the supposedly objective distance with her subject can obviously be understood in the context of the discussions on the ethics of documentary film-making that were happening at the time, particularly in feminist circles.13 But there is more to it than this. When Lahire appears before the camera, it is often to perform her fleshy vulnerability and expose herself to the same physical dangers as the workers she films (see Plate 1.8). This exposure plays out in different registers across the trilogy. In Terminals, she appears outside a nuclear facility and engages in a disturbing dance with her naked skeletal body, partially wrapped in strips of linen and her head sometimes covered with a black bag. In Uranium Hex, she stages the contamination of her own body by filming herself in the uranium mine amid clouds of coloured smoke or drinking a glass of water as the voice-over states: ‘You can’t drink it because it’s filled with uranium; you can’t drink it to save your life.’14 And in Serpent River, in an attempt to share the bodily experience of the local native community, she walks through a zone identified as the ‘sulphur circle’, while images of devouring flames appear in superimposition (the accumulation of sulphur residue in areas inhabited by native communities produces skin burns and other harmful health effects). By unveiling her own corporeal vulnerability as a gesture of empathy, Lahire does more than search for a compassionate identification with her filmed subjects. She also suggests that crucial ethical and political possibilities emerge from the recognition that vulnerability is constitutive of subjectivity, resonating again with Butler’s view that ‘the way in which the body figures [. . .] in the struggles for a less oppressive social world [. . .] is precisely to underscore the value of being beside oneself, of being a porous boundary, given over to others’.15 But whereas Butler’s discussion of the ethics of corporeal vulnerability remains centred on human beings, in Lahire’s work the other to which the self ‘is given over’ extends to the non-human. Her films indeed underline the co-

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implication of human bodies not only with each other but also with animals, and with the environment. Both Arrows and Edge draw connections between the bodies of women and animals. In Arrows, for instance, a close-up on an owl’s talons is followed by a shot of Lahire’s hands clenched into claws while the bird’s round eyes echo the shape of the camera lens. Later, a frontal shot of Lahire pointing the camera at the viewer while slowly raising and lowering her elbows evokes the recurring scene of a seagull flapping its wings. But while Arrows establishes a largely metaphorical connection between women and birds – one that allows Lahire to express her feeling of imprisonment and her desire to find some kind of freedom through the act of film-making – in Edge, this relationship appears to be of a metonymic order, in the sense that metonyms express not just a similarity but a relation of contiguity between two terms. When in Edge Lahire superimposes her own screaming face with a seal’s head just after a scandalous scene of seal slaughter, she is not simply trying to voice her own and other women’s desperate feelings. She is also taking a stance against animal violence – a fact made even more obvious by the inclusion of footage of demonstrations against animal testing – and attempting to provoke an ethical recognition of one’s human body as made of the same flesh and exposed to the same vulnerability as that of animals. Throughout the film, images of cats with cables hooked to their heads, of monkeys howling in scientific labs and of massacred seals abandoned along beaches are interspersed with bloody scenes of medical procedures performed on women, thus underlining the community of suffering between human and non-human creatures. In addition, the film’s focus on the female body as meat – ‘a pathological salami’, says Plath in one of the recited poems – emphasizes the material sameness of human and animal bodies and draws attention to the contiguity existing between them. And here again, an ethical and political call stems from the awareness of this bodily contiguity. In the nuclear trilogy, this awareness extends to the body of the land in ways that resonate with current approaches to ecofeminism, attempting to undo the nature-culture divide that enables the oppression of both female and nonhuman bodies. These films, and particularly Serpent River on which I will now concentrate, bring to light the mutual vulnerabilities of human bodies and nature in the hope of transforming our relationship to both. In Material Feminisms (2007, edited with Susan Hekman) and Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (2010), feminist theorist Stacy Alaimo

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introduces the concept of trans-corporeality, which she defines as ‘the timespace where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from “nature” or “environment” ’.16 For her, the realization that human bodies are in constant interchange with the environment can only lead to a reconfiguration of nature as an active agent, which has fundamental ecological consequences. In her own words, ‘imagining human corporeality as transcorporeality [. . .] makes it difficult to pose nature as mere background for the exploits of the human since “nature” is always as close as one’s own skin.’17 Serpent River overflows with images that can be said to visually translate Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality. Among the most striking is that of a chest X-ray superimposed with the underground cavity of the uranium mine. As a group of workers move deeper into the mine to the sound of a heartbeat combined with machine drilling noise, it is as if foreign, maybe cancerous, agents had penetrated the X-rayed lung. Another evocative passage, which brings us back to the etymology of vulnerability in a wound, is when Lahire performs naked in front of a ‘wounded’ rock cliff while a miner explains in the voice-over: ‘[T]hat’s how the cut would break after it’s been blasted.’18 The filmmaker’s prominent spinal column visually echoes the deep crack in the rock, forming an image that epitomizes the common precariousness of body and land. More broadly, Lahire evokes the circulation of toxins in the bloodstream by representing the dispersion of radioactive substances through shots of trucks, trains and pipelines, and also of the river itself, which is often coloured in artificial hues, transforming the landscape into a vast venous network. It is highly significant that these trans-corporeal motifs appear in the context of a film exploring the noxious effects of uranium mining on the bodies of the workers and inhabitants of the region. This context indeed moves us beyond a metaphorical relation between body and land to a more concrete figuration of the actual but invisible material exchanges between people and places (for instance, the much higher rates of health problems because of the intensity of radiation generated by uranium exploitation; the chemical contamination of the water and soil as a result of the careless treatment of hazardous waste, etc.). In her writings, Alaimo has been especially concerned with ‘toxic bodies’ as she believes that they constitute a ‘particularly potent site for examining the ethical space of trans-corporeality’.19 Because tracing the effects of toxins forces us to recognize that one’s health and welfare is inseparable from that of the planet,

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‘toxic bodies may provoke material, trans-corporeal ethics that turn from the disembodied values and ideals of bounded individuals toward an attention to situated, evolving practices that have far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences for multiple peoples, species and ecologies’.20 Thirty years before Alaimo’s theoretical writings, and twenty years before Butler’s, Lahire’s relentless experience of bodily vulnerability gave her the intuition, or rather the corporeal knowledge, of the palpable interconnections between all things, human and non-human. Experimental cinema, and in particular the mode of film-making associated with the LFMC in the 1980s, provided her with the aesthetic vocabulary to express this contiguity between all sorts of bodies: her own body, the miner’s body, the body of the land but also the body of the film and that of the viewer. Through a hands-on engagement with the materiality of cinema and a focus on the film’s surface, Lahire managed to give form to a trans-corporeal space that acknowledges the porosity of both human and non-human bodies and places. Her films make clear that this is also a space of shared vulnerability, which can become the ground of a feminist ethics that is anchored in the body and does not take a fixed, bounded subject as its basis.

Notes 1 For a discussion on the intersections of feminism and anti-nuclear activism, see, for instance, the chapter ‘Personal Politics: Radical Feminism, Difference, and Anti-Nuclear Activism’, in Harvey, Kyle (2014) American Anti-Nuclear Activism, 1975–1990: The Challenge of Peace, 68–92, London and New York. 2 Sandra Lahire, as quoted from LUXonline, an online education resource for LUX, the British non-profit organization that distributes Lahire’s films. See http://www. luxonline.org.uk/artists/sandra_lahire/edge.html (accessed 28 March 2016). 3 In recent years, many feminist theorists in various disciplines (philosophy, law, political sciences and other fields) have explored the ethical consequences of the inherent vulnerability of the human body. See, for instance, Nussbaum, Martha. (2006), Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge; Fineman, Martha Albertson. (2008) ‘The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 20 (1): 1–23; or Cavarero, Adriana. (2008), Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, New York.

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For a rich introduction to the diversity of perspectives on this issue, see Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Rogers and Dodds, Susan (eds). (2014) Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, Oxford. Butler, Judith (2004), Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 29, London and New York. Butler, Judith (2004), Undoing Gender, 25, New York. From the author’s transcript of the script of Arrows. The image of the concentration camps and the Holocaust runs through The Thin People but also through many other poems by Plath, most notably Daddy (1962) and Lady Lazarus (1962). For a discussion of the various responses to Plath’s use of the Holocaust, see Nelson, Deborah (2006), ‘Plath: History and Politics’, in Jo Gill (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, 21–3, Cambridge. Butler. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, 31. Sarah Pucill in discussion with the author, February 2016. This relationship of physical proximity between the film-makers and their films had a particular significance for several women film-makers at the LFMC, including Annabel Nicolson, Sarah Pucill and Nina Danino. See for instance: Reynolds, Lucy (2009), British Avant-Garde Women Filmmakers and Expanded Cinema of the 1970s, Doctorate Thesis, University of East London; or Poole, Susanna (2003), Touching Camera, published on LUXonline: http://www. luxonline.org.uk/articles/touching_camera(1).html (accessed 28 March 2016). Marks, Laura U. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 162 (Durham and London). Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 162. On this subject, see ‘Part II: Filmmaker/Subject: Self/Other’ and ‘Part IV: Innovative (Auto)biographies’ in Waldman, Diane and Walker, Janet (1999), Feminism and Documentary, 117–183 and 267–338, Minneapolis. From the author’s transcript of the script of Uranium Hex. Butler, Undoing Gender, 25. Alaimo, Stacy (2009), ‘Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature’, in Alaimo, S and Hekman, S, (eds), Material Feminisms, 238, Bloomington. Ibid., 238. From the author’s transcript of the script of Serpent River. Alaimo, ‘Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature’, 260. Alaimo, Stacy (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, 22, Bloomington.

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Erika Balsom – ‘Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s’: Penelope Spheeris’s I Don’t Know

‘To outplay the paradigm is an ardent, burning activity.’1 Los Angeles, 1970. Framed in a medium shot and facing the camera against a black background, Jimmie stands skinny and topless, addressing a figure just off-screen: ‘Well, I went down to the telephone company, and they wouldn’t hire me because I had boobs. It was hilarious, really. The old lady came up to me. She said, “I’m sorry, Mary. You just won’t do.” She said, “Come back when you get the other half!” ’ The synchronized sound cuts out, giving way to the whimsical piano arpeggio of Charles Trenet’s ‘Frederica’. Jimmie’s laughter, no longer audible, is communicated only in facial expression. So begins I Don’t Know (1970), the first of two short films featuring Jimmie (Plate 2.1), which Penelope Spheeris made during her time as a graduate student at UCLA. Sometimes referred to as “he”, other times as “she”,2 sometimes as a man, and others as a girl, Jimmie – who is named Jenifer in the second film, Hats Off to Hollywood (1972) – belongs to an Angeleno demi-monde of queers, strippers and hustlers. Across a combined running time of forty-five minutes, in these two films, Spheeris intimately explores friendship, violence, love, money and sexuality in the lives of Jimmie/Jenifer and their two successive companions, Spheeris’s sister Linda, a lesbian, and Dana, a gay man. Echoing the non-binarism that characterizes its approach to sexuality, I Don’t Know is neither a fiction nor a documentary, as interview fragments and vérité footage are entangled with fictional re-enactments based on real events and fantastical stagings of desire. As Spheeris put it in a 1974 interview: ‘I’m extremely fascinated with recreating the real situation. To me, it seems that there is more

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challenge in that than there is in total dramatic film-making and so my films, thus far, have been an integration of the two techniques.’3 This beautifully uncategorizable film is at once tender, funny, ridiculous and utterly serious. It is also deeply feminist, despite the fact that it is situated at a significant distance from the orthodox second-wave feminism one associates with Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and refrains from overtly addressing the feminist movement. The depicted milieu and performance styles of I Don’t Know most recall a cross between, on the one hand, what Jonas Mekas called the ‘Baudelairean cinema’ of Jack Smith and Ron Rice4 and, on the other, the performative interviews of Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), both products of the New York underground of the 1960s. This is a far cry from the white, heterosexual, middleclass feminism of, for instance, the collaborative installation Womanhouse (1972), organized by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in a vacant house in Hollywood. Chicago and Schapiro’s all-female class at CalArts worked together on the undertaking, with the teachers conducting consciousness-raising sessions and espousing non-hierarchical pedagogical methods that Schapiro described as ‘womb-like’.5 As documented in Johanna Demetrakas’s film Womanhouse (1974), on which Spheeris worked as a production assistant, the installation transformed the house into an interrogation of bourgeois domesticity, marriage, maternity, beauty and adornment – all taken as representative of ‘women’s’ experience under patriarchy. Despite its central importance to feminist art history, seen from the vantage point of the present, it is difficult not to understand Womanhouse as exemplary of second-wave feminism’s embrace of ‘woman’ as a falsely universalizing category. Eager to see ‘woman’ as a unifying ground that might serve as the foundation of a feminist politics, the artists of Womanhouse posited a normative form of female experience that was in fact a highly particularized subject position marked by white, heterosexual, cis-gendered, class privilege. Schapiro wrote that the exhibition adopted an ‘archetypal’ framework in its approach to femininity, suggesting a collectively shared experience or perhaps even, to invoke the Jungian sense of the term, something universal and archaic, beyond history.6 However, as Temma Balducci admits, reflecting on the exhibition, ‘while attempting to speak for “woman”, these artists were voicing the concerns more specifically related to their racial, class, and sexual positioning in the late sixties and early seventies.’7

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What are the dangers of assuming a unified and unproblematized category of ‘woman’ as the foundation of a feminist art practice, or a feminist politics more broadly? Judith Butler reminds us that ‘subjects are constituted through exclusion, that is, through the creation of a domain of deauthorized subjects, presubjects, figures of abjection, populations erased from view’.8 Even if the subject of ‘woman’ is constituted in the name of feminist resistance, as it was in the case of Womanhouse, it nonetheless partakes of such exclusions and the exercise of power they imply. Deauthorized subjects here included people of colour, transgendered individuals and the working class. Although Butler acknowledges that it may be in some instances politically necessary to maintain the category of women, in the domain of philosophy – and, one must add, artistic practice – this category must be constantly opened to negotiation and unfixed so as to mitigate the normalizing and exclusionary operations of identitarian logic. Such a project would not be counter-feminist, but on the contrary the basis for a feminist politics; after all, it is precisely the dominance of identity over difference, and the prevalence of binary thought that have historically precipitated women’s oppression. As Butler writes: If there is a fear that, by no longer being able to take for granted the subject, its gender, its sex, or its materiality, feminism will founder, it might be wise to consider the political consequences of keeping in their place the very premises that have tried to secure our subordination from the start.9

The aim here is not to fault Womanhouse for its blindness to privilege or lack of investment in a post-structuralist critique of identity that would later gain ground. Rather, Womanhouse must be seen as emblematic of the convictions and shortcomings of hegemonic feminism in the early 1970s, and as casting into relief the radical difference and heterodoxy of I Don’t Know, a film that has never entered the canon of feminist art or cinema. Rather than make recourse to a stable subject of ‘woman’, I Don’t Know marshals what Roland Barthes, in his 1977 to 1978 Collège de France lectures, called ‘the Neutral’: in content and form, it ‘baffles the paradigms’ of gender and genre, refusing to repeat and reinforce the normalizing binaries of man/woman and documentary/fiction.10 Whereas gender and genre share an etymology leading to the Latin genus, suggesting the taxonomic division into kind – always an act of ideology and power – the Neutral is derived from the Latin neuter, meaning ‘neither of the

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two’. Casting off the oppressive, patriarchal logic of non-contradiction, the Neutral opts out of the either/or and refuses rigid governance in favour of an unsettled movement that teaches one how, in Barthes’s words, ‘to live according to nuance’ – which is to say, ethically.11 The binaries of man/woman and documentary/fiction reify each term as a stable unity, suppressing their internal difference and policing their boundaries with an exclusionary force. Perhaps it is better to leave identitarian certainty and its promises of conceptual mastery behind and instead wager, with Spheeris and her characters, that saying ‘I don’t know’ can constitute what Butler calls the ‘ungrounded ground’ of an emancipatory and intersectional feminist politics.12 *

*

*

Following Jimmie’s opening screen test, I Don’t Know introduces Linda, its second protagonist and sometimes narrator (Figure  7.1). As Trenet’s music continues in the background, Linda describes her relationship with Jimmie in the voice-over with a seamless blend of irony and sincerity, playing up the stereotypical role of a woman in love: ‘What could be more perfect than love with Jimmie. Man together with woman, just how Mother Nature ordered it. Finally, I’d fallen in love with a man. It was a way out. It was the last chance for both of us. Of course he had problems, you might say mostly with his identity. But I had similar problems. Somehow I knew we could help each other.’ It is impossible to write off these statements as a mere mockery of compulsory heterosexuality; the film’s loose narrative arc follows Linda’s love for Jimmie. And yet, the kitsch romanticism of the Parisian chanson on the soundtrack contrasts sharply with the barking dogs, brick walls and chain-link fences of Los Angeles seen on-screen, underlining the irony of Linda’s proclamation that this relationship between a lesbian and a gender nonconformist who often passes as cis-female might be ‘just how Mother Nature ordered it’. These opening scenes establish an intimacy between Linda and Jimmie, albeit one that is not necessarily of a sexual nature – throughout the film Jimmie repeatedly makes reference to desiring men – while also serving to relay a series of anecdotes about Jimmie’s ability to pass. The contrapuntal use of nondiegetic sound serves as an effective analogy of the film’s tonal mingling of tenderness, laughter, joy and play-acting with the testimonies of discrimination, physical violence, suicidal impulses and medical options for reassignment

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Figure 7.1 Penelope Spheeris, I Don’t Know, 1970. Courtesy Penelope Spheeris and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

surgery that Jimmie relays throughout. Moreover, it establishes from the film’s opening moments the central role that non-diegetic music will play in framing and, in some instances, destabilizing what is presented diegetically. The exaggerated performance of traditional gender roles one finds in Linda’s opening monologue is redoubled in exaggerated fashion with the introduction of her and Spheeris’s brother, Andy, once again with the help of non-diegetic music. His first appearance lasts but a brief moment, when he can be glimpsed smiling and holding sound recording equipment in the background of a shot, suggesting a complicity with the film’s production that belies the trans-/ homophobic macho persona he adopts in a successive scene that features him alone. Wearing a denim vest, he leans over the open hood of a car. As ‘Angel Baby’ by Rosie and the Originals plays on the soundtrack, Spheeris prompts him from off-screen: ‘Tell me what you think of Jimmie.’ He replies, ‘He’s a faggot, queer, you know, weird, strange.’ With a smile on his face, he goes on to explain all the reasons he finds Jimmie disgusting, ending: ‘If I were in his position, I’d kill myself.’ On the one hand, this monologue can be understood

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as an absolutely straightforward delivery of a hateful, prejudiced attitude, a first-person exemplification of the violence Jimmie describes experiencing. On the other, Spheeris does not allow her brother’s statements to be taken entirely at face value. His previous appearance as a smiling soundman undercuts the authenticity of this performance of hate, while the posed miseen-scène of working on a classic car paired with the early 1960s pop of ‘Angel Baby’ recalls the homoerotic send-up of ostensibly straight subculture found in another Los Angeles film, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963). As Juan Suárez has put it, Anger’s film abides by a regime of ‘male display’ and plays with ‘mobility of meaning, which allows for the inflection of popular artefacts with gay significations’.13 In I Don’t Know, Andy’s apparent straightness and the apparent straightforwardness of his presence in the film are multiply undermined: he is at once happy collaborator (as a sound man) and odious bigot; he is an emblem of hetero-masculinity, yet framed as the object of a queer/female gaze, with his butch persona foregrounded as a cultivated pose rather than essentially given; and he inhabits the documentary form of the interview, yet with its typical truth claims blatantly in question. In Andy, Spheeris constructs even her most seemingly normative character in such a manner that he tumbles out of the binaries that constitute him. The most assertive documentary passage to be found in I Don’t Know comes at its halfway point. None of the film’s characters appear in this roughly one minute of handheld footage, shot at L.A.’s first Pride Parade. Held on 28 June 1970 on Hollywood Boulevard, the event was attended by a crowd of more than 1,000. People fill the streets, arm in arm. Some hold banners (‘I’m proud to be a star in Pat Rocco movies’, ‘Freakin’ fag revolution’), and others mug for the camera. Linda’s voice-over returns to speak of Jimmie: ‘The day of the first gay liberation parade, I called him up and asked if he was going. He laughed and asked, “Why should I? I wish them a lot of luck. I’m already liberated.” ’ The opening chords of Neil Young’s ‘After the Gold Rush’ fill the soundtrack, but Linda continues: ‘I learned later that at the time of the parade, he was in the back of an ambulance because he’d taken too many sleeping pills.’ Once more, the film introduces a schism between an utterance and its meaning, here relying on Linda’s narration to supply information that complicates – which is not to say negates – Jimmie’s initial statements about their non-attendance at the parade. In keeping with the tremendous importance accorded to

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non-diegetic music throughout the film, it is remarkable that this sequence concludes with the final line of Young’s first verse, ‘Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.’ Unlike the camp recoding of ‘Angel Baby’ earlier in the film, Young’s lyrics resonate with a palpable sincerity. It immediately chimes with Linda’s ironic invocation of Mother Nature in her opening monologue, while signalling the extent of the film’s investment in an anti-essentialist conception of gender. Mother Nature, so long presumed to be the ground of identity and key to some iterations of second-wave feminism, is here recognized to have fled. She is acknowledged as little more than an oppressive ruse. This midway interlude pulls back from the individual experiences of Jimmie and Linda to situate them within a broader context of shifting social formations and emancipatory struggle. This passage anchors I Don’t Know in historical actuality, but amid these documentary images, fiction remains both present and useful: Jimmie’s overdose reminds one of the extent to which the liberatory promises of the movement would not be fulfilled easily or equally. The documentary footage of the Pride Parade offers no simple claim to vérité authenticity; as it is narrativized as the site of Jimmie’s absence, it becomes part of a fiction. Positioned after the quasi-staged scenarios of the first half of the film, the claim to reality found in this sequence surfaces already under erasure, as if to suggest a second vanquishing of a different Mother Nature: just as genitalia cannot provide the foundation of the discourse of identity, documentary truth is not simply there to stand as self-evident ground of filmic discourse. In both gender and genre, the contingencies of construction replace the eternally given. In the subsequent sequences, Spheeris asserts a distinct presence as an offscreen interviewer, prompting and interrogating her subjects much as Shirley Clarke speaks to Jason Holliday in Portrait of Jason. If the interview is often thought of as a technique designed to excavate a pre-existing truth, for Spheeris it functions quite differently: It emerges as a means of producing truth out of a performative encounter. In a set-up that will be repeated mutatis mutandis in Hats Off to Hollywood, Linda and Jimmie sit together naked in a bath, washing each other and discussing their participation in the pornography industry (Figure  7.2). Spheeris enquires from off-screen about the roles each person plays, the gendered pay differentials, and Jimmie’s lack of fit in this hierarchy. When Jimmie mentions that porn directors like to ‘shock everybody’ by

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Figure 7.2 Penelope Spheeris, I Don’t Know, 1970. Courtesy Penelope Spheeris and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

‘exposing [their] true nature’, Spheeris asks what this nature might be. Jimmie responds, invoking the film’s title, ‘I don’t know yet, I haven’t figured it out.’ It is notable that Jimmie does not express a conviction of being a woman; to do so would be to remain imprisoned within the exclusionary categories of an identitarian logic. In place of the certainty that so often serves to police who is included and who is excluded, Jimmie baffles the paradigm, evading the either/or. Then, in the apartment’s kitchen with the film crew visibly seated in the background, a seemingly staged argument occurs between Andy and Jimmie. Jimmie pulls a knife on Andy, threating castration, and mocks him about his lack of affairs with women. With klieg lights and recording equipment present behind the central figures, the characters have what appears to be a serious and violent argument while wearing smiles on their faces, as the handheld camera bobs around the apparently improvised scene. From off-screen, Spheeris urges the two to kiss, a direction both reject. The room erupts into laughter, though

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one senses that Andy is quite serious when he proclaims: ‘I’m no faggot.’ He attempts to get the cameraman to take his place for the screen kiss, but the latter replies, ‘You pussy, I’m shooting this!’ Perhaps more than any other, the sequence’s intensely peculiar tone is exemplary of the film, created as it is out of a mélange of play-acting and sincere feeling, and insisting that the two cannot necessarily be separated. Across a chasm from the non-interventionist ethos that characterized many American documentaries during the period (particularly Direct Cinema), I Don’t Know wilfully inhabits a performative mode wherein, as Stella Bruzzi has claimed, films foreground ‘construction and artificiality’ and do ‘not seek to mask their inherent instability but rather . . . acknowledge that performance – the enactment of documentary specifically for the camera– will always be the heart of the non-fiction film’.14 Although the performative mode has a long history in documentary film-making and has been ubiquitous in recent years, I Don’t Know’s deployment of such strategies is particularly notable in that they serve to buttress the film’s effort to unground personal and sexual identity from a constative referentiality founded in pregiven categories and/or biology. Whereas the bathtub sequence stepped out of gender binaries, this sequence accomplishes the same conceptual move with regard to genre. Though I Don’t Know ostensibly focuses on Jimmie, it concludes with Linda, after Jimmie has left for New York to go back to a former abusive boyfriend. The closing sequences of the film chart the dissolution of Linda’s hopes for a sexual/romantic relationship with Jimmie, culminating in a final joyride around Los Angeles on a chopper motorcycle Linda fixed up as a present. Alone at home with Jimmie gone, Linda muses in voice-over about what will happen to her next, relating that she is in need of work and will most likely have to dance topless. She dances around her room with her shirt off, her brother Andy visible in the background just out the window, where he is working on his car. Rather than imitating the movements of a conventional stripper, Linda butches it up, flexing her muscles and flapping her arms like chicken wings to the tune of Joe Cocker’s ‘That’s Your Business Now’, at one point directly returning the look of the camera with a smile. When set with Spheeris’s images, the lyrics of the song evoke the close connection between commodification and the female body, while also speaking to notions of autonomy, self-possession and agency. The melancholic acoustic guitar of

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Mungo Jerry’s ‘Tramp’ replaces Cocker’s jangly piano, as Linda appears clothed once more in a white lace blouse. She looks in the mirror and, quite differently to her dance a moment before, performs the stereotypical role of the seductive woman, running her hands through her hair. ‘Sometimes I wonder who I am’, she says in voice-over. As she kisses her hand, a match-on-action connects to what is ostensibly the reverse shot of Linda, looking back at her from the position of the mirror. Though we expect to find the long-haired woman in the lace blouse, the screen is filled with a close-up of a man with a handlebar moustache – Dana, who will co-star in Hats Off to Hollywood. ‘I’m beginning to realize’, Linda continues in the voice-over, ‘I don’t know.’ We return to her image in front of the mirror, before she walks away and sits on the sofa, only to be replaced by Dana in a jump cut. She vanishes into the split second of the edit. Dana wears multiple bracelets and necklaces, as well as a kerchief over his hair secured with a metal headband. He recounts a story of Jimmie having a negative encounter with a woman ‘who didn’t understand why he was the way he was’ and insists that he is Jimmie’s only friend and that he misses them. The film ends with no further sight or sound of Linda. Much of I Don’t Know focuses on Jimmie’s ability to pass as a cis-female, but in its concluding minutes the film turns to a different interrogation of identity. In the bathtub, Jimmie had uttered ‘I don’t know’ in response to a question about their ‘true nature’; now it is Linda’s turn to leave this question similarly unresolved. After subverting the conventions of topless dancing with a display of masculine prowess and subsequently playing ultra-femme to her mirror image – as if to reflexively replay a classical scenario of female narcissism – Linda disappears through the magic of cinema, perhaps metamorphosing into a gay man. Her disappearance, like so many of the film’s gestures, cannot be resolved into one unitary meaning. It would be easy to see these final moments of I Don’t Know as definitively leaving the film’s grounding in actuality to enter the realm of fantasy. Understood in this way, the sequence would suggest Linda’s own cross-gender identification and foreground the struggles with identity she mentions at the beginning of the film. On the other hand, Dana – who appears unnamed in I Don’t Know – is not just any man, not just a mental projection, but the main protagonist of Hats Off to Hollywood. It is he who will star alongside Jimmie/Jenifer as their friend/roommate/pimp in the later film, taking Linda’s place in a new iteration of the bathtub conversation. In the

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closing moments of I Don’t Know, Dana might not be a differently embodied incarnation of Linda after all, but simply the introduction of a new character who will become central in the film to come. Which is it? Once again, one must say with Spheeris, Linda and Jimmie, ‘I don’t know.’ Penelope Spheeris is best known as the director of Wayne’s World (1992) and secondarily the Decline of Western Civilization trilogy (1981, 1988, 1998), documentaries charting the Los Angeles punk and metal music scenes. We are far from the feminist canon, indeed. When asked in the 1990s, ‘Would you say your films are made from a woman’s point of view?’, Spheeris responded: ‘I’m always being criticized because I don’t make films that are real sensitive to women’s problems and don’t deal with women in a way that some people think I should deal with them. But the way I see it is that it’s not a woman or a man, it’s a person.’15 It would be easy to read this statement as an evasion of feminist commitment, but I Don’t Know suggests something else. Though perhaps the same claims cannot be made for Spheeris’s later and more commercial work, in this early film the rejection of identitarian categories like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ can be understood as part of a feminist politics that takes up the imperative to resist the violence of binarism and the normalizing, exclusionary gestures that accompany the positing of any unified subject. At a time when such concerns were decidedly marginalized, Spheeris’s engagement with transgender issues and her insistence on the performativity of gender ask us to reconsider how we periodize feminism’s ‘waves’ and prompt us to acknowledge the coexistence of multiple contemporaneous and, at times, incompatible feminist formations. I Don’t Know levies a demand for intersectionality and inclusiveness – something of particular relevance today, as the gains made in transgender recognition have been met by the unsettling rise of a trans-exclusionary feminism that must be recognized as, in fact, no feminism at all.

Notes 1 Barthes, Roland (2005), The Neutral, Rosalind Krauss and Denis Hollier (trans), 7, New York. 2 In neither film does Jimmie/Jenifer express a preferred pronoun. For this reason, this text will refer to this figure using ‘they’ as a gender-neutral singular pronoun.

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3 Spheeris, Penelope (1973), quoted in: Tom Birns, ‘Report from the UCLA Film-Makers’, American Cinematographer, 436. 4 See, Mekas, Jonas (1966), ‘On the Baudelairean Cinema’, Village Voice, 2 May 1966, reprinted in (1972) Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959– 1971, 85–6. New York: MacMillan. 5 Schapiro, Miriam (Spring 1972), ‘The Education of Women as Artists: Project Womanhouse’, Art Journal, 31 (3): 268. 6 Schapiro, Miriam (Spring–Summer 1987) ‘Recalling Womanhouse’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 15 (1–2): 28. 7 Balducci, Temma (Fall–Winter 2006), ‘Revisiting “Womanhouse”: Welcome to the (Deconstructed) “Dollhouse” ’, Woman’s Art Journal, 27 (2): 22. 8 Butler, Judith (1992) ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism” ’, in J. Butler and J. W. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, 13, New York. 9 Ibid., 19. 10 Barthes, The Neutral, 6. 11 Ibid., 11. 12 Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism”, 16. 13 Suárez, Juan (1996), Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in 1960s Underground Cinema, 173 and 175, Bloomington. 14 Bruzzi, Stella (2006), New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition, 186–7, London. 15 Spheeris, Penelope (1993), quoted in J. Cole and H. Dale (eds), Calling the Shots: Profiles of Women Filmmakers, 221, Kingston: Quarry Press.

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May Adadol Ingawanij – Aesthetics of potentiality: Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Essay Films

Nguyen Trinh Thi is one of Vietnam’s leading contemporary artists and the founder of the independent documentary and experimental film collective Hanoi Doclab.1 Assembling found and created footage into rhythmic, dispersive and intimate audiovisual bodies, Nguyen creates forms that are essayistic insofar as they enunciate the hesitant, incomplete and unending qualities of the act and duration of thinking. This chapter explores the aesthetics of her essay films and relates them to the question of artistic potentiality, approaching Vietnam as an emblematic location in contemporary art. It reads Nguyen’s essay films as works that are shaped in response to the post-Doi Moi era.2 Some of the features of this era are the growth of the art market and the culture industry, expanding alongside a pervasive yet unstable censorship and surveillance of spheres of media and cultural production and circulation. Furthermore, arts and cultural practices have become key sites for reckoning with the legacies and residues of the anti-colonial struggle and the Vietnam War. In describing Nguyen’s essay films as an aesthetics of potentiality, my aim is to make a connection between the heterogeneous tendencies of the essay film and the question of art’s capacity for collective life and autonomy, as refracted through the legacy of the instrumentalization of art in Vietnam’s modern history.

Artistic practice in post-Doi Moi Vietnam Born in Hanoi in 1973, Nguyen studied in the USA in a range of disciplines including journalism, photography and ethnographic film before returning to the city to establish a widely exhibited3 artistic practice encompassing found

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footage videos exhibited in multiple formats, observational and experimental documentaries, photographic works and intermedial installations and performances. Integral to Nguyen’s artistic practice are the curatorial and pedagogical activities of Hanoi Doclab, which she founded in 2009. The collective’s activities, such as its organization of screening programmes showing a diverse range of films, or its film-making workshops (including one led by Harun Farocki shortly before his death), might be regarded as a tacit form of activism. Or perhaps more precisely, Nguyen’s artistic practice combines aspects of grassroots media production and activism with informal pedagogy intended to address an absence. Motivating her initiation of Hanoi Doclab is the paucity of artistic and cultural spaces and agencies in Vietnam that explore, document and create artistic and audiovisual forms to represent everyday lives and lived historical experiences, especially ones that contradict or elude official images and ideas of national history, identity and culture.4 The significance of Nguyen’s mode of artistic practice, with its combination of essayistic audiovisual production and curatorial and pedagogical activities, might be grasped more precisely by comparing her practice with pre-existing modalities of artistic labour and professionalization in Vietnam’s modern art history. In her ground-breaking study of painters in Hanoi from the colonial era to the present, art historian Nora Taylor observes the following significant changes.5 With the long era of war after the declaration of independence, the subjectivity of the professional artist was redefined away from the influences of the early twentieth century colonial era, whose art school aimed to train locals to become westernized, modern, professional artists. In the eyes of the socialist state, artists were state-sponsored workers in the service of nation-building and national liberation, and subject to the state’s cultural policies.6 Those artists who did not want to comply were marginalized from the institutions of arts education and administration that controlled the distribution of stipends and supplies of art materials. However, Taylor emphasizes that the boundary between being the state art worker and the non-state-sponsored artist was often arbitrary, and artists in this era shared the experience of being subjected to the state’s cultural policies. After reunification, the launch of the Doi Moi reforms from the mid-1980s brought artistic production into the orbit of the global capitalist art market. Significantly, this globalized period has brought about ambivalent changes to

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the production and valuation of art and to the mode of professionalization of artists. For some artists, marketization has earned them financial independence from state patronage. Yet the market valuation of artworks, and participation in market relations with Western collectors, galleries, museums or arts institutions, has created another structure of control and dependency.7 To be an artist in the post-Doi Moi conjuncture is to inhabit multiple force fields of political control and market liquidity, constituting at times overlapping and divergent conceptions of art and non-art.8

The face of Nhu Quynh The formal signatures of Nguyen’s essay films, such as Landscape Series #1 (2013), Song to the Front (2011), Letters from Panduranga (2015) and Eleven Men (2016), are their serial and repetitive structure, editorial assemblage, and female bodily and facial gestures. In the related works Song to the Front and Eleven Men, Nguyen creates gestures through assembling fragments of Vietnamese feature films spanning around four decades, starring the actress Nhu Quynh. Propaganda and promotional films from the wartime era of state-sponsored studio filmmaking in Vietnam have tended to be consigned to obscurity. Scholarly and critical attention have turned instead to art house and transnational genre films produced in the present that respond to, and are shaped by, the force fields of the post-Doi Moi era.9 In this respect, Nguyen’s found footage video series makes a provocative aesthetic move in using the digitally circulated archive of Vietnamese state-sponsored cinema. Here, her appropriation of Vietnam’s sponsored social realist films resonates with strategies adopted by artists such as Andrei Ujica, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Mila Turajlic and Kim Kyung-man, to reclaim and, in some instances, redeem propaganda film archives from the Cold War and the Communist eras. The significance of Nguyen’s reassembling of fragments of social realist films from the Vietnamese film archive lies in the way she suspends their narrative power and instrumental logic. Although the social realist melodramas channel the affective intensity and utopian longing of popular cinema to the political end of creating socialist-nationalist subjects, Nguyen transforms these ideologically instrumentalized images of intense and eroticized emotions into materials for creating gestures.10

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Using such technical means of reassembling found footage such as jump cuts, rapid montage and graphic match cuts, Nguyen’s five-minute video Song to the Front looks intensely at the melodramatic scenes and close ups of the faces of the young protagonists of a black and white 1973 melodrama film that was made in the social realist tradition by the Vietnam Feature Film Studio. The basis of narrative pleasure of this film is the libidinous celebration of the heroic youth who regains his sight to fight for the socialist nation. The last shot of the video presents the most clichéd of the social realist trope, a close up of the young soldier’s face with his head held high and his chin tilted slightly upward. He is casting his eyes to the left off-screen, looking into the distant with a serene smile. The glowing surface and simple contour of his face, enlarged in the close up, affectively mobilizes the spectator to look with him confidently into the future. The soundtrack of the video at this point shifts from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring to the rousing trumpet march music of the original film soundtrack. Nguyen uses the jump cut and quick montage to accentuate the iconographic fixity of the young soldier as a heroic type in nationalist fiction. He regains his sight in order to become a mechanical body. Just before the iconographic last shot there are four jump cuts showing the soldier firing a machine gun to a target off-screen. In every shot his pressing of the trigger itself triggers a full-mouthed smile. The instrumentality of meaning of these images contrasts with a far less readable freeze frame that occurs before the jump cuts; the close up that punctuates the dramatic last note of Stravinsky’s music. The young nurse, played by Nhu Quynh, looks like a porcelain doll with delicate eyes and mouth. The softness of her round face is accentuated by close-up shots on black and white film. The skin in close up becomes a tactile surface of youthful luminosity. Her fictional profession is a strongly symbolic one as the maternal giver of life. In nationalist melodrama the image of such a desirable beauty functions as a metonym for the strength of nationalistic love, driving the hero to devote himself to the cause of national liberation. The gestural quality of Song to the Front comes from Nguyen’s re-editing and juxtaposing of the faces and bodies of the young nurse/Nhu Quynh and the young soldier. In a freeze frame we see a close up of the face of the actress (Figure  8.1), just in her late teens, in an almost frontal shot with her face turned slightly towards the right side of the screen. Her eyes are widened

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Figure 8.1 Nguyen Trinh Thi, Song to the Front, 2011. Courtesy the artist.

and there is a touch of a frown. Her mouth is slightly open and is a touch downturned. A shadow falls over the right half of her face. The expression stilled in the freeze frame is an involuntary reaction to something that remains off-screen. Although the young soldier gains his sight to look into the distance in anticipation of the glorious future, Nguyen’s video portrays the repeated gesture of the nurse/Nhu Quynh looking at and reacting to something offscreen. Compared to the presentation of the face and body of the soldier, Nguyen’s strategy of cutting, repeating and freeze-framing minute movements and changes coming into being on Nhu Quynh’s face makes visible those instants of erotic and affective tension while suspending the resolution or containment of that energy. A jump cut twice presents in slow motion the actress’s smiling upward glance. In the narrative economy of a social realist melodrama this would signify an erotically reciprocal return of the hero’s look. A look slowed down and repeated to create a jerky rhythm during the projection of Song to the Front holds in reserve the possibility of desire’s consummation, and at the same time it is gestural for its possibility of otherwise actualizing or prolonging the duration of its intensity. The gestural qualities of the video both suspend the original film’s ideological function, grounded in narrative pleasure, and at the same time invite tactile perception of the artistic labour and film-making skills that went into creating

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the symbolism of film propaganda, and the visual and affective power of the 1973 film.

Art and collective capacity The young Nhu Quyhn’s facial and bodily gestures from nearly five decades ago are preserved on film by the archiving of the Vietnam Feature Film Studio. More recently, to commemorate the film studio’s founding in the early 1950s, the DVD release of the original 1973 film enabled Nguyen to make Song to the Front. The material dimension of her work, apparent in the interlace stripes displayed when figures and objects move, indexes the present-day low-quality digital accessibility of the original film. Yet, as previously mentioned, Nguyen’s utilization of the material afterlife of the social realist melodrama as poor image is a provocation. Here, her strategy of dissembling and reassembling fragments from the original film creates an audiovisual body whose rhythm and energy is not channelled for ideological critique, nor is the essayistic assemblage an exercise of the will to retrospectively destroy the original film’s propagandistic power. This aspect of Song to the Front exemplifies what is perhaps the most significant dimension of Nguyen’s artistic practice. Along with curiosity, play and openness to chance, she often speaks of her interest in the possibility of collective existence as one of the impulses triggering her artistic experimentation.11 This interest should not be misunderstood as a symptom of nostalgia for previous forms of collective organization. Rather, the significance of her image-making processes enunciating the potentiality for collective life has to be thought of in relation to widespread mistrust of – and exhaustion with – state organization and enforcement of collectivization in present-day Vietnam; and the ensuing embrace of market individualism, partly as a desire to break with the ideological legacy of the wartime past. Here, Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of potentiality as the capacity to not do, which always co-exists with the capacity to do, is helpful for grasping the significance of Nguyen’s editorial assemblage as a mode of cinematic thinking about artistic labour and collective possibilities.12 As Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s feminist reading of Agamben’s concept puts it, potentiality exceeds

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historical realization, and the ambiguity between doing and not doing is distinct from acts of will, necessity and individual agency.13 Retaining the capacity to not do, rather than to will into being or to act upon a law, Agamben’s concept of potentiality is thus closely related to an idea of history as contingency, that is, a temporality that encompasses that which might have come to pass but did not, rather than a chronological succession of events and the realization of destiny or ideological power. In this sense the ambiguous capacity to not do, which exceeds historical actualization, signals the possibility of transformation and freedom. Accordingly, to remember the past could then imply the capacity to restore the possible within that which did come to pass. Recent film theoretical/philosophical reflections on Agamben’s work, such as those by Silvia Casini and Janet Harbord, address the relationship between cinema, potentiality and historical contingency. They dwell on aspects of audiovisual materiality, such as the capacity to repeat, stop, reframe, cut and transmit. They delineate the capacity of certain modes of films such as experimental or incomplete films to inhabit the contingent temporality of that which might have been and could become again.14 Nguyen’s gestural imagemaking process in Song to the Front resonates compellingly with this conceptualization of cinematic potentiality. Its transformation of Nhu Quyhn’s eroticized return of the look into a gesture of indeterminacy is an example of her artistic creation of a contingent image, one that signals collective life’s unrealized capacity. Nhu Quyhn’s look, now made gestural, signals a collective capacity for interrelation and reclamation of life, in excess of the unfolding of actual historical events of destruction and the instrumentalization of labour. More significantly still, in her recent essay film Letters from Panduranga Nguyen connects this cinematic potentiality and historical contingency to a female-orientated conception of deep time and relationality across expanded temporal scales. The film came into being with an initial idea triggered by a trip to Japan around the time of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The latter encouraged Nguyen to take an interest in the Vietnamese government’s plan to build two nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuan province in the south. This province stands on land that in antiquity had been part of Champa, a kingdom and culture that had extended its reach and movement of people across much of what is known as South East Asia today, as well as beyond.15 In present-day Vietnam, the province is populated by the Cham, who are recognized by the

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state within the circumscribed term of a minority ethnic group, rather than as an indigenous people with cultural ownership of their homeland based on ancestral ties. Nguyen took several trips to the region, initially with a group of artists, to spend time in the province and to connect with Cham intellectuals and activists. Her initial intention was to make a series of works with the group about the development of the plan to build nuclear power plants on this ancient land without consulting the local population. Letters from Panduranga begins with a poetic image of a rowboat bobbing in the sea in parallel with the horizontal frame line. Citing Chris Marker’s foundational essay film, Letters from Siberia (1957), a female voice (Nguyen’s own voice-over) reads in the Vietnamese language the start of a letter, ‘I’m writing you this letter from what seems like a distant land. She was once called Panduranga.’ The anonymous female voice seems to be an artist, or someone trying to find a way to tell a story, via making images, of the land that was once part of the Champa kingdom called Panduranga. The voice says that the more time she spends in this area the more she is drifting away from the initial interest that had brought her here, and instead she finds herself trying to take photographic portraits of people in the area. Later in the film she says she no longer knows what she is doing here. Her interlocutor takes the form of a male

Figure 8.2 Nguyen Trinh Thi, Letters from Panduranga, 2015. Courtesy the artist.

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voice. He seems to be an artist or image maker who is travelling across the central region collecting people’s stories and making images in areas bearing traces of historical conflicts such as the Truong Son mountain trail, a notorious route used to supply arms and supplies from North to South during the Vietnam War. Although the structure of epistolary exchange gives the impression that Letters from Panduranga is an intimate dialogue between a man and a woman across spatial and temporal distance, the strategy of enunciation of this work is one that refracts Nguyen’s biography and artistic subjectivity. This is hinted at when the male voice, recounting an incident, about being arrested for filming an interview with old women by the river, echoes Nguyen’s previous experience of arrest when shooting video footage for her documentary film, Chronicle of a Tape Recorded Over (2010). In their commentaries on Letters from Panduranga, Laura Rascaroli and Nora Taylor reflect on the film’s significance in relation to, respectively, the ethics of representing and speaking for marginalized people, and the historical and present-day silencing of the Cham people in regard to their cultural selfrepresentation.16 Nguyen did not set out to make an essay film but, after experimenting with several mediums and iterations, came to the realization that the essay film mode encouraged the creation of an appropriately dispersive and self-reflexive form for expressing ambivalent thoughts and feelings about her relationship as an outsider to the southern land and its Cham people. Rascaroli, in particular, draws attention to the film’s ethics of lyrically disjunctive textuality. She reads Nguyen’s film as exemplary of an essayistic mode whose intimate and disjunctive qualities, as figured in the split self of the authorial enunciation, highlight the defining characteristic of the essay film as an interstitial audiovisual text whose mode of narration and enunciation engenders epistemological uncertainty and self-reflexivity. The split authorial self is one of the strategies of self-reflexivity enacted by Nguyen, to think the possibility and impossibility of establishing the right distance and proximity to speak on the issue of the nuclear power plants on behalf of the local Cham inhabitants. Rascaroli’s insight about Letters from Panduranga’s portrayal of narration as a process of self-questioning, and of finding appropriate distance and nearness, can be extended in another interpretative direction. Another important repeating structure is the scenes showing a camera lens trying to establish the

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right focal distance and framing to take portraits of aged female bodies and faces. Similar to Nguyen’s found footage works, these repeated scenes engender the duration of coming into being of gestural images. Rather than dwelling on the narrator’s uncertain thoughts regarding the distance desired and needed in order to avoid assuming the position of speaking for the local Cham people, the process of hesitantly trying to find the right frame and focus embodies a duration during which the observing image maker maintains the possibility of moving nearer to the figures encountered. Her actions signal in a non-verbal, tactile way the possibility of intersubjective contact across the threshold of ethnic and generational difference. Near the beginning of the film a portrait shot begins with a close up of the striking impish face of a very elderly woman with betel stained lips. After a few seconds the camera reframes, pulling out from the close up with a slightly jerky motion. The movement of reframing, made by the camera person stepping backward away from the elderly woman, then shows her encircled by a group of men whose height accentuates her birdlike frame. The younger men mill about with agitated energy in contrast to the poise with which the Cham matriarch carries her tiny, fragile frame. The female voice lists the different kinds of shots she has been trying to make, then the camera moves in again. This time the lens and the image maker behind it move very close to the matriarch’s body, the camera recording the dance of amusement of her eyes. Near its end Letters from Panduranga returns to a concrete yard. The scene begins with a long shot showing a woman with stately bearing seated facing the camera. After a few seconds of ambient sound the female voice says, ‘I am writing to you from the land of the woman. Champa is a matriarchal society.’ The figure in the frame fidgets, looks to the left of the screen and makes a beckoning gesture with her left hand. Another woman darts into the frame and sits on the empty stool next to her. The two figures nestle into each other and try to hold a pose, whispering to each other as they try to hold still their expressions (Plate 2.2). The voice says that when she goes around doing her research, ‘The men, as usual, always end up being the voice.’ The women here, to use the term reflected upon by the male voice in a previous letter, ‘are like the background. They don’t write poetry, but they work very hard, take care of finance, sing, dance, drink, and get drunk.’ The association of women with silence and background may superficially resemble a familiar colonial trope of visualizing the landscape of conquest. In

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this case, however, Nguyen complicates the commonly problematized binary, of female/background/non-speech and male/foreground/speech, with another analogy referring more precisely to the restrictions on artistic expression in Vietnam both of the Cold War and post-Doi Moi eras. Although differing in terms of the combination of determinants affecting censorship and restrictions on artistic expression, and artistic production in each era, silencing and privation remain dominant factors in both eras, shaping the apparatus of artistic production and the formation of artistic subjectivity. Artists, in this sense, are akin to the female figures in the background in Letters from Panduranga. Nguyen herself tells an illuminating story about experiencing a moment of realization as she was trying to find the right form for making a work out of her experiences of encounters and uncertainties in the region. The sense of ‘a way in’, which she needed in order to create an appropriate form of audiovisual thinking, came with the thought that powerlessness and voicelessness were dimensions of shared experience between artists in Vietnam such as herself and the Cham people, and between the former and the silent presence of women in the region despite the legacy of matriarchal social organization of the Champa kingdom. The narrating strategy of the split self in Letters from Panduranga creates further thought-provoking layers. Reflecting on being arrested for shooting an interview with the group of old women by the river without a permit, the male voice says the experience of arrest gave him/her a taste of what the locals have had to endure every day, and a feeling of being able to look at history from the inside for the first time. Refracting Nguyen’s own artistic experience of state suppression with the male voice at this moment might be read as an allusion to the figuring of the male artist as a symbolization of the committed modern artist in Vietnam. If the artist during the wartime era was, in symbolic terms, the state-sponsored propagandist and educator figured as male, the subjectivity of the artist or storyteller that the male voice is now reflecting on is one that exists in proximate conditions of silencing and privation to marginalized people. Nevertheless, in the present, the artist can no longer be the one who simultaneously embodies distance from the people on the basis of being part of the intelligentsia, whose historical actualization took the form of a politically and economically precarious yet symbolically endowed, and symbolically male, group charged with the state-induced task to sentimentally educate the people into national liberation.

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This subtle reflection on the exhaustion of the historical model of the modern Vietnamese artist figured as male, yet the continuing potential of art as the site of autonomy and collectivization, is perhaps the most provocative of Letters from Panduranga’s many nuances and elegant provocations. Nguyen’s process of finding its form started with her perception of the shared experiences of powerlessness among artists and indigenous people in Vietnam, intersecting the shared experiences of the former with the voicelessness of women. Yet Letters from Panduranga does not inhabit the aesthetics of melancholy. In other words, it is not an essay film that casts artists and marginalized people as seers in circumstances they cannot shape or change. Nor does it create images and enunciating positions associating artistic agency, or the agency of marginalized people, with resistance to power. Instead, Nguyen’s film thinks artistic potentiality through its gestures of tactile contact with female, indigenous figures of anteriority and presence. The inexhaustible capacity of art to create living collective forms, and to embody autonomy as transformation and becoming, a capacity in excess of historical actualization, becomes associated in her essay film with voiceless aged female figures who are the background and yet at the same time are figures of ongoing and continuous duration. Letters from Panduranga’s achievement might in this sense be described as an unusual cinematic thinking, a bringing into play of an aesthetics of matriarchal potentiality. ‘As artists we have contradictory desires, to be engaged and to disappear’, Nguyen says in a conversation with curator Erin Gleeson.17 This remark becomes especially poignant when situated in relation to the formation of the modern and contemporary artist in Vietnam. Although the actualization of the subjectivity and labour of the artist tells a story of the harnessing of artistic production and agency to political and global capitalistic will to power, Nguyen’s essay films experiment with creating an aesthetics of potentiality that shift the actualized past of cinematic and visual production and the formation of the modern artist in Vietnam into the realm of contingency. In so doing, her works think the possibility of artistic autonomy and collective life, most significantly thinking such possibility as images of the capacities of female bodies, female relationships and as matriarchal figures of deep time.18

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Notes 1 Nguyen Trinh Thi’s website has complete information about her moving image works. See https://nguyentrinhthi.wordpress.com/. 2 The term post-Doi Moi signals the present period several decades after the Doi Moi policy reformation in the mid-1980s initiated Vietnam’s shift to a market economy. 3 Museums, art institutions and large-scale exhibition events that have featured her moving image works include daadgalerie Berlin (2016), Jeu de Paume (2015), Fukuoka Triennial (2014), Singapore Biennial (2013), Sydney Biennial (2018) and Rotterdam International Film Festival (2016). 4 See Lertwiwatwongsa, Wiwat (2013), ‘A Chronical Tape Recorded Over’, in May Adadol Ingawanij (ed.), The 6th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival: Raiding the Archives, 69–76, Bangkok: Read (Aan) Publishing; Butt, Zoe (22 November 2015), ‘Practicising Friendship, Respecting Time as a Curator ’, Asia Art Archive, https:// aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/practicing-friendship-respecting-time-as-a-curator. Last accessed 25 March 2018. 5 Taylor, Nora Annesley (2004), Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 6 Ibid., 22–62. 7 Ibid., 108–26. 8 See Taylor, Nora (2007), ‘Vietnamese Anti-art and Anti-Vietnamese Artists: Experimental Performance Culture in Hanoi’s Alternative Exhibition Spaces.’ Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2 (2): 108–28. 9 See Lam, Mariam B. (2012), ‘Circumventing Channels: Indie Filmmaking in Post-Socialist Vietnam and Beyond’, in May Adadol Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay (eds), Glimpses of Freedom: Independent Cinema in Southeast Asia, 87–106, Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University. 10 My usage of the term draws on Giorgio Agamben’s influential definition of gesture as the process of making visible a means. A gesture suspends a result and makes perceptible a temporality in which the potential to do something exists without enacting that possibility as such. At the same time the potential not to do persists in actualization. See Agamben, Giorgio (2000), ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Means Without End, 49-62, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. 11 This is summarized from three artist talks that Nguyen has recently given where I attended either as an audience member or interlocutor. They took place at daadgalerie, Berlin, 2016; Sa Sa Bassac, Phnom Penh, 2017; NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore, 2017; Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, 2018.

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12 Agamben, Giorgio (1999), ‘On Potentiality’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, 177–84, Stanford: Stanford University Press; Harbord, Janet. (2016), Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology, 225–29, Bloomsbury. 13 Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska (2012), Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism, 107–10, New York: Columbia University Press. 14 Gustaffson, Henrik and Gronstad, Asbjorn (2014) Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image, 139–60, London: Bloomsbury. 15 See texts by Erin Gleeson and Nora Taylor in the catalogue Lettres de Panduranga produced for the exhibition of the work at Jeu de Paume, Paris (October 2015 to January 2016), and CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (November 2015 to February 2016). 16 Ibid.; Rascaroli, Laura (2017), How the Essay Film Thinks, 147–54, Oxford University Press. 17 Gleeson, Lettres de Panduranga, 63. 18 I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers, Lucy Reynolds, Jamie Maxtone-Graham and Nguyen Trinh Thi for their feedback on previous drafts of the article, and to note here the immense generosity with which the artist has shared her insights, works, materials and precious time with me over many pleasurable conversations and trips.

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Sarah Neely and Sarah Smith – The art of maximal ventriloquy: Femininity as labour in the films of Rachel Maclean

It wasn’t until I was looking at the world of female artists and thinking of the way that women are presented in the media that I really became aware of what I was being pressurised to be. I’m angry that there’s not more done to help women and young girls be aware of what is being thrown at them. Not to protect them from seeing it but to understand how you push against it.1 This essay makes a case for Scottish artist Rachel Maclean’s work as a form of feminist critique, positioning her within the tradition of women’s performancebased video art, such as that of leading figures Martha Rosler, Joan Braderman, Sadie Benning and, more recently, Pipilotti Rist and Miranda July. It considers how the intensive labour of her own performances, in which she plays the dual function of artist/director and performer, together with her thematic focus on the values of youth, celebrity and beauty, foregrounds a wider consideration of the work of femininity in contemporary culture. Often the weird and wonderful array of characters played by Maclean invoke familiar pop cultural types. Always strikingly off-kilter, they enable her to excavate the saccharine surfaces of popular culture in order to reveal the more grotesque and disturbing seam running beneath. As well as being evident in her films, Maclean’s position in relation to feminism is now well documented. In one interview, she describes her interest in the ways in which identity is articulated through pop music as part of ‘largely a feminist critique’,2 (she is particularly preoccupied with the complex contradictions of media representations of women, which conflate female sexuality and childhood innocence). The film Make Me Up (2018), her longest

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and – by her own admission – most ambitious film to date, is inspired by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s suffragette movement and commemorates the 100-year anniversary of women’s voting rights. Of the film, she says ‘I’m delighted to have the opportunity to explore the excitements and complications of contemporary feminism.’3 The increasing clarity of Maclean’s position on feminism and her propensity to speak about its centrality to her work, aligns her with an emerging generation of women artists who explicitly call attention to their feminism, both in discussion and in the themes, methodologies and strategies of their work.4 At first glance, Maclean’s work may seem as innocuous as the texts it references. It may look like trivial pieces of culture for which she essentially serves as the ventriloquist (or, ‘the dummy’). However, the many distancing devices, from the exaggerations and ruptures of her performances to the post-production distortions of the image, draw out the darkness of certain themes – such as the fetishization of youth – that signals her work as a sharp critique of twenty-first century culture. In the dystopian space of her 2015 film Feed Me (Figure 9.1) for instance, adults are addicted to baby-shaped candies, doled out to them by mobs of streetwise, soother-sucking, big-eyed youths. The film’s mise-en-scène is peppered with the accoutrements of childhood, such as bibs, satin bows and

Figure 9.1 Rachel Maclean, Feed Me, 2015. Courtesy Film and Video Umbrella, British Art Show 8, Creative Scotland.

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toys, but they are either too large or out of place (worn and played with by adults), and the melancholic tone that runs throughout clashes with the many exclamations of something being ‘too cute’ or someone feeling ‘too happy’. Maclean’s video works are as beguiling as they are frustrating in their loosening of the lid on the complex psyche of contemporary popular culture. Maclean’s performative self-imaging shares much in common with photographer Cindy Sherman, who she cites as an influence.5 Like Maclean, Sherman also performs in all of her work and designs her own sets and costumes. Her photography often involves her performance of a great range of different characters or types within a number of dramatic contexts that are highly evocative of various genres – from film stills to centrefolds – and their associated conventions. Sherman is still best known for her breakthrough series of Untitled Film Stills (1977 to 1980), which staged generic stills from films that did not exist, although the more overt artifice of other series such as Headshots (2000 to 2002), a tragi-comic collection of ageing actresses’ publicity stills, bears a closer relationship to Maclean’s work. Because Sherman draws on so many familiar tropes, the viewer is left with the uncanny feeling that they have seen the image before and that the work references an actual film or media text. This déjà vu quality is also present in Maclean’s work where it is often further heightened through a use of found audio texts that carry with them their own nostalgic resonances. Both Sherman and Maclean’s works are densely loaded with approximated references to popular culture in an aesthetic style Maclean refers to as maximalist.6 Maximalism, in a visual art context, is more than simply a reaction against minimalism. Rather, it describes labourintensive practices that result in visually and referentially excessive works; a ‘more is more’ aesthetic. Although Sherman continues to make critically and commercially successful work, she was active during the emergence of the first feminist art movement of the 1970s and 1980s and, as such, her relationship to feminism necessarily differs from artists of Maclean’s generation. Maclean is making work at a time that coincides with a renewed interest in feminist art, heralded by the spate of survey shows that included WACK!: Art and the Feminist Revolution (2007) at MoCA, Los Angeles and elles@centrepompidou (2009) at Centre Pompidou in Paris.7 This renewed interest, much of which historicizes feminist art, also provokes urgent questions of what feminist art is and can be today and, by

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extension, what forms contemporary feminism might take. Feminist art critic Amelia Jones warns against a hasty celebration of the art world’s revival of feminist art, which she characterizes as a post-feminist closing down of the possibilities of feminist art by reducing it to a highly marketable brand of ‘sexy art’ that has developed from the ‘bad girl’ art of the 1990s and which centres on highly sexualized images of the woman’s (often the artist’s) body. Jones’s point is that this market-friendly brand of feminist art has closed the gap between the object of critique and the critique itself.8 These are questions that Maclean’s work usefully addresses, by focusing on significant themes to a generation of women who grew up in an era of so-called ‘post-feminism’ and immersion in social media. A recent example of this is provided by Amalia Ullman’s Excellences and Perfections (2014), a performance work in which the – conventionally attractive – artist adopted a fake persona and set up a fake Instagram account that documented various aspects of her life, including what she had for breakfast, a nervous breakdown and breast enhancement surgery.9 This visual diary is replete with Kim Kardashian-like clichéd sexy selfies. Like Maclean’s work, Ullman’s performance was intended as a feminist commentary on the media pressures placed upon young girls and women and an exposition of the labour-intensive artifice of twenty-first century normative femininity. In an interview for the Telegraph, she says: ‘I wanted to prove that femininity is a construction and not something biological or inherent to any woman [. . .] the joke was admitting how much work goes into being a woman.’10 The widespread celebration of Ullman’s work, which exemplifies the ‘sexy feminism’ that Jones cautions against, and the renewed art world interest in feminism more generally, is part of a broader mainstream cultural embrace of feminism. However, by embodying the object it intends to critique, by passing as ‘the real thing’, Ullman’s performance effectively shores up the gap that is essential to the efficacy of feminist art.11 Although Maclean engages with mass culture’s perpetuation of the woman’s body as a fetish object, she avoids the ambivalence that Jones warns of and that Ullman’s performance exemplifies by consistently framing her citations offkilter – through a combination of visual hyperbole (in her performances, costumes, props and post-production effects) and various disjunctures between sound and image. Or, as with her photographic work Candy Girls (2014), she inflects them with elements of the grotesque, which conflate the

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hypersexualized female body, the candy coloured palette of hyper-femininity and the wizened face of the fairy-tale witch. Here, three women – all played by Maclean – with fake breasts and witches faces, adopt clichéd sexually provocative poses in thongs and high-heels while pink ice cream squirts from their ‘twerking’ behinds and fluffy pink toy monkeys drink their pee. Through these strategies she variously dislodges what cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha refers to as the ‘fixity of the stereotype’. Bhabha describes the stereotype as ‘a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known and something that must be anxiously repeated’.12 Maclean’s invocations of twenty-first century gender stereotypes involve a series of adjustments, designed to intervene in this relentless process of ‘anxious repetition’. Thus, the satirical or parodic intent of Maclean’s work is always obvious and, in that sense, her work disrupts (if not completely undermines) the visual pleasures of the cultural texts she cites; pleasures, associated with a privileged ‘male gaze’, which often remain intact in the work of many so-called feminist artists since the 1990s (as per Jones’s critique). It’s What’s Inside That Counts (2016), part of Maclean’s solo show Wot u :-) about? (2016 to 2017), at HOME in Manchester, is a three-screen work that centres around a perpetual selfie-taking, Kardashian-inspired celebrity called Data, who is worshipped by a mob of onesie-wearing, pimpled-faced zombies and fed off by a race of underground rodents dressed as children (Figure 9.2). Religious devotion meets obsession as the mob’s Gregorian-inspired chants of ‘We Want Data. Again. Again. Again’, clash with the frenetic, speeded up pop singing of the rodents, whose lyrics also include the childish refrain: ‘Again and again and again.’ Just as Data feeds off the devotion of the enthralled zombies, the rodents in turn literally feed off Data – by biting through (or hacking) – the data cables that can be seen varyingly as her veins or life-support. A satirical poke at our culture’s insatiable appetite for celebrity, the film also takes a shot at the darker side of data use, surveillance, algorithms, celebrity culture and forensic self-monitoring that power the contemporary media landscape. More often than not, the most difficult images in Maclean’s films involve the bodily violation of women and girls. Indeed, in a 2018 interview with Phil Millar for The National, Maclean states that she wants her work to be ‘uncomfortable and difficult to watch’, to challenge the apathy that our culture promotes when we are confronted by images of violence against women:

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I’ve been disturbed and troubled by the recent rise and confidence in misogyny, the rise in anti-feminism, and reactionary attitudes to feminism, and that coupled with a feeling that we are immune, as a culture, to violence against women in images and the exploitation of women – images of women’s bodies used to sell perfume or cars – and it is so ingrained we are not shocked by it anymore.13

The seduction of watching Maclean’s work is quickly replaced by repulsion, as the image spills over the edges of the familiar into morally uncomfortable territory; the ‘beast’ pulls the girl down into the underground sewers in Feed Me, the rats gorge on Data until she is immobilized in It’s What’s Inside That Counts. One of the most compelling aspects of Maclean’s films is the intensive labour that has gone into their making, visible in their maximal aesthetic. Up until recently (around 2016), they have generally been low-budget productions, usually made for a few thousand pounds, which were, by nature and necessity, one-woman shows; the elaborate sets and costumes are all created by Maclean herself who also acts in, writes, directs and edits her films. At art school, Maclean began experimenting with green-screen technology and constructed a screen in her bedroom to perform her characters in front of. Although the

Figure 9.2 Rachel Maclean, It’s What’s Inside That Counts, 2016. Courtesy HOME, University of Salford Art Collection, Tate, Zabludowicz Collection, Frieze Film and Channel 4.

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budgets for Maclean’s films have steadily increased alongside her growth in notoriety as an artist, her approach has remained relatively consistent with the practice she developed as a student, suggesting that this multiple-role approach has significance beyond the ‘needs must’ dictate of low-budget productions. Writing of the process involved in creating her persona for Germs (2013), Maclean describes: The 2-day shoot followed a manic and sleepless few days of costume and prop production, so I was pretty exhausted and confused. However, I just about managed to pull off an improvised dance routine in a life-size ‘germ’ costume, which was constructed using the contents of 2.5 double duvets. Consequently, the suit was so amazingly insulating that I was concerned I might pass out from heat exhaustion, so had to aim a fan into my face at intervals to cool down.14

Maclean’s multiple-role approach facilitates the simultaneous staging of different types of creative labour, from time-consuming artisanal making of props, sets and costumes, which often involves small repetitive acts, to the physically demanding endeavour of performing. The exhaustion Maclean describes above, which resulted from the frenzied acts of making, the heat of the heavily insulated ‘germ suit’ and the physical and mental demands of improvising, together characterize her practice as a kind of endurance test. It is interesting to consider the highly elaborate nature of productions such as this, which involve obviously laborious processes largely undertaken by Maclean, in relation to the function of women’s labour within the work of women artists. In particular, the overwork of Maclean’s own performance serves as a kind of extreme counterweight to her videos’ appropriation of existing sound files, what might be seen as a kind of casual theft that mirrors contemporary practices associated with user-generated content as well as contributing to a tradition of feminist appropriation art that simultaneously critiques popular culture and art history. Recalling some of the debates around authorship and originality sparked by 1980s feminist appropriationists such as Sherman, Sherrie Levine and Barbara Kruger, the high visibility of her performances parodically inscribes the videos with her own authorship. Maclean’s approach also raises general questions in relation to women’s labour in the digital economy, taking into consideration the relationship between work and play in online contexts; in particular, she uses visual

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hyperbole to emphasize women’s online content production as frivolous, playful and purely recreational rather than another site of unacknowledged labour. The production of the self as brand, which drives the now ubiquitous social media selfie culture, exemplified by platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat, requires participants – most of whom are young women – to invest in sophisticated levels of what Elizabeth Wissinger refers to as ‘glamour labour’,15 and elsewhere Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff refer to as ‘aesthetic labour’.16 These terms denote the myriad forms of normalized beauty work that women carry out in attempts to maximize their bodily capital and include increasingly complex and time-consuming levels of personal styling and online self-representation. The desired aesthetic is most often associated with girlhood, where even adult women are encouraged to maintain the attributes of youth via make-up, flattering camera angles, the ubiquitous ‘head-tilt-duck-face’ pose, filters and ‘face tuning’ apps. In Maclean’s work, femininity is characterized as a kind of manic positivity, where women and girls take seriously the tasks of looking nice and always smiling. Maclean’s video Lolcats (2012) is perhaps her most explicit exploration of ‘cute’, drawing from a number of tropes associated with lolcats17 and other elements of meme18 culture. Her website, like her films, is cast in a ‘girly’ palate of pastel pinks and blues, and features rainbow cursive bubble fonts, online slang and other tropes of online culture, many of which play on the conventions of online etiquette and the humour that erupts when they are transgressed. In 2016, when Maclean’s website was down for renovation, the notice alerting visitors to the website’s status featured a sad smiley face with the message ‘SOZ! Website is 2 Sad :( Still hungry? Y no HappyChat wit me herez:’ the page then went on to list her other email and social media accounts. The issue of beauty and the attendant pressures on women to be attractive and agreeable has been part of feminist debate since the start of the second wave, but has tended to be side-lined in favour of activist work that focused on women’s labour; both in terms of unpaid domestic and reproductive labour and women’s limited access to the professional world of paid employment. The engagement in Maclean’s work with online practices that are often dismissed or trivialized bears a lineage to feminist art practices found in the work of Miriam Schapiro, Chantal Akerman or Rosler. The practices of these pioneering figures of the 1970s feminist art movement, variously utilize and stage women’s

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domestic labour to challenge its denigration within a capitalist economy, while at the same time advancing a pointed critique at the art world’s relegation of women’s creativity within modernist narratives of high and low art. For instance, Schapiro’s feminist art practice drew on the kinds of women’s work that are often categorized as low art, such as the traditions of quilting or patchwork. She combined these with references to high art, such as large-scale abstract expressionist paintings to orchestrate a collision of opposing cultural modes and their attendant value systems. Using the term ‘femmage’, Schapiro describes an approach where saving and collecting are important. Much as they are when running a thrifty household, scraps are essential and are recycled in the work.19 It is in this sense that Maclean’s work functions as a kind of femmage, where the digital folk art of memes and mash-ups share much in common with unvalued scraps or found material, or the ordinary stuff of everyday – often domestic – life and personal anecdote, seen in the feminist film and video art of an earlier generation. For instance, Akerman’s News From Home (1977), is a poetic exploration of the correspondence between her and her beloved mother after she moved to New York in the early 1970s, or Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), which makes a parodic performance of a TV cookery demonstration in which kitchen utensils transform from tools of domestic creativity to weapons of war. However, in recent years, the feminist focus on labour has shifted from an earlier interest in what has often been termed ‘productive’ forms of labour carried out by women, through domestic labour and childcare, to more insidious sites of women’s labour in emotional, affective and aesthetic registers. Much of the user-generated content Maclean is referencing is associated with leisure and play rather than with the legitimized work of the professional. One of the popular online formats Maclean makes considerable use of in her own work is the mimetic video. As Limor Shifman defines them, mimetic videos are a type of user-generated content, whereby users tend to mimic performances from pre-existing media texts (e.g. the many video performances of Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)’). Maclean’s appropriation of the form serves to destabilize established styles of representation evident in the hyper-mimetic forms of contemporary culture. Her videos are a form of bricolage in the way that they often subvert the original meaning of the texts they reference and appropriate. This can be seen in Maclean’s Let It Go (2015), a work comprised

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of six short videos, featuring Maclean miming to found audio recordings of people singing their own version of the popular song from Disney’s 2013 film, Frozen, where the emotive musical performances of the disturbing pauper-like characters are interspersed with further found audio texts containing dark personal accounts of poverty and individual suffering. Similarly, in Over the Rainbow (2013) (Plate 2.3), Maclean is drawn to subverting particular moments of emotional excess. In one of the video’s sequences, Maclean mimes to audio from the popular television show, Britain’s Got Talent, featuring one of the many ‘show-stopping’ performances by children (in this case, Connie Talbot, aged six), presumed too young to display such extraordinary talent. Maclean’s articulation of the climax through her own performance creates a rupture in the representation that draws attention to the mimetic qualities of the original. The disjuncture between voice and image creates what might be seen as a kind of Deleuzian stutter,20 with the re-contextualization of the original recording serving to make something familiar strange, fracturing what is presented as an indestructible loop of identity constructions in online spaces where meaning is built on endless recycling, and nothing is original. Maclean’s specific references to lolcats, referred to above, also connects to a major concern that she identifies in her videos: the ‘complex relationship Western society has with notions of childhood innocence and female sexuality’.21 Lolcats are rarely just a picture of a cat, but often connect to complex networks of meaning drawn from contemporary culture and continually refined through the abundant articulations of memes by their various creators. As social media theorist Clay Shirky writes, they are ‘the stupidest possible creative act. Formed quickly and with a minimum of craft, the average lolcat image has the social value of a whoopee cushion and the cultural life span of a mayfly’.22 Nevertheless, for Shifman, lolcats can also serve as an effective way of communicating rather complex emotions, ‘as indirect ways to convey a wide array of feelings and states of mind. Thus, although LoL Cats are often dismissed as emblems of a silly and whimsical culture, [. . .] they actually fulfil diverse and complex social roles.’23 The dismissal of lolcats for their ease of creation is problematized by Maclean’s laborious creations, which highlight the labour that goes into the process of mimicry and the construction of identity. The rupture at the seams reveals the messiness of their construction

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where – to use Erving Goffman’s terms24 – the divisions between front stage performance and back stage performance are upset, and the stability of the constructed identity crumbles. This chapter has attempted to connect Maclean’s interest in the trivial spaces of twenty-first century popular culture to the trivializing of women’s work previously challenged by feminist artists and to point towards new directions of travel for contemporary feminist art. Second-wave feminist artists such as Rosler or Shapiro emphasized the structural inequalities at the heart of late capitalist Western society through a focus on women’s domestic and affective unpaid labour, women’s traditional crafts and – though more controversially at times – women’s bodies as commodity fetish. Although these issues remain live and unresolved and continue to be challenged by feminist politics and activism, some of them would appear to be of diminished interest to a younger generation of feminist artists. Put simply, there would appear to be less feminist art about domestic labour and childcare, for instance, but an interest in the body persists. Clearly glamour/aesthetic labour and the hypersexualization of young girls and women are considered by a younger generation to be pressing and insidious sites of female bodily oppression, particularly in the face of the emergence of fluid, non-binary understandings of the body and identity. These artists are highly cognizant of what Elias et al. point out when they state that ‘beauty pressures do not exist in a social and cultural vacuum but are connected to broader social trends in complicated ways’.25 To return to Jones’s caution about the revival of art world interest in feminism – we may simply be more attuned to these issues within an art context because the art world has spotlighted practices that focus on women’s bodies, much as it did with feminist body art of the 1970s. However, in Maclean’s maximal ventriloquism we find an effective parodic feminist politics that undercuts some of these tendencies, in its admirably sincere commitment to see how women are presented by the media and ‘to understand how you push against it’.26

Notes 1 Jeffrey, Moira (5 January 2016), ‘Rachel Maclean and her “maximal”, MTVinspired pop art’, The Scotsman. Available at http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/

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culture/art/rachel-maclean-and-her-maximal-mtv-inspired-pop-art-1-3992369 (accessed 13 February 2016). Brown, Will (3 June 2015), ‘Rachel Maclean: “I’m taking and contributing to the weird recycled ecosystem of the internet” ’, Studio International. Available at http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/rachel-maclean-interview-videololcats-britney-spears-scottishness-internet (accessed 2 December 2017). Miller, Phil (23 January 2018), ‘Artist Rachel Maclean to make new film about women’s right to vote in new commission with NVA’, Herald Scotland. Available at http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15889352.Artist_Rachel_Maclean_to_ make_new_film_about_women__39_s_right_to_vote_in_new_commission_ with_NVA/ (accessed 22 January 2018). Other emerging artists who explicitly foreground feminist politics in both their practice and discussions of their practice are Ann Hirsh and Faith Holland (both of whom also, like Maclean, take the internet and social media as sites of critique). Jeffrey, Moira (5 January 2016), ‘Rachel Maclean and her “maximal”, MTVinspired pop art’, The Scotsman. Available at http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/ culture/art/rachel-maclean-and-her-maximal-mtv-inspired-pop-art-1-3992369 (accessed 13 February 2016). http://www.rachelmaclean.com (accessed 12 June 2015). See Hilary Robinson’s discussion of a number of these survey shows, ‘Feminism meets the big exhibition: Museum Survey Shows Since 2005’, ONCURATING , 29, May 2016. Available at http://www.on-curating.org/issue-29-reader/feminismmeets-the-big-exhibition-museum-survey-shows-since-2005.html#. WdaCXGXePFI ) (accessed: 29 January 2018). Jones, Amelia (2010), ‘The return of feminism(s) and the visual arts, 1970/2009’, in M. Hedlin Hayden and J. Sjöholm Skrubbe (eds.), Feminisms is Still Our Name: Seven Essays on Historiography and Curatorial Practices, 16, Newcastle. This performance work, in which Ullman intended to comment on femininity as construct, has reached art world acclaim and is included in Tate Modern’s 2016 show ‘Performing for the Camera’, which also includes the work of second-wave feminist artists Hannah Wilke and Sherman. Sooke, Alistair (18 February 2016), Interview with Amalia Ullman, ‘Is this the first Instagram masterpiece?’, The Telegraph. Available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ photography/what-to-see/is-this-the-first-instagram-masterpiece/ (accessed 10 October 2017). For a further discussion of Ullman’s work in relation to feminist body art, see Smith, Sarah, ‘Posing as art: the ambiguities of feminist body art and the misclassification of Natacha Merritt’s pornographic photographs’, Feminist Media Studies, 17 (5): 774–89.

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12 Bhabha, Homi K. (1997 2nd ed), ‘The other question: the stereotype and colonial discourse’, in K.M. Newton (ed.), Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader, 293, London. 13 Miller, Phil (9 May 2017), ‘Shocking new film by Scots artist Rachel Maclean, inspired by Brexit and Trump, goes on show at the Venice Biennale’, The National. Available at http://www.thenational.scot/news/15273002.Shocking_new_film_by_ Scots_artist_Rachel_Maclean__inspired_by_Brexit_and_Trump__goes_on_ show_at_the_Venice_biennale/ (accessed 22 January 2018). 14 Maclean, Rachel (19 February 2013), ‘Where I Make: Rachel Maclean’, Central Station, Featured blog. Available at http://thisiscentralstation.com/where-i-make/ where-i-make-rachel-maclean/ (accessed 12 June 2017). 15 Elizabeth Wissinger has brought this term to prominence in her book: (2015), This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media and the Making of Glamour, New York. 16 Elias, Ana Sofia, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff (eds) (2017), Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism, London. 17 Lolcats are memes comprised of a photo of a cat accompanied by a humorous caption, written in a kind of broken English known as ‘lolspeak’. They are generally perceived as childlike texts – playful and harmless. 18 The term meme, first coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1989/1976), can be described as ‘a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation’; in short, memes are ideas that are transferred from person to person through imitation, 192. 19 Thanks to Lucy Reynolds for drawing attention to the term in her lecture on women artists and collective practice at Glasgow School of Art, 11 February 2014. Available at https://vimeo.com/89595036 (accessed 12 June 2015). 20 Deleuze, Gilles (1998), Essays: Critical and Clinical, Brooklyn. 21 Brown, Will (3 June 2015), ‘Rachel Maclean: “I’m taking and contributing to the weird recycled ecosystem of the internet”’, Studio International: Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. Available at http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/ rachel-maclean-interview-video-lolcats-britney-spears-scottishness-internet (accessed 12 June 2015). 22 Shirky, Clay (2010), Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, London. 23 Shifman, Limor (2013), Memes in Digital Culture, Cambridge. 24 Goffman, Erving (1978), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin. 25 Elias, Gill and Scharff (eds), Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism, 9. 26 Jeffrey, ‘Rachel Maclean and her “maximal”, MTV-inspired pop art.’

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Situations and Receptions

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In conversation: Club des Femmes, Helena Reckitt – An interview on International Women’s Day 2017 Selina Robertson and Sarah Wood, founder members of the feminist curatorial collective Club des Femmes (CDF), met with Helena Reckitt, feminist curator and researcher, and Lucy Reynolds, in London on International Women’s Day 2017 to discuss – among other things – the role of film and video in curating, activism, collectivism and the emergence of a new moment of intergenerational feminism. Lucy Reynolds (LR) What motivates your approach to programming as feminist curators? Do you feel that you always use that prefix? Selina Robertson (SR) Yes, we call ourselves a queer feminist curating collective, so anybody who comes to any of our events knows that we are going to be curating the work in that context and creating an intersectional feminist space in order to show the work and discuss it. Sarah Wood (SW) And even if the work itself isn’t necessarily a feminist piece of work, or the artist may not originally have conceived it like that, we provide the frame for a feminist reappraisal. That’s the discussion we’re enabling. Helena Reckitt (HR) Although my curating has always been informed by my feminism, recently I’ve initiated curatorial projects that are not just implicitly feminist, or even just feminist in content, but that attempt to adopt feminist methodology. The ‘Now You Can Go’ programme that I initiated in 2015 explored the contemporary resonance of Italian feminisms that emerged in the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.1 The project grew out of the Feminist Duration Reading Group that I run, which since spring 2015 has met monthly to explore under-known feminisms from outside the Anglo-American feminist canon. Lucy, you of course developed your wonderful Feminist Chorus for Feminist Revolt performance and score with members of the reading group. Six of us developed the ‘Now You Can Go’ programme in a framework that, while not exactly collective, enabled each of us to contribute

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different elements that corresponded to our interests and backgrounds. It’s a style that reflects the emphasis that Italian feminists, such as those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore collective, placed on enabling differences among women, rather than suppressing their individuality in the name of consensus (see Plate 2.4). SW It’s funny, I was only thinking about framing yesterday. I was at my studio. There are twenty artists working there and only one is a man at the moment. He maybe feels a little disenfranchised. Just up the road there’s an all women art collection at New Hall/Murray Edwards College (in Cambridge). Mary Kelly was there as an artist-in-residence in the eighties and asked: Why hadn’t this all-female college got a women’s art collection? So, the collection was started, and the college has an exhibition space that shows women’s work. Anyway, the man in my studio was agitated about this: ‘Oh you know . . . in this day and age it’s a meritocracy . . . and we don’t need a female space . . . and I should be able to exhibit there,’ and it was the same old same old. I just became really angry because it’s actually so important to think about what constitutes women’s art, particularly in that context. Even if people say that’s not the way that they work, that gender isn’t relevant to their practice, I think it’s interesting to sometimes set work in juxtaposition to see what traditions exist. I still think it’s amazing that we have to have these conversations. LR It’s interesting that what came up around the title of this book was ‘can we still really use that term?’ ‘Should we use a gendered term?’ Gender is so much more in question. But given the nature of the work that people are writing about and given the nature of the people who are writing, it felt that it still was an important concern. SW Feminism is all about equality. So, if you’re interested in human rights and equality why would you say that’s all over? There are so many battles to have. And now that we’ve seen the Trump presidency for what it is, we know we’ve got such a big battle ahead of us. Everything is slipping backwards in the West. HR Actually, one of Italian feminisms’ most provocative challenges is that they rejected the rhetoric of equality and equal rights. They practised a form of

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strategic separatism, a practice of drawing aside as an instrument of struggle. The Milan collective dismissed equality as that which is offered to colonized people, who are then appropriated into the mainstream. Against the mainstream of women’s liberation, members of the collective made the strategic decision not to go out and protest for abortion rights. They said, we don’t want any laws over our bodies. We’re not going to agitate to get a little bit more legislation that feels more sympathetic to women. No, the whole premise of male rule over our bodies is fucked. The ‘Now You Can Go’ programme faced the challenge of how to make a movement that is not well-known in Anglo circles both visible and relevant today. We treated it as a tool that can inspire contemporary feminisms, rather than a movement to be contemplated aesthetically or studied academically. SW Yes, so that it creates a dialogue from which we can come and go. Just at the moment we’re all being held apart with the assertion of national borders and walls going up. It makes you think how hard we need to work to keep dialogue going because what one culture invents at one time in history will be quickly forgotten by another if we don’t keep asserting all the possibilities. The conversation about feminism is going on all the time all around the world, countering backlash. It’s alive and powerful. HR Your curating seems to move back and forth between current and earlier moments of film-making. You’re profiling current work while also going back and saying: ‘Let’s have another look at this. What motivates that?’ SR We have just been celebrating our tenth anniversary on Monday night at the BFI, so we’ve been thinking about the early curating work that we’ve been doing. And it’s funny because in our early days we screened Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) and Bette Gordon’s Variety (1983), and these are films that are recirculating again. Recently Born in Flames was presented on a new 35mm print at the BFI in the LFF and the Essay Film Festival is just hosting a retrospective of Bette Gordon’s films. But we chose those films because I think for us they just felt like a brave new world. And they were punk. And those were our ‘ground zero’ films, weren’t they? SW And when we played Born in Flames it was just after September 11 . So, at the end of Born in Flames, at the moment of Borden’s premonition, the

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audience was just like: ‘Oh my God!’ The prescience of that film is incredible. I don’t know what it would feel like to watch it now. LR

Do you think it still is ground zero – those two films?

SW I think for our generation it is, isn’t it? Because the world exploded in punk. It made you think something was possible, and something was visible, an energy which could come anarchically through women as well as through men. I think punk was a really exciting moment. And it felt so dangerous at the time. Now it’s coming back to those times again and we need something as radical to shake things up. SR And again, I think those films are very much about intersectional feminism, which was really important for us. Maybe we didn’t verbalize that so much at the beginning, but I think as we’ve gone on we’ve reiterated that the sort of narratives that are retold about the history of the second-wave concern white feminism, but if you delve a bit deeper there’s a lot of films and film-makers and activists who were involved who are women of colour, and it’s vital to tell and show these stories as well. Yes, I think those films are still so impactful and powerful. SW Also, they take the energy that was coming out of the discussions of second-wave feminism. Punk just exploded that into action. There’s nothing more exciting than watching Vivienne Dick or Bette Gordon – all those films and that art that came out at that time, it’s just phenomenal. LR Whereas film features in Helena’s curatorial projects alongside other art forms, in CDF it plays the principal part. Do you feel that there is something particular that the moving image offers to feminism in curatorial projects? SW Machinery! I just think about the impact of women using machines. I think the fact that as a woman you could pick up a 16mm camera, or work on an optical printer, hands on, doing ‘boys’ jobs, had a huge impact. I think that’s why the 1970s in London was such an exciting time, because of the film co-op and the number of women who could start using film equipment. It’s the moment when you just say: ‘I’m not going to go and do watercolours anymore.’ I think that’s what’s exciting for me – that sense of just being out there.

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Also, the mix up between music, performance and film makes something very alive happen. The act of actually recording and performing at the same moment is an action that’s about now and also about posterity. So, when Vivienne Dick records a Lydia Lunch performance as part of a film (Vivienne Dick, 1978), for instance, it’s an incredible mix. You’ve got something absolutely contemporaneous being recorded for posterity and which also feels alive and made for the moment. You can watch the performance on film fifty years later and still see and feel what all that energy was about. The fact that film is collaborative is exciting as well. The facilities at the coop meant you could not only make a film by yourself but also work collaboratively. For me that’s what’s exciting – the collaborations that came out of that time that were enabled by the very notion of what a co-operative meant. HR What about from the audience’s point of view? What do you think can happen to a group of people who watch a film together? SR I think it can be quite transformational. We’ve been putting on some screenings and discussions talking about the legacy of the women only antinuclear protests at Greenham Common during the 1980s. And the discussions that have happened after these meetings have turned into more political meetings really, and intergenerational engagements. For us personally it’s quite a moving experience. I think for people that come it’s cathartic, informative and people are sharing tactics of activism and collective living. Yes, I really believe in the power of the film to transform and that’s a big reason why we do what we do: to make it as alive as possible. HR The emphasis on bringing things alive, into the space and up for collective discussion, motivates the Feminist Duration Reading Group, which met last night, actually. SW

What were you reading?

HR We were reading two texts from Islamic feminism. Rather than expect people to read the texts in advance we read them out loud together on the

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Figure C3.1 Tina Keane, In Our Hands, Greenham, 1984. Courtesy the artist and Cinenova.

night, literally paragraph-by-paragraph, one person at a time, as we make our way round the circle. After the initial focus on Italian feminisms we felt the need for a more intersectional emphasis, and for broadening beyond European perspectives, such as the rich feminist tradition from the Arab world. We have also hosted film screenings. LR

What sort of things have you been screening?

HR A mixture of contemporary and second-wave feminist material. Rose Gibbs organized a wonderful session around a film in the Cinenova archive called Scuola Senza Fine [School Without End] (Adriana Monti, 1983). It was made as part of the 150 Hours Schools, which were experimental education programmes for adults who had not completed high school education. Set up initially through the trade unions in the early 1970s to target factory workers and farmers, a number of female teachers joined the programme where they used the framework to develop a distinct strand of feminist pedagogy. These

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became intense sites for political awakening among working class women, rural women, older women, domestic workers . . . . women who hadn’t necessarily been politically active before. Consciousness was being raised by the minute! Following the screening, which was made collaboratively by women who had attended one of the courses and didn’t want to stop learning, we talked about pedagogy, activism and consciousness-raising. The group is very intergenerational. There are women my age (middle aged – yikes!), and older women who were part of the women’s liberation movement. But the group mainly comprises younger women, and some men – a lot of MA students and younger artist and writers. We also have a kind of ‘sister’ group in Toronto called the Emilia-Amalia Working Group, with whom we share ideas and resources. This was set up by Gabby Moser and some of her feminist artist and curator friends after she had attended ‘Now You Can Go’ in London. After they had decided to screen Scuola Senza Fine they discovered that the filmmaker, Adriana Monti, now lived in Toronto. She attended the screening and talked about how she now works with elders in Toronto using similar tactics of consciousness-raising and starting from the self (‘la pratica del partire da sé’). So that really loops the loop. Last night’s meeting followed some earlier Feminist Duration Reading Group sessions around Arab feminisms, which centred on a screening of the documentary Feminism Inshallah: A History Of Arab Feminism (Feriel Ben Mahmoud, 2014), that Giulia Damaini organized. Although the film contained lots of fascinating archival material, the more it went on, the more uncomfortable I started to feel. And it turns out I wasn’t the only one. The film certainly told an interesting story of the burgeoning of feminisms in Arab countries, of how feminist struggles have been part of self-determination and liberation movements, but the promises made to feminist comrades were not necessarily fulfilled once liberation movement leaders took power. But implicitly the film’s concept of feminism was very Western, very French. It gave hardly any sense of how Arab feminisms emerged indigenously from the region. The film seemed to equate feminism with female visibility. There was lots of footage of women in the 1960s smoking in cafes, wearing miniskirts. Belly dancing was used as a symbol of liberation. It felt to me like something was a bit off. So, it was great to talk about the film with a group of other people, to start unpacking its ideological investments, to ask: ‘What is going on?’

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So, the fact that it was off really enabled you to break things down a bit?

HR Totally. I won’t say it was a completely successful session. In fact, I found it quite awkward, partly because not many people with Arab or Muslim backgrounds were present. One British artist with a Muslim background who was there seemed to be getting visibly more and more uncomfortable. I felt a bit bad. There’s a group of this predominantly white women watching a somewhat contentious film about Arab feminism. But we had a difficult but necessary conversation. SW That’s consciousness raising in action. It’s that moment of realization when you re-watch a work and you suddenly realize just how many different frames you’re watching it through. LR Would you say that’s something you’re all doing in some sense? Keeping going back again, and keeping checking yourself? SW Becoming conscious is a struggle. I think we forget that. We want things to be easy now. It’s exciting to watch/read things together because so much of life is isolated. We look at things on screens and think that we have all the information at our disposal, but we forget that there are so many things we can’t access easily. It’s good to know that actually gaining knowledge is a difficult process. I think the struggle to understand ourselves and others – to know that things like recognizing cultural difference can be difficult, but to be prompted to think why – is a valuable and valid experience. I think it’s good to slow down and try and work out why we’re feeling uncomfortable, for instance, and work it out. I think so much of culture at the moment moves too quickly for us to really get to grips with that. LR So, all of you are interested in something that has a real discursiveness to it, in terms of discussion through reading groups, events, Q & As and so on? SW And also, those things change you. I mean, if we (CDF) can put on a screening or you (HR) put on an exhibition and let it go out into the world, what comes back from that changes you as the curator.

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SR It’s about that live event – that live situation. I think we always took our roots from the setting up of Circles, which was a kind of curatorial initiative as well as a distribution network. They were curating screenings and hosting discussions and we always had that as such an important part of everything that we do. And then we also have, when we can, panel discussions and involve people from different walks of life and different interests, not just film people but activists – just encouraging difference and debate basically. LR I want to draw out this question of difference a bit more, but thinking about how artists place themselves in relation to the term ‘feminism’, and how you work with how artists and film-makers do or don’t want the word ‘feminist’ attached to them? SW Once an artist produces an artwork and it exists in the public domain, you can read it however you want. I suppose the motivation behind the making of an artwork is interesting biographically. But, at the end of the day, that artwork will travel through time and it’s going to mean many things to many different people. How much can the artist control that once it’s made?

Figure C3.2 Club des Femmes’ ‘Instructions for an Unmade Film’, a public participation activity commissioned by The Photographers’ Gallery to coincide with the exhibition Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s (October 2016 to January 2017). Courtesy Tim Bowditch and The Photographers Gallery.

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HR That’s interesting because the art world is still caught up in a much more author-centric, monographic approach where an oeuvre is read back through the individual, which is different to your recognition that material circulates and then becomes different things to different people. It’s partly to do with the market. It’s also to do with the way that art history is constructed around the great masters and the Oedipal idea that subsequent generations of artists overthrow them. SW And in fact, it’s something that Lucy, you noticed at LUX, when we were working on LUXONLINE. You said it was amazing when you read back through the bibliographies for the male film-makers included on the website – they’d all got monographs, and there they are. Preserved in history. With the women film-makers, however, maybe they were mentioned in chapters in edited collections but not as individual artists. LR But also, it was interesting working on LUXONLINE because the women featured on it didn’t have either the same interest or confidence in organizing themselves like that. And I don’t know if that’s something you’ve come across particularly? HR There are a few women who aren’t backwards about coming forward. I’m thinking of Barbara Hammer as someone who’s been ‘gung ho’ about working with curators, producers and publishers in order to sustain and promote her career. But with her it doesn’t feel diva-ish. It’s more as if the act of queer women taking up space is in itself political. SR Isn’t it also because she came of age, so to speak, in the 1970s, didn’t she? She’s written in her book, Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life2 that she came out as a lesbian in the 1970s. Those are her roots – that collective lesbian feminist activism. I think we’re very conscious about the film-makers that we chose to show at CDF. Obviously, there’s always this process of negotiation of how the work is positioned and writing copy and all this – but I don’t think we’ve ever had difficulty in producing events and the discussions that we’ve had. I remember before CDF I was one of the programmers at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and there was a terrible moment once

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when I invited a film to the festival, and then introduced the film and the filmmaker came. And I realized that the film-maker wasn’t queer and wasn’t interested at all in queer politics and queer cinema and had just happened to make a queer story. And that was for me a very uncomfortable awkward situation and I didn’t have the language to run that discussion. So, I mean for us it’s really important to know that politically we’re on the same page. I think, because we curate everything ourselves, no-one tells us what to do. We so rarely apply for funding, we’re fiercely independent and it’s important for us to remain like that, because then we can take agency and full ownership over each project. LR And the projects that you’ve been doing recently, Helena, have they been finding more bits of funding? HR Recently my projects have become quite low key in a way and small budget. Rather than emphasizing big events that are seen by lots of people, I’ve gravitated to small groups where you can have an informal, potentially intense and even transformative experience. The curator Kirsten Lloyd recently suggested that this kind of programmatic emphasis reflects a desire to flee visibility, which resonated with me.3 With the reading group there’s a sense of participating in a space of shared discovery. Each month we put aside time to think together as feminists and see where discussions take us, rather than perform our knowledge or mastery. LR Intimate audiences, discursive audiences . . . do you feel that there’s a need to try to draw in new audiences or do you think that people will just find their own way to it? SW I think it’s both really. Actually, it’s interesting because we gave an interview the other night at the BFI and someone asked about our Greenham event and said: ‘Did we get in a younger audience – because it’s a shame if that history gets lost?’ And we could proudly say we did. We thought very consciously about how to try and engage younger people because there’s such a need. What the women of Greenham taught us about how to resist is exactly what we so badly need right now.

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I think it’s really important to try and mix audiences and – like you already said really – there are so many great conversations that can happen. I remember at the Greenham event there were a couple of people who had come from the protest at Heathrow, basically they’d dug themselves into the ground at Heathrow. Watching the Greenham films offered them strategies. They asked us to bring the films to them. For them the films weren’t about a history but were about learning what to do right now. LR I did show my Greenham film at the Occupy camp. Treasa O’ Brien organized it – do you remember? That was fantastic because I realized that, even if my film was offering a more retrospective view, by showing it alongside Carry Greenham Home (Beeban Kidron, 1983) we were offering strategies. And it did feel amazing to be there in that space showing it. HR The projects I am involved with are attracting more young people than older ones, as well as some men and non-binary people. A lot of younger people are open about their lack of knowledge of feminism. They have a hunger for it, a desire to know these histories. But they don’t seem to be getting introduced to that material, or exposed to these discussions, at college or elsewhere. LR

I wonder what happened that there was this huge gap for them?

HR Well, some of them are only 18/19 so – it’s not like they rejected it. But with the precarity of today’s economy, which is exacerbated by student fees and student debt, they seem to want the kind of collectivity and solidarity that feminist spaces can offer. SW I think there was a complacency. I think there was a sense that somehow women had got what they wanted. Somehow that was advertised very widely as though that was that. Feminism was over. We had had the Spice Girls, so it was all OK! I suppose people can see the reality now. That feminism isn’t over. There’s a lot more for young people to protest about generally at the moment and I think they’re looking around to see what to do. I went to a rally in Cambridge against Trump’s inauguration and it was very charming really – there were lots of students there and when they did their

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chanting they did it in polite rounds like Christmas carols and I was thinking: ‘Oh you really need someone to help you find that inner protest voice.’ That moment of finding your voice isn’t something immediate. You’ve got to be around people who can express themselves in a certain way or who can think of actions that make resistance come alive. It’s interesting that art spaces are one of the places where people are finding that voice at the moment. SR That’s very true. But I think also that the millennial generation is so much better at communicating because it’s through social media. It’s a basic thing to say but when we did this screening a couple of years ago with the London Feminist Film Festival we showed this film about the US second-wave movement She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (Mary Dore, 2014). And we sold the entire cinema out at the Rio and a lot of that was just through word of mouth, social media and millennials wanting to find out more – like you said, Helena – about the history and the strategies. Again, it was like a consciousness-raising meeting, we had a typical CDF diverse panel discussion hosted by another CDF co-curator So Mayer, which drew in lots of women of colour as well – it was really wonderful to see. But, you know, I think it’s very important to get people active and engaged. It’s so important because that’s how people communicate and affect change. HR Yes exactly. One reason this resonates in the art field is because the blinkers are coming off. Students are recognizing that something that was considered such a privilege, to work in the arts, to see work as a passionate vocation rather than a profession or a job, is a con. They’re getting stuck in unpaid internships, and when they do get a job they can’t live on it. We see the total feminization of the cultural labour force, and the class connotations inherent to this. Unless you have money behind you, you cannot afford to work in the arts in London. It’s untenable. One former student just emailed me to explain that she had given up the good art world job that she landed on graduation because, as a single mum struggling to buy a flat, she can’t live on the salary. And she was one of our success stories! So, I’m in this ambivalent position of educating the next generation of curators while also worrying about their futures. SR In terms of feminist curatorial activists there’s lots of really smart young people coming up and there’s a great scene in London at the moment. But they

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have no idea about good practice and how much to ask for their labour. Should they even ask to be paid? And there’s such exploitation going on by cinemas of these young people that we were talking the other day about the need to write something down about good practice for freelance programmers and curators; because they don’t know, and the complete exploitation is just outrageous. HR Do you know that group WAGE, Working Artists in the Greater Economy? They have formulated best-practice policies for payment in the non-profit visual arts sector. They certify arts organizations that comply with these and other criteria. You should check them out. Because – we need policies! SW Otherwise we don’t know what we’re worth. There’s an Artists’ Union now as well, because artists often don’t get paid and they should. LR Of course, there was one, which was incredibly active in the 1970s. And that’s how the women’s workshop of the Artists Union came about – which was so strong. It’s almost as if we have to keep going back and starting again! I think the idea of something becoming established and rooted is just not the way it can work with feminism. We have to keep pushing and keep re-establishing in the times when they keep knocking it back down. SW That’s Susan Faludi’s model – that the advances of feminism get knocked backwards.4 Progress isn’t linear. I think sometimes success enables the backlash. The other night we were talking about the 1990s and the great moment of new queer cinema and the triumph of the YBAs (Young British Artists), who emerged at the time. These were moments of wider cultural success, but which also represented a stopping point. We can never be complacent. Even at moments of success we have to build up again, think about what we’re actually doing. What’s our motivation? Where are we coming from? How can we work together? What new vision is going to be produced? Otherwise we just replicate patterns of success until the market isn’t interested any more. I think there’s something about reinvention and being imaginative that’s vital and important for progress to be made.

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LR Well it’s now coming up to quarter past five so that’s probably a good place to stop. SR

Wow, that’s come up very fast!

SW I feel like we all ought to go and make something now. General laughter . . .

Notes 1 ‘Now You Can Go’ was a public events programme comprising film, performance, talks, workshops and a meeting of the Feminist Duration Reading Group. It explored the resonances of earlier moments of feminist thinking, art and activism, particularly those from 1970s and 1980s Italy. Activities took place from 1–13 December 2015 across four London, UK, venues: ICA, Raven Row, Space Studios and The Showroom. It was organized by Angelica Bolletinari, Giulia Casalini, Diana Georgiou, Laura Guy, Helena Reckitt, Irene Revell and Amy Tobin. 2 Hammer, Barbara (2010), Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life, New York. 3 Horne, Victoria, Kirsten Lloyd, Jenny Richards and Catherine Spencer (29 May 2016), ‘Taking Care: Feminist Curatorial Pasts, Presents and Futures’, ONCURATING, 116–29. Available at http://www.on-curating.org/issue-29reader/taking-care-feminist-curatorial-pasts-presents-and-futures.html#. WSgDKSMrKu4 (accessed 20 March 2018). 4 Faludi, Susan (1991), Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, New York.

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Catherine Elwes – Strategies of exposure and concealment in moving image art by women; a cross-generational account

The female body [. . .] is arguably so overdetermined that it cannot be used without being, by implication, abused. But of course it is unthinkable that the only constructive strategy for women performers would be their absence. So steps are taken to build a new presence. Sally Potter1

Introduction Since the 1960s, women artists’ professional visibility has grown exponentially, with practitioners such as Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat and Tracey Emin now enjoying international recognition. However, the problem of self-presentation has not so much endured as mutated into a renewed anxiety about the female form in contemporary practice.2 Women face the Sisyphean task of forging self-images that represent the whole of their beings, psychic, political, economic and social, while hemmed in on all sides by a culture of display that narrowly focuses on the status of individual women’s erotic capital. As a result, women artists today still struggle to ‘build a new presence’ and maintain a viable identity as social subjects through self-portraiture in its myriad forms.3 The moving image as a medium of revelation and deconstruction, as well as a means of tactical self-effacement and disguise, has served successive generations well. Laura Mulvey recalls that in the 1970s, ‘the terms “women” and “film” were brought together as a problem and a possibility.’4 Although the

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representation of women in film and television was a site of oppression, with ‘the female body [. . .] tied up for so long by the accoutrements of visual pleasure’,5 it was transformed into a site of resistance and reinvention, not least of femininity itself. In this chapter, I will revisit the different approaches to self-representation adopted by women film- and video-makers across the decades, and identify recurring themes threading through and overlapping in second-wave feminism, in the exuberant post-feminist third wave and the so-called fourth wave that is heralding a resurgence of feminist-oriented practices today.6 This account will identify an oscillation between two extremes: the full public self-display of the naked artist on the one hand and the total elimination of the female form on the other, with graduated stages of veiling and disguise in between. The degree of exposure and concealment involved is determined by the perceived risks and benefits mediated by the prevailing social, political and intellectual conditions of the day, and the magnetic pull of trends and fashions blowing through the art world at any one time.

Self-effacement; strategies of abstraction and displacement In the 1960s and 1970s, British commentators such as Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker warned that conventional likenesses of women were ‘easily retrieved and co-opted by a male culture because they do not rupture radically meanings and connotations of woman in art as body, as sexual, as nature, as object for male possession’.7 This critique resulted in a withdrawal of the female form in certain branches of the early feminist art movement, notably in the work of Mary Kelly, Susan Hiller and Lis Rhodes. Film-makers who defied the ocular regime of the male gaze by removing their bodies from the picture frame nonetheless sought ways to affirm their authorship of the work, and to illuminate the subjectivity of ‘the invisible producer’.8 Lis Rhodes, in a series of works spanning the 1970s and 1980s, deflected attention from the ‘projective surface’ of a woman’s body onto the materiality of film, the skin of the film.9 In Light Reading (1978), the formal processes of materialist film-making – multiple exposure, repetition, superimposition and reframing – are accompanied by the artist’s voice. Her

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words emphasize an inner life and inscribe her presence through the workings of her intellect rather than by means of her physical attributes. Rhodes has asserted, ‘where women have historically had a voice it has been in oral recounting and writing’,10 and where other artists might have rejected verbal language as irretrievably ‘man-made’, Rhodes embraced the non-visual declamatory form, evoking the literary inheritance derived from Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein and Alice Walker: ‘She objected/she refused to be framed/she raised her hand/she stopped the action/she began to read/she began to read aloud.’11 Poets exploit the malleability of language, its slipperiness, its ability to materialize the Keatsian ‘negative capability’ of a feminine register. Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti locates that transgressive register in ‘the break, within the gaps, between systematic spaces of artistic language’.12 Practising within this interstitial domain, Rhodes ‘make(s) images out of words’, printing text across the image and sound section of 16 mm film, in both Light Reading and the earlier Amanuensis (1973), thus enabling ‘what is said to be seen’ and ‘what is seen to be said’.13 Processes of layering and displacement, and the transposition of linguistic and visual codes, align with the optical investigations of abstract painters working in the same period. Bridget Riley’s canvases are structured around tightly woven patterns of reverberating bands of colour and black-and-white in which the image of woman is notably absent. It is replaced with a strippedback experience of seeing that ‘helps us to be more truthfully aware of the condition of being alive’.14 Agnes Martin similarly eschewed the human form in favour of uniformly abstract grids rendered in a restrained palette. Drawing on Hélène Cixous’s notion of écriture feminine, Ruth Burgon describes Martin’s works as ‘fluid, heterogeneous, lacking in hierarchy or centre, open, tactile and abundant’.15 Martin transformed her reticulated motifs into an editing strategy for Gabriel (1976), her only film. Here she combines an undifferentiated, meshlike structure of edits with images of a muted landscape seen through the eyes of a child. Martin finds in the landscape the multifariousness of nature that exceeds the frame, analogous to the excess that is the feminine in-representation. As Burgon argues, unpolluted by any gendered signs, Martin’s minimalism achieves a restaging of the self and a new corporeality, ‘a kind of Irigaryan jouissance, a joy in the movement and plenitude of things’,16 one that dissolves the semantic limitations of conventional female iconography.

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Repositioning the gaze and the subcutaneous body Although what Peggy Phelan later dubbed ‘active vanishing’17 was a rational response to women’s objectification, it was not a viable strategy for all visual artists active within second-wave feminism. While Sally Potter dismissed a stratagem of concealment as ‘unthinkable’ for performance artists, many film and video artists concluded that renewed levels of physical invisibility, however willingly entered into, left the field clear for conventional representations of women to maintain their dominance. Potter’s call for ‘a new presence’, a new way of coming into view, led some to displace the gaze from its conventional masculine orientation. In her 1972 video Appendix to an appeal, Ketty La Rocca choreographed a wordless screendance in which two individuals interact through sensually interlacing fingers, while the rest of their bodies remain mantled in shadow. The coupling of androgynous hands is framed as mutual, and within the tangle of fingers, it is impossible to locate the woman and fix her as an object ‘to-be-looked-at’. Another disruption of the male gaze is attempted in my own video work, There is a Myth (1984) (Figure 10.1) in which a swollen breast fills the frame, isolated from the armature of the body and returned to its physiological purpose of lactation within what Fulvia Carnevale formulates as ‘the endless, unrecognized work of motherhood’.18 An infant’s rough caresses tease milk from the nipple asserting the child’s point of view and the polymorphous and perverse sensuality animating the mother and child dyad, locking out any other claims.19 The skin carries its own history and early video artists strove to expand the meaning of nudity, enabling it to speak a language of the body beyond erotic inscription. In Birthday Suit– with Scars and Defects (1974), Lisa Steele presented just such a transgressive figure. Palely naked in discreet monochrome, the artist calmly faces the camera, and in a flat, conversational tone takes the viewer on a tour of her scars, each yielding up a tall tale of misadventure, endured and survived. Martha Rosler similarly employed the video camera to problematize the external appearance of the female body. In Vital Statistics of the Average Citizen Simply Obtained (1977), directed by a team of white-coated officials, the artist stands naked and impassive as her whole body, including her vagina, is measured and recorded, creating an ironic topography of her given anatomy. The female form, already an unstable sign, hovers between an

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Figure 10.1 Catherine Elwes, There is a Myth, 1984. Courtesy the artist.

object of medical research and the subject of Rosler’s own creativity. Like Steele, Rosler usefully demonstrated that nakedness reveals nothing in and of itself, however the vestigial erotic charge of these works (the bodies are young and beautiful) remained problematic and further strategies of concealment were sought by practitioners. Zooming in with the close-up lens of a video camera, Nan Hoover contrived to push the phallic body of woman beyond the threshold of visual coherence. Working with analogue equipment in the 1970s, Hoover produced a series of luminous, black-and-white works in which the dramatically magnified epidermis of a woman is transformed into a primordial landscape, a prelingual, voluptuous Arcadia where the long tentacles of patriarchal signification could not follow. It was not until the 1990s that Mona Hatoum achieved the total erasure of surface appearance – without leaving her body. In her visceral video Corps étranger (1994), she embarks on a subcutaneous journey, delving into the internal channels of her body with a camera attached to an endoscope. The work brings to mind St. John Chrysostom’s warning to men not to be

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deceived by the surface attractions of a woman, because ‘the whole of her bodily beauty is nothing less than phlegm, blood, bile, rhem [sic]’.20 Hatoum reminds us that when a woman’s body is forensically dissected and judged by the superintendents of religion, science and fashion, it is robbed of its humanity. These works take advantage of the intimacy of video to bring the hidden life of the body into view, but they also emphasize the distance between the female subject and her own likeness. Video, Peggy Gale has observed, ‘is itself a means of [. . .] physical removal, as a camera is not the artist’s body, nor [her] hand or even eye.’21 The suppression of distinguishing marks in Hatoum and Hoover’s corporeal archaeology accords them anonymity and shifts the focus from the artists’ bodies to their minds, to their artisanal skills and the agency that they achieve as cultural producers.

Masquerade, impersonation and surrogacy; ‘wrestling with the icon’22 Beginning in the 1970s, a number of women tackled representation head on, investigating cultural stereotypes calcified in centuries of art and popular culture.23 Challenging the notion of a unified self, some artists adopted doubles and disguises, notably Eleanor Antin with her cast of alter egos: The King, the Ballerina and the Nurse. In Made for TV (1984), Ann Magnuson channelhopped through a collection of film and television personas, from the cheerful 1950s housewife to the vamp of film noir, all played by the artist herself. In her video Free White and 21 (1980), Howardena Pindell parodied the insult of ‘blacking up’ in early cinema. She performed as a white woman criticizing Pindell for being an ungrateful and paranoid black artist, mocking her complaints of racism encountered both as a child, and later, in the context of the predominantly white feminist movement in the USA. Other artists have also shape-shifted to capture the power of cultural icons, for instance, the superheroine in Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation; Wonder Woman (1978 to 1979), Marilyn Monroe in Jean Matthee’s The Descent of the Seductress (1988) and the ecstatic St. Teresa of Avila in Nina Danino’s Now I am yours (1992). Although these works of ‘mimetic congress’ run the risk of ‘contamination’ by the originals,24 they successfully merge individual, ‘marked’

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bodies with a variety of interchangeable (dis)guises and as Patricia Mellencamp suggests, they ‘put on femininity with a vengeance’, which in turn ‘suggests the power of taking it off ’.25 I would argue that by corralling mainstream icons into their own creative universes (enacting cultural piracy), Magnuson, Birnbaum and Danino initiated a politics by proxy and created a bridge into the explosion of ‘delegated performances’,26 mainstream parodies and direct self-portraiture in the post-feminist era.

Self-revelation ‘post-feminism’ Although many of these tendencies carried over into the 1990s, when ‘girl power’ burst onto the UK scene, a reaction against the perceived prohibitions of early feminism, exemplified by the ‘active vanishing’ lobby, led artists such as Gillian Wearing, Sam Taylor-Johnson and Tracey Emin to appear confidently before the camera, declaring their creative agency and laying claim to the extensive landscapes of their desires. Theirs was a practice predicated on the belief that a singular vision would protect them from mainstream ‘contamination’ – as Emin asserted, ‘art is an expression of my soul.’27 Many embraced entertainment formats, albeit with irony, borrowing from TV shows, advertising and tabloid journalism, and, as Julian Stallabrass noted, they recycled the media obsession with ‘drugs, sex, violence, music, celebrity . . .’28 Pursuing the ‘degenerate sublime’,29 Wearing photographed friends masturbating and videoed the confessions of masked strangers in Confess all on video . . . (1994) and in Slut (1993), Taylor-Jonson brazenly displayed her neck wounded with love bites, affirming that she was ‘happy that [she] had wild sex the night before, rather than being the victim of something’.30 Finally, with a nod to Cindy Sherman, Sarah Lucas took artful selfies adopting masculine attributes and playing with gender identity and the cult of personality. By selling art with sex, some works of the period looked like wholesale capitulations to the demands of corporatized culture and male desire. For example, Vanessa Beecroft exhibited naked models and, in the Strip photographic series (2000), Jemima Stehli disrobed for male curators and critics. Not to be outdone, in Untitled (2006) Andrea Fraser videoed herself having sex in a hotel room with a man identified as an art collector, who paid

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for the privilege.31 Ostensibly, these performances, videos and photographs were designed to highlight the high incidence of eating disorders among western women (Beecroft), uninvited male attention (Stehli) and the complicated transactions between women artists and collectors (Fraser). Beecroft has been widely criticized for objectifying and demeaning her models, and, contends Laura Piccinini, for tailoring her work to the appetites of tabloid journalism.32 These works undoubtedly run the risk of reproducing what Erika Balsom terms a ‘mythologised femininity’ based on the old alignment of women’s bodies with sex and nature first identified by Pollock and Parker in the 1970s.33 Self-revelation in art that relies on such strategies is not for the fainthearted. If these artists were indeed critiquing the social conditions of women, the vacuity of popular culture and the excesses of a capitalist art market, they did so without the conviction that they could change what they observed. The yBas34 appeared to lose faith in the image as a catalyst for change – as TaylorJohnson remarked, ‘why offer hope when in many instances there isn’t any hope.’35 It would appear that political disillusionment combined with a backlash against feminism in the 1990s drove many to distance themselves from the politics of the 1970s and 1980s.36 Like their antecedents, artists such as TaylorJohnson, Stelhi and Emin demanded the right to be publicly visible, but as individual cultural heroines. They forged alliances within a loose tribe of friends and associates, uncoupled from the activist communities of their feminist predecessors. A number of commentators later endorsed the unfettered self-exposure of the 1990s. For instance, Alexandra Kokoli shifts Emin’s practice into the realm of the symbolic, discussing her as ‘a persona [. . .] rather than the flesh-andblood’ author of her own utterances.37 Emin represents, not herself, but ‘the place of the “woman artist” ’ in the contemporary art world.38 Similarly, Rosemary Betterton views Emin’s work as a poetic interpretation of (auto) biographical ‘truth’ that has the virtue of ‘giving space to the marginalised experiences of working-class women’, while progressing second-wave feminist themes, something the artist herself generally denies.39 In a bid to sidestep these ambiguities, ‘delegated’ autobiography re-appears in the work of Alex Bag, who runs through a repertoire of alter egos in her satirical video Untitled Fall ’95 (1995). The art student, fashion show host and Björk

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lookalike are personas reminiscent of Lynne Hershman Leeson’s tragic heroine ‘Roberta Breitmore’ (1974 to 1978) and Magnuson’s 1980s TV spoofs. Looping forward, Bag anticipates bloggers and contemporary YouTube divas such as Ann Hirsch. Maria Walsh has suggested that Bag fields ‘a strange mixture of sincerity and parody’ that ‘points to a value that exceeds commodity exchange’.40 Artists such as Bag, argue Walsh, align themselves with the ‘disaffected’ grunge aesthetic of the 1990s, itself a protest against the reluctant admission of women to the workplace, but only those endowed with the requisite feminine charms. The 1990s threw up further explorations of self-portraiture, in works that cracked the surface of mediatized gender representation while exposing deep divisions in human affairs. In 2 into 1 (1997) by Gillian Wearing (Figure 10.2), the artist interviews a woman and her two young sons and transposes their narratives so that the woman mimes her sons’ critiques of her mothering skills, as if they were her own, while the boys mouth their mother’s frustrations with them as sons. This artful ventriloquism, dislocating voices from their points of origin, dramatizes what Rozsika Parker formulated as ‘maternal ambivalence’,41 the co-existence of love and hate for a child, an ambivalence that Wearing’s subject so disarmingly confesses. It also exposes the aggression that these boys had developed towards their mother, an anger that is born in the bosom of the

Figure 10.2 Gillian Wearing, 2 into 1, 1997. Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley London.

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family and can so easily transfer to adult life where it finds institutional legitimization. Although the sons in Wearing’s video act as surrogates for their mother, and vice versa, the work marks a shift in which the artist increasingly retreats into the partial veiling of self that her directorial role enables. She has since dispersed her identity through other surrogates, while relinquishing none of her creative control as director.42

Contemporary evocations of self The drift towards the occlusion of self in Wearing’s practice across the 1990s indicates that ‘active vanishing’ persisted in the post-feminist era. Now that feminism is riding its fourth wave in the new millennium, it re-emerges in the work of the collectively named Claire Fontaine (Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill), who, following the writings of Carla Lonzi, have evolved the strategy of ‘Human Strike’.43 Carnevale advocates a process of ‘desubjectivisation’ that entails a refusal to participate in cultural systems built on hierarchies, including parenting. However, Carnevale herself admits to the impossibility of such a project (Claire Fontaine enjoys both gallery success and academic esteem). Maria Walsh reformulates the problem by asking whether ‘femininity can be posed as a site of resistance or whether it is fully enmeshed within the neoliberal production of subjectivity as aspirational and entrepreneurial?’44 Unable to reconcile a criticality of approach with participation in the languages of objectification, some artists have revived the formal strategies of their predecessors and returned to surrogates. Citing the cyberfeminism of Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant, Patricia Piccinini creates works that emerge from the undifferentiated terrain of computer data. In The Gathering (2006), Piccinini generates a tribe of furry mutants, stand-ins that Haraway has described as ‘unsettling but oddly familiar critters’.45 As they shuffle about a domestic interior, these computer-generated kobolds remain gender neutral, racially indeterminate and unclassifiable within the animal kingdom. The issue of the racialized body gives rise to a more explicit, but equally complex approach in the eroticized and queered work of Ope Lori, a practice informed by the new intersectionality of contemporary feminisms. Like Steele in the 1970s and Emin in the 1990s, Lori braves the full glare of public exposure.

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In Deracination (2010) (Plate 2.5) she splits the screen; one side features the artist, naked but for a thong, performing a dead-pan, slow-motion imitation of the incendiary ‘banana’ dances of Josephine Baker in the 1920s. Lori’s desultory gyrations are juxtaposed with clips of white girls dancing enthusiastically on black male singers’ promotional videos. Lori is referencing the issue of ‘colorism’, whereby, according to Catherine Long, ‘idealized’ white women ‘are set as a template for femininity in the West while black women are coded as Other.’46 The full exposure of the artist’s black body to the Western desire for the exotic Other makes for uncomfortable viewing. However, Lori resists the objectification of blackness, by her negative, morose, rhetorical performance and by ‘castrating the gaze’,47 by locking eyes with the camera and the spectators beyond, forcing an awareness of their own voyeuristic desires. Setting up a tension between the white girls’ performance and her own, Lori challenges those imperial colour codes that still measure value by the degree of skin pigmentation – the lighter the skin, the more ‘feminine’ and desirable the woman.48 In a different register, Pipilotti Rist puts her own and other women’s nakedness on show in a riotous celebration of female sensuality. She figures her women as both desiring and desired subjects. Reprising Hatoum’s Corps étranger, in Mutaflor (1996), Rist allows the camera to caress her naked, supine body and then plunge into one orifice only to re-emerge from another. Where Hatoum erased the problematic image of female nakedness by revealing only the deep interior of the body itself, Rist flirts dangerously with conventional voyeuristic representations of its surface. However, she also pinpoints the moment of transition from outside to inside the gendered membrane, the moment of dissolution of cultural markings into anatomical homogeneity – the levelling of meat. We might speculate that the object of the work is to show that women, in their hyper-sexualized mode are rendered invisible, and no less so than when they are reduced to the medicalized probings of their interior anatomy.49 Where Lori disrupts cultural constructions of black sexual identity through an anti-performance of self, and Rist animates the physical boundaries of the gendered body, other contemporary artists continue to tackle normalized female stereotypes through parody and performance to camera, wearing a number of disguises. Such works operate from a basal conviction that the mainstream, on

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and offline, plays an ever more powerful role in the formation of the subject, and moulds women’s needs to the dictates of the enterprise economy. In videos such as Center Jenny (2013), Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch satirize the narcissism of the ‘networked self ’,50 in both reality TV and social media. Their ‘hypermagnified’, camp performances sail close to the wind, exploiting the seductions of the already hyperbolic original. Identity in these performances of femininity remains provisional and in flux; the artists show unwillingness to close down any avenues of expression, even those that offer compromised forms of exposure. ‘Women’ said Mary Beard, ‘in some ways are fake [. . .] you’ve got to look the part and you’ve got to be authentic. And that’s impossible.’51 The central paradox of contemporary femininity drives these works. The increased opportunities for women to make meaning, to assert a presence in art, also require putting on a display coded as female, less Judith Butler’s notion of performativity than Beard’s concept of femininity as fake, one that severs the connection between representation and felt experience. However, I suggest that the kernel of each work contains within it a sincere desire to speak, to be understood, to be known. Sometimes that desire can only find expression through the most entangled, schizoid displays of feminine behaviour. Anna Watkins Fisher identifies a quality of ‘incompleteness’ in the extreme sexual performances of (‘The Famous’) Lauren Barri Holstein who describes herself as ‘part-time sex object, part-time flailing mess, part-time feminist’.52 Like many others, Barri Holstein accepts the inevitable compromises involved in working within existing cultural forms and institutions, but she adopts an optimistic brand of ‘parasitism’ where she can work ‘in friendship with institutions’ while ‘mess[ing] with [them]’.53 According to Marina Vishmidt, these artists are searching for an unorthodox, marginal space within established cultural arenas from which to speak, to make a mark, one ‘which does not degrade [them]’.54 The circle turns once again and there are women artists working today who doubt the usefulness of renewed confrontations with feminine stereotypes in the hazardous waters of satirical performativity. Some prefer to revisit the negotiated visibility adopted by early feminists, often in the form of collective re-enactments that Nina Wakeford has described as practices of ‘temporal drag’.55 These younger women feel more comfortable inhabiting the gestures of their cultural antecedents and, according to Catherine Grant, when classic works from the feminist canon are re-enacted they become ‘scenes of learning, embodied

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quotations and reveal a subtext or reshape the original while being replayed’.56. In Salomania (2009), Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz re-create the provocative Dance of the Seven Veils from the silent movie Salomé (Alla Nazimova, 1923), which, in the 1970s had inspired a work by Yvonne Rainer. The choreographer herself takes the role of Herod in Boudry’s video, but she is also seen coaching the principal dancer who performs Nazimova’s unconventional interpretation of Salomé’s dance. Helena Reckitt has expressed reservations about re-enactment, questioning ‘who benefits from these rescue missions?’57 In some cases, it is possible to detect hostility, or embarrassment towards the historical figures as well as respect.58 However, Grant argues that the younger generation is seeking to establish an alternative genealogy of feminine representation for women, a parallel cultural presence in art, one that prevents feminism ‘from slipping from memory and out of history’.59 The citation of feminist signifying practices from earlier eras in which one woman is ventriloquized, anatomized or celebrated in the body of another, creates an alternative historical trajectory, leading not so much to the death of the author, but to an intermingling of female identities, and the establishment of an intergenerational body politic. In this chapter, I have considered an array of feminist strategies across three generations, tracing continuities and differences in their approaches to exposure and concealment of self within the frame of the moving image. I have looked at how women have tried to avoid reproducing ideological constructs that have historically oppressed them, even when ‘wrestling with the icon’, and I have focused on their endeavours to calibrate artistic interventions to a narrative of self that ‘builds a new presence’. Whatever strategies feminist artists adopt in the future, however contradictory, compromised and provisional they prove to be, they will continue to reinvent the ‘portrait of the artist, she . . .’ , one that reflects the struggles of women to sustain a creative practice and protect their rights at home, at work, within education, the law and in religious ordinance.

Notes 1 Potter, Sally (1980), ‘On Shows’, Catalogue essay for the exhibition About Time; Video Performance and Installation by 21 Women Artists, ICA, London.

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2 I am focusing here on moving image practices that emerge from a fine art context, which include performative, screening-oriented presentations, webcasts and gallery-based installations. 3 I am limiting my discussion to Western art practitioners who have the opportunity to be physically represented in their art, both clothed and naked without giving rise to legal or religious censure. 4 Mulvey, Laura (2018), ‘Afterword: some reflections on the engagement of feminism with film from the 1970s to the present day’, MIRAJ, 7 (1): 84. 5 Ibid., 84. 6 The notion of ‘waves’ of feminism has been widely interrogated, and many prefer the concept of an intersectional feminism understood as a continuum, while others adopt symbols such as forests, feminist ecosystems and ‘No-Wave Feminism’ rooted in the everyday struggles of women across the world. See: Ahmad, Aalya (30 June 2015), ‘Feminism Beyond the Waves’, Briarpatch. Available at: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/feminism-beyond-the-waves (accessed 4 January 2018). 7 Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock (1981), Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology, 130, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. 8 Constanze Rhum speaking at the ‘Invisible Producers’ seminar convened by Laura Mulvey, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, 25 March 2015. 9 Ibid., her term. 10 Rhodes, Lis (2016), ‘Lis Rhodes in conversation with Jenny Lund on 16 April 2015’, MIRAJ, 4 (1 and 2): 186. 11 Voice track from Light Reading (Lis Rhodes, 1978). 12 Sauzeau-Boetti, Anne-Marie (January/February 1976), ‘Negative capability as practice in women’s art’, Studio International, 191 (1979): 25. 13 Rhodes, ‘Lis Rhodes in conversation with Jenny Lund: London, 16 April 2015’, 195. 14 Riley, Bridget. Speaking on Abstract Artists in Their Own Words (dir. Ben Harding), BBC 4, 9 September 2014. 15 Burgon, Ruth (2016), ‘Trips, crossings, trudges: A reappraisal of Agnes Martin’s Gabriel’, MIRAJ, 4 (1 and 2), London: 64. 16 Ibid., 9. 17 Phelan, Peggy (1993), Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, 10, London: Routledge. 18 Carnevale, Fulvia. Speaking at the Now You Can Go seminar, The Showroom Gallery, London, 12 December 2015. 19 For more on Myth and related works addressing motherhood, see Betterton, Rosemary (2010), ‘Maternal Embarrassment: Feminist Art and Maternal Affects’, Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1). www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/sim.88/ galley/84/download (accessed 5 January 2016).

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20 St. John Christostom quoted by Warner, Marina ([1976]2013), Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, 59, Oxford: Picador. 21 Gale, Peggy (2006), ‘On the Horizon’, in C. Elwes and C. Meigh-Andrews (eds), Analogue: Pioneering Video from the UK, Canada and Poland (1968-1988), exhibition catalogue, 55, Preston: University of Central Lancashire. 22 Kathleen Pirrie Adams identified women who ‘wrestled with the icon [. . .] with [their] full body weight’. See, Promise catalogue, YYZ (Toronto, 1999), 5–11. 23 Catherine Long provides a useful definition of a stereotype in her (unpublished) thesis, A Feminist Dialogue with the Camera (2016): ‘[S]tereotypes operate to create intentional divisions in society and perpetuate inequality while presenting themselves as both harmless and truthful.’ 47. 24 Adams, Kathleen Pirrie, ‘Lady in the Lake: fluid forms of self in performance video’, 5. 25 Mellencamp, Patricia (1990), Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video & Feminism, 129, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 26 See Bishop, Claire (Spring 2012), ‘Delegated performance: Outsourcing authenticity’, October, 140: 91–112. 27 Tracey Emin, interviewed by Matthew Stadlen, On the road with Tracey Emin, BBC news channel, 20 May 2011. 28 Stallabrass, Julian ([1990] 2001), High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, 4, London/New York: Verso. 29 Jake Chapman’s term in Taylor-Wood, Sam (1996), ‘No-one’s Mother Sucks Cock in Hell’, Exhibition catalogue, Chisenhale Gallery, London. 30 Stallabrass, High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, 143. 31 This work is reminiscent of Cosi Fanni Tutti’s ‘Prostitution’ show at the ICA in London in 1976. 32 Quoted in Nick Johnstone, ‘Dare to bare’, Guardian, 13 March 2005. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/mar/13/art (accessed 20 March 2016). 33 Balsom, Erika (2013), Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, 60, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 34 The abbreviation yBas refers to ‘young British artists’, a term used to identify a group of artists who emerged in the UK during the 1990s. Their characteristics are described in Stallabrass, Julian, High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art. 35 Taylor-Johnson quoted in Stallabrass, Julian, High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, 145. 36 See Faludi, Susan (1991), Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, New York: Vintage.

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37 Kokoli, Alexandra M. (4 June 2006), ‘Review of Tracey Emin’s Strangeland (2005)’, The F-Word. Available at: https://www.thefword.org.uk/2006/06/strangeland/ (accessed 4 January 2018). 38 Kokoli, ‘The Woman Artist as Curatorial Effect: The Case of Tracey Emin’s Scottish Retrospective’ in Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry (eds). 2013), Politics in a Glass Case: Feminism, Exhibition Cultures and Curatorial Transgressions, 12, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 39 Betterton, Rosemary (2002), ‘Why is my art not as good as me? Femininity, feminism and ‘life-drawing’ in Tracey Emin’s art’, in Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend (eds), The Art of Tracey Emin, 30, London: Thames & Hudson. 40 Walsh, Maria (2016), ‘From performing resistance to performing autonomy and back again: Alex Bag meets Ann Hirsch’, MIRAJ , 4 (1 and 2), 2016: 29. 41 Parker, Rozsika (1995), Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence, London: Virago Press. 42 See for instance Wearing’s Self Made (2010) in which she works with untrained actors drawing on their own experiences. 43 See the Claire Fontaine website: http://www.clairefontaine.ws/ (accessed 7 January 2016). 44 Walsh, ‘From performing resistance to performing autonomy and back again: Alex Bag meets Ann Hirsch’, 11. 45 Haraway, Donna (2007), ‘Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country’, in the (tender) creature exhibition catalogue, Artium. Available at: http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/essays/30 (accessed 4 June 2012). 46 Long (2016), ‘Ope Lori: I want me some brown sugar’, MIRAJ, 4 (1 and 2): 269. 47 Mulvey ([1975] 1989), ‘Visual pleasure and Narrative cinema’, in L. Braudy and M. Cohen (eds), Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 833–44, New York: Oxford University Press. 48 In 2006, a Cuban businesswoman confided to me that in her country, skin colour not only determined sexual desirability but it also impacted on employment prospects and social standing; the more ‘Spanish-looking’ and the less ‘African’, the better. 49 Catherine Long has made this point in her discussion of the work of Ope Lori, ‘Ope Lori: I want me some brown sugar’ (2016), and for further elaboration of the issue, she directs readers to Woodward, Kath and Sophie Woodward (2009), Why Feminism Matters: Feminism Lost and Found, Basingstoke. 50 Lisa Akervall’s term, from my notes. Akervall was speaking on ‘Videoart’s inverted panopticon: a critical aesthetics of postcinematic subjectivity’ at the Screen conference, Glasgow, June 2014.

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51 Mary Beard in conversation with Hilary Clinton (2 December 2017), ‘The presidential candidate and the classicist’, The Guardian colour supplement, 21: 10–22, original emphasis. 52 Barri Holstein, Lauren, ‘The Cyclical Pleasure/Death of Symbolization: How To Become a Cupcake/The Famous’ Adaption of Frankenstein’, in Eirini Kartsaki and Gareth Farmer (eds), On Repetition: Writing, Performance, Art (London: forthcoming). See also (2016), ‘Lauren Barri Holstein in conversation with Anna Watkins Fisher’, MIRAJ, 4 (1 and 2): 216–28. 53 Ibid., 11. 54 Marina Vishmidt speaking at the ‘Now You Can Go’ symposium, Showroom Gallery, London, 12 December 2015. 55 Nina Wakeford, in conversation with Griselda Pollock at Camberwell College of Arts, 8 March 2016. Wakeford is referencing Elizabeth Freeman’s use of the term in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham and London, 2010). ‘Temporal drag’ describes the embodiment of the past in contemporary reworkings of earlier queer and feminist art practices, a process that is ‘not simply [. . .] citational, but physical, even erotic’ (93). 56 Catherine Grant speaking at the ‘Feminist Duration in Art and Curation’ symposium, Goldsmiths College London, 16 March 2016. See also her essay (2011), ‘Fans of Feminism: Re-writing Histories of Second-wave Feminism in Contemporary Art’, Oxford Art Journal, 34 (2): 265–86. 57 Helena Reckitt speaking at the ‘Now You Can Go’ symposium, Showroom Gallery, as above. 58 Nina Wakeford spoke of the use of irony in some works as a way of mitigating that embarrassment, which she defined as ‘the excess of the history we are investigating’. Camberwell College of Arts, 8 March 2016. 59 Catherine Grant speaking at the ‘Feminist Duration in Art and Curation’ symposium.

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Maeve Connolly – Choreographing women’s work: Multitaskers, smartphone users and virtuoso performers

Introduction During the 1970s, women artists and film-makers frequently utilized the moving image to investigate changing concepts and conditions of labour, focusing on the unwaged (and sometimes waged) work performed by women in the service of social reproduction, both within and beyond the home. These concerns are apparent in films by Helke Sander, Yvonne Rainer, Babette Mangolte, Pat Murphy, Vivienne Dick and Laura Mulvey (with Peter Wollen). Paralleling these developments in moving image practice, a new generation of Marxist feminist theorists, including Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, radically expanded critical and historical analysis of women’s reproductive labour, demonstrating both its invisibility and its centrality to the operations of capital.1 Their research directly informed activist movements such as the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign, with Federici noting the ‘combination of physical, emotional and sexual services involved in the role that women must perform for capital’.2 Federici’s reference to emotional ‘services’ preceded Arlie Hochschild’s in-depth analysis of waged emotional labour in The Managed Heart, an influential sociological study of (predominantly female) flight attendants and (predominantly male) bill collectors at Delta Airlines. These workers were required – and in the case of the attendants, trained – to perform ‘emotional labour’3 in their interactions with customers, which meant that they needed to ‘induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others’.4 215

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This varied tradition of research into women’s waged and unwaged reproductive work has, however, been somewhat overlooked in subsequent theorizations of affective and immaterial labour. Kylie Jarrett, who draws on Fortunati’s research to analyse the work of consuming and producing social media, such as Facebook, notes an elision of Marxist feminist analysis in much research on labour in digital media industries, which she finds ‘surprising [. .] given the “feminization” of work in contemporary capitalism’.5 The shift toward service-based economies understood as post-Fordism, often requiring greater specialization, favours consumer-oriented and ostensibly ‘immaterial’ skills of communication, often stereotypically attributed to women. A full discussion of affective and immaterial labour in the post-Fordist economy, as theorized by Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri, and Paolo Virno, among others, is beyond the scope of this chapter,6 but Virno’s concept of ‘virtuoso performance’ is directly relevant to my discussion. He highlights the increased requirement for ‘linguistic-relational abilities’,7 likening workers in this economy to ‘virtuoso’ performers such as actors, teachers and artists, whose labour does not result in a conventional (material) product. Virno is not the only theorist of post-Fordism to identify a generalization of the condition of artistic work. Analysing the reorganization of capitalism in the wake of 1968, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argue that management discourse has incorporated and co-opted the ‘desire for liberation, autonomy and authenticity’ articulated as ‘artistic critique’.8 Accordingly, workers are offered the flexible models of organization and employment associated with creative labour, typically in place of security. There is little doubt that women are heavily exposed to the demands of post-Fordist culture, as evidenced by Hochschild’s research on service work and Jarrett’s analysis of digital media use. Yet, unlike many other workers, women artists can draw on a long history of feminist activism and theory,9 focused directly on the place of reproductive labour in capitalism. In this chapter, I approach the woman artist film-maker as a privileged commentator on women’s work (in all of its guises) within the post-Fordist economy, informed not only by feminism but also by intimate knowledge of media economies and technologies, developed in the hands-on use of media and in (highly self-reflexive) interactions with professional and non-professional collaborators.

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I focus specifically on moving image works by Irish artist Sarah Browne and Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh, because both are attentive to intersectionality and to the lived experiences of women marginalized on the basis of class, ethnicity, race, age or occupation, as well as gender. My discussion centres primarily on Browne’s Something from nothing (2014) and van Oldenborgh’s Bete & Deise (2012). In both instances the artists privilege the experiences of individual women workers situated within specific cultural and socio-political contexts. Significantly, both artists are outside observers to the women they film; Browne focuses on women working on the Shetland Islands, both in the past and present, while van Oldenborgh’s film centres on two Brazilian women with international reputations as performers.10 Browne and van Oldenborgh are by no means the only contemporary women artists using the moving image to explore women’s work.11 But Something from nothing and Bete & Deise share a distinctive emphasis on the historical changes that have occurred in the reproductive labour performed by women, including those who define themselves as artists.

The labour of appearance and the virtuoso performer Acting, knitting, care work, carioca funk performance, parliamentary political representation and sex work are just some of the diverse forms of women’s labour explored in these films, and Browne and van Oldenborgh both highlight disparities in the status and value attributed to various forms of emotional, physical and mental labour, ranging from waged, unionized employment to unpaid familial care work. By discussing Something from nothing and Bete & Deise together, I seek to frame the choreography of women’s work for the camera as a means of articulating, and potentially contesting, the conditions of labour in post-Fordism. Both artists seek to bring women of different generations and occupations into either direct or mediated dialogue with each other, and to elicit semistaged performances of their labour for the camera. Their performances are loosely choreographed, and frequently involve the use either of quasiprofessional media and techniques (microphones, vocal projection skills, lights and reflectors) or quasi-domestic media and tools (from Facebook, Skype and smartphones to desktop computers, knitting needles and pens). In

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the discussion that follows, I situate these strategies of choreography and staging in relation to disparate traditions of research into labour and its performance. In order to theorize the performance of emotional labour, Hochschild draws partly upon Erving Goffman’s analysis of human interaction, citing his attention to ‘how we try to control our appearance even as we unconsciously observe rules about how we ought to appear to others’.12 Goffman develops an explicitly dramaturgical approach to behaviour, using the term ‘performance’ to describe how individuals interact with ‘observers’, differentiating between ‘front’ and ‘backstage’ situations, and emphasizing the role of settings and props in the management of appearance.13 Significantly, Goffman’s theorization of ‘selfpresentation’ was informed by fieldwork conducted in Unst, the most northerly of the Shetland Islands, and he makes several allusions to the behaviour of local women (of different classes) working in an island hotel. Something from nothing refers directly to Goffman’s research,14 with Browne consciously taking up the role of participant-observer and deploying strategies of staging to analyse the self-presentation of creative workers, including herself and her crew. Although Goffman is attentive to the conditions of service work, his analysis of self-presentation does not offer a critique of capitalism, or the dominant political order. In contrast, Virno seeks to examine the political consequences of virtuoso performance as a pervasive mode of labour, where workers are increasingly required to develop and display ‘skills and aptitudes of a political kind’ as part of their linguistic-relational labour.15 Virno identifies a potential crisis of representation, as a result of acting ‘politically’ having become a pervasive and ubiquitous part of labour. Oldenborgh has made several works exploring changing forms of collective social and political action, sometimes focusing on specific labour campaigns. Bete & Deise references the history of labour activism in Brazil, through one of its participants (Bete Mendes). I am especially interested in this film’s materialization of tensions between Fordist and post-Fordist cultures of political representation, seen in a semi-choreographed encounter between individuals who belong to different classes, generations and performance cultures, yet share the will to use their own bodies (and voices) to articulate the experiences of marginalized women.

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Women’s work on camera Vocalization, through speech and song, plays a central role in Bete & Deise. In contrast, some of the women that appear in Something from nothing specifically use image-based media, or written text, as their primary means of public communication. Browne uses online and social media as research tools in her own practice, while also exploring how other women engage with digital media technologies, as settings and props in their own self-presentation. Shot in black and white, using a smartphone camera, Something from nothing is structured around the activities of several women who are based either fully or partially on the Shetland Islands. These women include Hazel (a recordbreaking knitter and a producer of patterns), Kaylee (a member of the Scottish youth parliament who authors speeches and campaigns), Honey (an escort operating between Shetland and other locations) and Floortje (a photographer). Browne, who categorizes all of these women as ‘creative workers’, identified her subjects through online research into the profiles and activities of Shetland workers.16 They are deliberately depicted separately from each other, engaged in various forms of productive and reproductive labour; very often collapsing distance through the involvement of computers or mobile devices. For example, we see Hazel using Facebook to communicate with friends and family, doing the washing up and subsequently knitting, at an impressive speed. Kaylee, meanwhile, is pictured using her phone and laptop, as well as writing in longhand. In Something from nothing, digital media are directly implicated in the dissolution of boundaries between the domestic and non-domestic. This is not to suggest that fixed spatial boundaries for reproductive labour existed in the pre-Facebook era. These boundaries are clearly contested by the images of early twentieth-century Shetland women walking while knitting – which appear in Browne’s film – and also by the more recent research of Fortunati noting that the affective organisation and material work of maintaining the home has long been carried out in other places, enabled by older communications technologies such as fixed-line telephones.17 At the same time, mobile devices undoubtedly play an increasingly significant role in the performance of reproductive labour. The smartphone, which has replicated and superseded the affordances and functions of many older technologies – including the book, clock, radio, map,

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compass and camera, to name a few – both facilitates and normalizes the (apparently) simultaneous performance of multiple tasks. In Browne’s practice, however, the smartphone is approached as both object and tool, materializing the ostensibly immaterial. Browne herself also appears on screen at several points during the film, engaged in the work of research and communication. We first see her using a microfiche viewer to scan through documents related to Erving Goffman, and then seated at a laptop, engaged in a video conversation with Honey, a participant in the film who is represented visually only by her Skype avatar, which is an image of the torso of a voluptuous female body, clad in a metallic bikini. These scenes of (primarily indoor) labour are interspersed with more open-ended images of movement through the Shetland countryside, accompanied by a soundtrack – composed by Alma Kelliher – incorporating recordings of devices and environments associated with specific labour practices. Something from nothing also explores changing relationships between energy, power and production, involving technologies and non-human bodies. The film is punctuated by images of whirring wind turbines and includes images of (wool-producing) alpacas, illuminated petrol pumps and the glowing dashboard of a car at night, to emphasize the material supports for so-called immaterial labour.

Figure 11.1 Sarah Browne, Something from nothing, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

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As mentioned earlier, Browne’s research was partly prompted by photographs, initially encountered online, of early twentieth-century women from the Shetland Islands knitting while walking, backs bowed to bear the weight of turf-loaded baskets. One of these photographs appears as Browne’s Skype avatar in the conversation with Honey, underscoring the fact that the demand for flexibility and multitasking skills long precedes the post-Fordist economy. These images disrupt conventional understandings of knitting as domestic work, but they are important to Browne because of the attenuated, indirect (and even illicit) relationship that existed between the Shetland knitting economy and the wider context of capitalist production. The Shetland knitters had limited access to local materials because it was hard to raise sheep on the islands, and they were often paid for their knitwear through a barter system, so they did not necessarily use cash to purchase wool for production. As its title suggests, Something from nothing emphasizes the interdependency of production and reproduction, materiality and immateriality, in both analogue and digital media, and Browne alludes in various ways to the historical connections between textile manufacture and the development of computer coding.18 These connections are suggested both by Kate McCullough’s cinematography, which includes extreme close ups of movement across woven textile fibres, handwriting and computer screens, and by the soundtrack, which mixes dial tones, sounds of knitting needles, keyboards, microfiche mechanisms and women’s voices. Bete & Deise explores a much narrower historical timeframe and is less focused on the connections between material and immaterial labour. Unlike Browne, van Oldenborgh stages a direct encounter between her subjects, filming them together and separately within the same location, at an unfinished building in Rio de Janeiro. The film features an unscripted dialogue between Bete Mendes (born in 1949), a celebrated Brazilian telenovela actress, labour activist and former Secretary of Culture in the state of Sao Paulo, and Deise Tigrona, who is thirty years younger and grew up in Rio’s Cidade de Deus. Tigrona came to prominence in the city’s funk carioca music scene during the 2000s, acquiring a reputation for her explicit focus on female sexuality.19 Both women recall, and re-enact, key moments from their own professional trajectories, moving between personal disclosure and more self-consciously polemical modes of speech. So, for example, Mendes describes her role in the fight for women’s and workers’ rights, recalling a speech she made at a mass

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gathering of 100,000 workers, also addressed by her ally Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil from 2003 to 2011). She mentions hearing and seeing army helicopters at the rally, and the sound of choppers – omnipresent in many Brazilian cities – can be heard at other moments, blurring the boundaries between past and present. Tigrona also revisits pivotal moments in her professional life, including her triumphs in heated ‘battles’ at Coroado dance hall, located in Cidade de Deus. Browne’s film was realized with the involvement of a choreographer, Fearghus Ó Conchúir, a native speaker of Irish known for a collaborative, experimental and research-led practice, engaged with the politics of gender and language. Although there is no formally authored choreography in Something from nothing, Ó Conchúir (who often uses choreography as a form of facilitation) acted as a kind of mentor to the project in discussions with Browne both before and during the shoot.20 Ó Conchúir does not appear in the film, but Browne chose to make the performance of her own labour, and that of the cinematographer Kate McCullough visible on screen. Browne is shown scrolling through files on the microfiche reader, while McCullough is briefly pictured behind a smartphone mounted on a tripod (Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 Sarah Browne, Something from nothing, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

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Something from nothing is not the only moving image work shot by a professional cinematographer on a smartphone camera. The feature films Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015) and Unsane (Steven Soderbergh, 2018) were both shot entirely on iPhones, enabling access to locations that might be off limits to a large film crew. Browne, however, is specifically interested in the smartphone as a material technology that both facilitates and intensifies the demand for multitasking by workers in the post-Fordist economy. Before filming on Shetland, she devised the work Peripherals (2013) for a commission on the theme of women’s labour from the National Women’s Council of Ireland. Part of the touring exhibition Still We Work, Peripherals consists of a video and a group of ‘hand-sized sculptures’ (made with aluminium, silicone, black glass and scented soap) cast from objects ‘used for work and play’,21 including a smartphone, computer mouse and vibrator.

Choreographing histories of labour Like Something from nothing, Bete & Deise should be understood as part of a larger investigation of labour history, and it is the final work in a trilogy, preceded by Après La Reprise, la Prise (2009) and Pertinho de Alphaville (2010), and also by Supposing I Love you and you also love me (2011), which is identified as a prologue. These earlier works, which have been theorized by Eric de Bruyn and Sven Lütticken,22 do not feature professional performers and were produced using still images, assembled into projected sequences and accompanied by audio. Many of their participants reflect upon personal experiences of industries that have been radically altered by practices such as outsourcing. But rather than simply documenting these labour struggles, van Oldenborgh highlights situations in which former factory workers have become active in union campaigns, have politically represented themselves and, in some instances, found new (albeit equally insecure) occupations as performers. So, for example, Après La Reprise, la Prise explores the experiences of a group of women who worked for a Levi’s factory in France, fought as union members against its closure and subsequently took part in the production of a book and play (501 blues), devised by dramatist Bruno Labara in response to their story. Pertinho de Alphaville also deals with the situation of textile

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workers whose labour has become ‘public’, but this time focusing on a factory in Brazil (Wearplay) in which manufacturing was moved from the factory to the shop floor, exploiting a new demand for locally produced goods. Van Oldenborgh has described Bete & Deise as her first experience of working with professional performers, but both Bete Mendes and Deise Tigrona very evidently appear as ‘themselves’. In contrast to Something from nothing, van Oldenborgh’s film places its central characters within the same physical setting, and it is through this situation of physical proximity that differences in their biographies and professional trajectories are revealed. Mendes (who is white) is well known for her appearances in various telenovelas and also for her involvement in state politics and labour activism. Tigrona, who is black, built her professional reputation in the funk carioca scene, which was marginalized in mainstream Brazilian media until it received greater international visibility in 2004, when a sample from Tigrona’s song ‘Injeção’ (Injection) was used by Sri Lankan-British singer-rapper M.I.A. in her single ‘Bucky Done Gun’. Significantly, the sampled sequence incorporates reworked airhorns from ‘Gonna Fly Now’, the theme from the film Rocky (1977), which accompanies underdog boxer Rocky Balboa as he runs through the gritty streets of Philadelphia, eventually ascending to the steps of the city’s Museum of Fine Art. The sampling details are significant because they underscore the complexities of authorship and accreditation for many performers in the digital media economy. Mendes has achieved cultural status and financial security and has used her celebrity status to successfully campaign for the rights of domestic workers. In contrast, Tigrona derives very little income from music and almost abandoned performing because of family responsibilities, working as a maid to secure a regular income even after she had established a prominent public profile. Despite her commitment to worker’s rights, Mendes clearly struggles to recognize Tigrona as a peer, and is visibly shocked that the younger woman has little or no relationship with the labour movement. Their interactions occur within a halffinished building that seems quasi-domestic and yet resists categorization as residential (Plate 2.6). Its walls and floors are not fully enclosed and so operate as stage-like platforms, allowing the structure and surroundings to substitute for other spaces evoked by the women’s words and actions, most obviously when they recollect specific performances (at political rallies, in the case of Mendes, or in the dance hall, in the case of Tigrona).23 Neither of the women are fully at

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home in this setting, but Tigrona is arguably more comfortable than Mendes in claiming it as a space of performance and potential political action.

Conclusion Something from nothing and Bete & Deise both offer new ways of thinking about the contradictory and occluded category of ‘women’s work’ that has historically been associated with the domestic and yet has long extended beyond the home. I have emphasized that Browne and van Oldenborgh both use strategies of choreography and staging, informed by research into labour and its performance, choreographing women’s work for the camera to articulate, and challenge, the conditions of labour in post-Fordism. Both artists seek to explore physical settings and, particularly in Browne’s case, the technologies used in everyday forms of self-presentation, and in what might be termed virtuoso performance. I have differentiated between the approaches used by Browne and van Oldenborgh, emphasizing the materiality and objecthood of media technologies in Something from nothing and the significance of architecture in Bete & Deise that materially manifests the dissolution of boundaries between home, factory, office, studio and stage. Ultimately, however, I think it is more important to register the commonalities between these works. Both artists articulate and explore the particular instabilities – material, social and political – encountered by women workers post-Fordism, while also attending to continuities in reproductive labour over time. They pay close attention to the lived experiences of specific women, but also acknowledge the broader intersectional dynamics of race, class and gender, which intensify the fraught transition from mass to socialized labour, and contribute to the continued occlusion of certain forms of women’s work.

Notes 1 Federici, Silvia (2004), Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, New York: Autonomedia; Leopoldina Fortunati (1995), The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labour and Capital, Transl. H. Creek New York: Autonomedia.

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2 Federici, Silvia (1975), Wages Against Housework, 3, Bristol: Falling Wall Press. 3 Russell Hochschild, Arlie ([1983] 2012)The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Jarrett, Kylie (2014), ‘The Relevance of “Women’s Work”: Social Reproduction and Immaterial Labor in Digital Media’, Television & New Media, 15 (1): 15. 6 On immaterial labour and digital media, see Ibid., 16–18. See also Virno, Paolo and Michael Hardt (eds). (1996) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, and Weeks, Kathi (2007), ‘Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics.’ Ephemera, 7 (1): 233–49. 7 Virno, Paolo (2004), A Grammar of the Multitude, Transl. I. Bertoletti, J. Cascaito and A. Casson, 98, New York and Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 8 Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello (2007), The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. G. Elliott, 419, London and New York: Verso; See also Chiapello, Eve (2004), ‘Evolution and Co-optation: The “Artist Critique” of Management and Capitalism’, Third Text, 18 (6): 585–94. 9 In October 2015, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy), Marina Vishmidt and Melanie Gilligan co-organized a four-day series of events at Artists Space, New York, around the theme of ‘Value’, including a roundtable discussion with Silvia Federici, addressing connections to the Wages for Housework campaign. See online at http://www.wageforwork.com [accessed February 2018]. 10 Something from nothing and Bete & Deise are both single channel works, primarily exhibited in galleries. Both have, however, been shown in cinemas and were programmed together at a screening I co-organized with Alice Butler at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin in July 2014. 11 My analysis could (if space allowed) be expanded to encompass discussion of films by Jaki Irvine, Jesse Jones, Alex Martinis Roe and Rehana Zaman, since all have addressed experiences of marginalized women workers, staging encounters between women from different generations, socio-economic classes or cultures. 12 Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, xviii. 13 Goffman, Erving (1956), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 12–13, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre. 14 The specific text referenced by Browne (in a credit at the end of the video) is Goffman’s unpublished PhD thesis, submitted to the University of Chicago in 1953, entitled Communication Conduct in an Island Community. 15 Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude.

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16 For further details on Browne’s research see her blog online at http://www. sarahbrowne.info/news/filming-in-the-shetland-islands/ (accessed February 2018). 17 Fortunati, Leopoldina (2007), ‘Immaterial Labor and Its Machinization.’ Ephemera, 7 (1): 139–57. 18 Browne’s research on textiles is informed by the work of Sadie Plant, who has theorized the relationship between weaving and cybernetics from a feminist perspective in publications such as ‘The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics’, in J. Wolmark (ed.) (1999), Cybersexualities: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, 99–118, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Plant contributed (via Skype) to a symposium on Material Thinking organized in conjunction with Browne’s exhibition Hand to Mouth at the Centre for Contemporary Art Derry-Londonderry on 17 May 2014, online at http://ccaderry-londonderry.org/public-programme/material-thinking-public-discussionand-screening/ (accessed February 2018). 19 There are two variations in the spelling of Tigrona’s name and her Wikipedia page specifies Deize rather than Deise. Online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Deize_Tigrona (accessed February 2018). 20 This role is described in Ó Conchúir’s blog. Online at http://www.fearghus.net/ shetland-with-sarah-browne/ (accessed February 2018). 21 The video, which features a demonstration of the objects, is voiced by a blogger and part-time hand model, and framed by Browne as an exploration of the ‘labour involved in the construction of an image [and], the role of her body in accessing feeling and memory’. Online at http://www.sarahbrowne.info/work/peripherals/ (accessed February 2018). 22 See De Bruyn, Eric C. H. (2010), ‘Intermittent Conversations on Leaving the Factory’, in Texte zur Kunst 79, 138–45, and Lütticken, Sven (2012), ‘Interzone: On Three Works by Wendelien van Oldenborgh’, Afterall, 29, 47–56. 23 Aspects of this ambiguous architecture are also referenced and amplified by van Oldenborgh in the gallery installation version of Bete & Deise, which involves a projection onto a screen integrated into a semi-enclosed wooden seating structure.

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Maria Walsh – Female solidarity as uncommodified value: Lucy Beech’s Cannibals and Rehana Zaman’s Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen

I am my own enterprise, if Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of capitalism, post-Fordism integrates reproduction and communication . . . subjectivity is the raw material for immaterial labour.1 Lucy Beech’s Cannibals (2013), and Rehana Zaman’s Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen (2014), are two recent British video art works that speak to the material conditions of women’s immaterial labour in postFordist global capitalism. Whereas Fordism consolidated an economic and physical separation between the reproductive sphere of women’s labour and the productive sphere of industrial labour, while exploiting them both; in postFordism, this separation blurs somewhat with attributes of the reproductive sphere, such as emotional training, care and communication becoming newly ripe for exploitation in a post-industrial economy that extracts monetary value from them. In addressing aspects of this economy, both video works feature all-female groups and deploy hybrid forms of performed documentary, though their content is very different: Beech’s video is a fictional adaptation of pyramid investment schemes that ostensibly empower women; Zaman’s juxtaposes a soap drama based on the 1990s international takeover of Tetley Brewery and documentary footage of workshops with the self-organized group, Justice for Domestic Workers (Leeds). However, I want to frame an interchange between them introduced by the conjunction of terms in the above cited film title from Maria Ruido’s video Real Time (2003). In this interchange, my intention is not to unite the two videos under one rubric, but rather to explore what their focus 229

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on female groups of ‘labourers’ under post-Fordism might tell us about desire, needs and resistance to being subsumed under capitalist exploitation. Firstly, in aligning post-Fordism with labour, which (re)produces ‘immaterial goods such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge or communication’,2 I want to insist from the outset that this emphasis on cognitive and affective skills in immaterial labour does not mean that material labour disappears. It continues both in the Global North’s outsourcing of assembly-line Fordism to so-called less developed countries, and in the employment of cheap migrant labour. However, the fact that all forms of labour in post-Fordist capitalism are increasingly dependent on the immaterial attributes of communication and emotion has expanded the areas of life available for the extraction of capital value.3 As opposed to Marxist analyses of Fordist industrial labour, where maintenance of the sphere of production was relegated to an unsalaried, largely female, invisible ‘workforce’ in the home; in a post-Fordist economy, while maintenance of the reproductive sphere of the home is still an issue, its affective ecology of care and free labour has transmuted into a new source of capital to be extracted from a whole spectrum of workers from call centre operatives to freelance creatives. However, precarious workers are not equally exploited, i.e. freelance creatives have certain privileges and choices unavailable to those in the service and care industries. Yet many theorists argue that these new conditions of exploitation also harness new political subjectivities, which might be capable of releasing ‘a social potential for transformation, largely attributable to [their] affective dimensions and the opportunities for human contact and interaction’,4 an idea I shall go on to develop in this essay. Although the political ramifications of precarity and social transformation is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting that there are echoes here of the conflictual debates in 1970s feminist discourse in Italy, the UK and the US about the value of reproductive labour to capitalism in the Wages For Housework campaign.5 For founding member Silvia Federici, the campaign for reproductive labour to be salaried was not simply to put housework on a par with male industrial labour but part of a move to ‘reorganise it as creative’.6 In other words, the campaign’s goal was not simply for recognition of a new working-class of women, but for a reconsideration of capitalist conditions of exploitation and oppression in general. In this sense (and perhaps one of the reasons why there has been recent interest in this

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historical campaign), housework takes on a status of a materialist aesthetics encapsulating economic and utopian potential for a redistribution of labour in society. Although Federici remains critical of theorists of immaterial labour such as Hardt and Negri for not recognizing the power relations at work in the ‘feminist analysis of the function of the sexual division of labor’,7 the blurring of the boundaries between salaried and free labour in post-Fordism underpins my interest in putting Beech’s and Zaman’s films together. Within the exploitative conditions they image, both films envision the potentiality of female group solidarity as an uncommodified pleasure and value that might provide momentary glimpses of transformation. Beech’s Cannibals features a group of white, lower-middle to middle-class, women, who belong to a do-it-yourself pyramid investment scheme, loosely based on the real-life online pyramid community ‘Women Empowering Women’ (WEW), which was one of many schemes of this ilk popular in the 1990s. The pyramids comprised groups of eight women who would each be recruited to invest £3,000 in the scheme. Once the group was complete, the leader would then gain £24,000 and move on to allow the recruits below her in the pyramid to complete their own groups, the goal being that each investor would recoup and make a huge profit from their initial investment. The UK Government tried to put a ban on these groups in 2001 as, of course, while a few women succeeded, many, unable to recruit their own groups, simply lost their investment. Beech’s fifteen-minute video features six women congregating in group leader Helen’s garden-flat for a ‘feast’, to which they bring the dishes that represent their place in the pyramid, for example, newcomers bring starters, the leader, the dessert. During the course of the meeting, the women perform a series of ritualistic, ostensibly therapeutic, behaviours in the hope of exorcizing inhibiting memories and rising higher in the triangle. As Beech intends, and this was certainly my experience of viewing the video, Cannibals can be read as an allegory of female immaterial labour under global capitalism in which women are encouraged to be their own entrepreneurs, to be aspirational and self-improving as well as responsible for their own well-being.8 Zaman’s video, by contrast, can be seen as making an intervention in the lack of literature addressing ‘the specific case of bodies marked by gender and race’ in the discourse on immaterial labour in the art world.9 Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen, commissioned by the Tetley in Leeds, was

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the outcome of Zaman’s residency there, which involved a twelve-month process of doing research in the Tetley archive, interviewing ex-Tetley Brewery workers, as well as co-running workshops with women from the recently formed Leeds branch of Justice for Domestic Workers (J4DW).10 The 49 minute film was initially exhibited as a multi-screen installation, each monitor featuring one of the six episodes of a soap drama set around the Tetley Brewery takeover by Carlsberg in the 1990s.11 Each episode is intercut by documentary footage of the workshops with J4DW (Leeds). Although it may seem trite to juxtapose the ‘real’ conditions of oppression that the largely Asian domestic workers operate under with the fictional women in Beech’s film who have the leisure to self-exploit, it is my contention that the conditions of immaterial labour, in which the cognitive and emotional capacities of subjectivity are mined as ‘raw material’, has multifarious effects that need to be thought of in conjunction with one another.12 There is an obvious level on which the plight of foreign domestic workers in the UK is interlinked with the immaterial labour of an aspirational middleclass female workforce. As Amy Charlesworth, citing art historian Angela Dimitrakaki, says: ‘Women’s increased presence in the paid workforce has not been facilitated by a redistribution of tasks, or through state support in the sphere of social reproduction, but rather the site of exploitation has shifted to (largely) female migrant workers.’13 Rather than further exploring the social inequality that underpins this, it is my contention that the ‘neoliberal theatre’ of post-Fordism in which, according to Sven Lütticken, ‘it became imperative to present oneself not so much as an interchangeable supplier of labour-power – which is the commodity most people sell – but to perform oneself as a unique commodity-person’ is not exclusive to a white lower-middle to middle-class.14 In this case, Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature published in 1991 is today newly resonant in its articulation of how all workers under global capitalism are subject to vexed social relations between women and machines, labour and care. Haraway’s prescient situating of women of colour, white socialist feminism and technological capitalism on a continuum acts as a corrective to the current largely ungendered discourses of immaterial labour. She says: The actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation into a world system of production/reproduction and communication called the

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informatics of domination. The home, workplace, market, public arena, the body itself – all can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways, with large consequences for women and others – consequences that themselves are very different for different people and which make potent positional interrelational movements difficult to imagine and essential for survival (my emphasis).15

To begin the difficult task of imagining the possibility of such alliances, it is necessary to think across the multiple material effects of post-Fordist labour without, of course, blurring the distinctions between them. In one sense, Zaman’s video, by juxtaposing a soap drama about the Tetley takeover with the documentary present of the domestic workers, begins to do this. The soap features a British male working-class soon to be disposed of in a corporate takeover and focuses on the main female protagonist, Sue, an ambitious secretary, who repeatedly comes up against sexism. The brewery manager Colin refuses to promote her to management until he realizes he has to get rid of ‘dead weight’ in preparation for the takeover. Sue’s supposedly ‘feminine’ reproductive attributes of being caring and empathetic are then seen as a valued asset. Inserting the documentary footage into the soap episodes, the film contrasts the erosion of white, male, industrial labour in a globalized market with a labour force comprised of women of colour. Two groups who are now no longer geographically separated as they were in the 1990s when Haraway was writing about the production of a ‘new world-wide working class, as well as new sexualities and ethnicities’.16 Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen could be said to juxtapose the precarious solidarity of J4DW as a new UK working class with the historical solidarity of the British union movement, which was largely eradicated during Margaret Thatcher’s reign as prime minister. In conversation with Zaman, writer Laura Guy situates the Tetley narrative as part of the aftermath of Thatcher’s Conservative government policies: ‘The sell off and resultant restructuring of Tetley came after most UK industrial centres had been decimated by the Conservative government that Margaret Thatcher led during the 1980s, which also facilitated the breaking of the British union movement.’17 In the final episodes of the soap, the Tetley workers strike in protest against the lay-offs that ensue from the amalgamation of draymen and drivers jobs into one, but their resistance is ineffectual. Management outsources the work that needs doing in preparation for the takeover.

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In the 1980s too, there was a shift in Western feminist discourse from an emphasis on activism to one on cultural critique, in which the pleasures of soap opera audiences, largely female homemakers, were revalued as worthy of academic attention.18 In this regard, Charlotte Brunsdon’s 1981 essay, ‘Crossroads: Notes on Soap Opera’ is a key reference for Zaman. As opposed to dismissing soap operas as a form of working-class entertainment that contrasts to the supposedly superior viewing of high art, Brunsdon reread the pleasures of soap opera in terms of a latent critique of patriarchy. Portraying strong female characters and constituting largely female audiences as expert interpreters of their moral universes, soaps could be seen as a testing ground as important for emotional intelligence as any Brechtian Lehrstücke (learningplays). At the time of Brunsdon’s writing, soaps were scheduled to coincide with teatime, their episodic, fragmentary nature making them conducive to combining the execution of household chores with viewing. This connection to the sphere of reproduction and immaterial labour made the form especially attractive to Zaman as a means of addressing the paternalistic ethos of the sphere of production that traditionally took place in industries in which men had jobs for life regardless often of how efficient they were. Although the pleasures of cultural critique offered by the soap opera might pale before ‘real’ issues, Zaman’s video, in oscillating between activism and cultural critique, performs a complex understanding of the pleasures of solidarity that resonates with Beech’s Cannibals. Whereas the real-life context of the pyramid community, ‘Women Empowering Women’, was explicitly bound up in the acquisition of money, Cannibals adapts its ethos of being an all-female support group, and gears it towards affecting psychological rather than solely financial change. This collapsing of the psychological into the financial is played out in the rituals undergone by the six women in the marquee of group leader Helen’s garden. Sitting in a circle, the women, at Helen’s admonishment, engage in a mini-psychodrama to exorcise inhibiting memories and reinforce positive thought in the present (Figure 12.1). Helen refers to this ritual as ‘emotional circuit training’, ‘a marinating process’, which softens and breaks down connective tissue, loosening the body to make it ready to receive the benefits of the pyramid. To enable this process, three of the women place electrodes on their bodies, Helen makes a salt gargle and another woman lights up a cigarette while Dorothy, the sceptical counterfoil

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Figure 12.1 Lucy Beech, Cannibals, 2013. Courtesy the artist.

to Helen’s enthusiasm, is given the speaker’s mat. Dorothy recounts a fear of ascending the upper floors of a building. She wants the money to buy a bungalow, but also fears climbing up in case of a crash. The allusion to a ‘crash’ is suggestive of either a financial or an emotional risk, her monologue here pointing to how in the context of post-Fordist neoliberalism, the two go hand in hand. As Catherine Rottenberg, citing Wendy Brown, says: ‘[o]ne of the hallmarks of our neoliberal age is precisely the casting of every human endeavor and activity in entrepreneurial terms.’19 As the economic and the emotional coalesce in Dorothy’s monologue, the group members engage in a collective paroxysm of hysterical trembling, as if incorporating Dorothy’s fears and ejecting them from the inside. Helen gargles the salt water, another woman exhales cigarette smoke: salting and smoking both being actions associated with ‘curing’ flesh, where curing, in this context, is a pun on healing. Dorothy’s voice-over – the only one in the film – begins when she takes up the role of cigarette smoker: a ritual usually considered damaging but here the smoke is considered transformative, the poisonous toxins affecting a curative purging from deep within the body. As Dorothy ruminates on this inverse healing, the woman now on the speaker’s mat confesses her addiction to online poker: another form of financial and psychological risk. The psycho-dramatic role playing, in which the group are

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encouraged to see themselves objectively as characters to gain a perspective on their problems and desires, culminates in a ‘feast’ loosely inspired by Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, a concept of festival in which hierarchies are overturned. Identifying with the foodstuffs that represent their place in the pyramid – they are by turns garlic bread, prawn dumplings and a blini – the women metaphorically consume themselves, as if the process of ingesting this food will free them from the internal constraints that prevent their success. Beech refers to this process as an allegory of capitalism, stating that the work is ‘a microcosm of a capitalist system, mirroring an image of unsustainable growth’.20 The women’s desire to self-improve and succeed incorporates them more thoroughly in an endless cycle of self-exploitation that can only escalate until it implodes. As a real-life phenomenon, this would occur with some of the women on the bottom losing all their money, while the leader creams off the rewards. Unlike the real-life ‘WEW’ gatherings at which money would be present, in Cannibals, the implosion occurs from within. As Dorothy observes with insight ‘we are consuming ourselves’. Rather than merely a microcosm of the capitalist system at large, this can be specifically related to the condition of the feminist neoliberal subject under contemporary capitalism in which many of the demands of previous generations of feminists for equality and autonomy in economic and social life are sold back to us as personal – rather than social – imperatives and forms of governance. As Rottenberg diagnoses it, the neoliberal feminist subject ‘accepts full responsibility for her own well-being and self-care’,21 thereby disavowing the social, cultural and economic forces that produce inequality. Although on the one hand, Cannibals might be said to align with such a view, the video also affords a glimpse of the potential of female solidarity. Initially, Dorothy’s scepticism seems like a foil to Helen’s optimism, but at the end of the film, it too becomes fully incorporated into the capitalist microcosmic structure, as we learn that Dorothy is going to be promoted from a starter to a main course. However, during the course of Dorothy’s role play, she seems to experience a moment of liberation beyond the ostensible group fantasy of self-advancement. This occurs when the camera focuses in on her upper torso and face as she lies on the grass looking upwards (Plate 2.7). Her voiceover ruminates on her desire for change. The film awkwardly cuts to a counter shot of the sky, as if it can’t quite believe in the clichéd nature of this

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shot sequence, but, in lingering on it, hesitantly suggests that things could go in another direction. This is also one of the sequences in which the documentarylike gaze of Beech’s camera used to record the staged performances is made extremely palpable to the viewer. In the reverse shot, Dorothy’s face bleeds into an image of her plate of blinis, while her internal monologue rapidly recites a speech that is a cut-up of statements from a ‘WEW’ website and quotes from Bahktin’s Rabelais and his World.22 Honing in on the ‘feast’, the camera lingers on the food going into the women’s mouths, and being chewed and swallowed in a grotesque inverse of the ‘food porn’ quality of contemporary supermarket advertising. Reversing the seductive luxuriating over close ups of expensive convenience food in such advertising, the self-devouring in the ‘feast’ shows the entropy at work in consumption, and drags this profit-motivated aspirational labour into the realm of the reproductive, i.e. that which needs to be done all over again. Beech has said that ‘[t]he therapeutic potential of the group’s haptic communication is negated by the meetings’ internal hierarchies that mirror a capitalist model’, but I would say that the psycho-dramatic potential of what she refers to as ‘performing as an agent for someone else’s experience’, and which occurred during the ‘therapeutic’ rituals, is still held open in this penultimate shot sequence.23 Although the belief that you alone are responsible for your own well-being wins out in the end – and it is noteworthy here that the final sequence shows Helen putting her intact pavlova back in the freezer – an alternative energy and collective solidarity is suggested between the women through their transpersonal capacities to feel one another’s emotions from the inside. In this way, Cannibals proposes the relationality of the psycho-physiological body that exceeds the calculating, self-regulating, hierarchical structure of the capitalist triangle and squanders its surplus in a foolish, perhaps joyous, act of collective self-consumption. This hyperbolic fictional depiction of self-exploitation is very different to the depiction of exploitation in Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen, especially its documentary footage of the workshops. In relation to the latter, Zaman’s video can be seen in the context of the historical reception of The Berwick Street Film Collective’s Nightcleaners (1972 to 1975), a documentary film about the campaign led by activist and night cleaner May Hobbs to set up a grassroots organization to unionize the immigrant and working-class women who performed this invisible labour. Many feminists and

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activists criticized Nightcleaners for its aesthetic formalism.24 It was considered a political failure because of the way its use of formal techniques slowed down the forward temporality of political consciousness. The film’s use of reprocessing techniques to underscore the materiality of film, such as the use of montage and black leader, made the sequence of events seem confusing, while evacuating the emotionalism of activism. Similarly, Zaman’s video does not simply advocate on behalf of the domestic workers’ situation, but uses elliptical documentary footage of the workshop meetings with J4DW both to question her own, and subsequent viewers, identification and distance from the domestic workers, as well as to interrupt the future propulsion of the soap narrative.25 Whether moving between the six monitors in its initial installation or, as in my case, following the sequentiality of the single screen version of the film, the viewer can only access the domestic workers’ issues in a piecemeal fashion, as much of the footage is shot out of focus and the discussions are sometimes muffled. Much of this has to do with necessity and practicality. For example, some of the footage was shot by the domestic workers, who had never used a film camera, and point-of-view shots were not always possible, as remaining invisible allows some of these women to continue working in the UK. However, Zaman deliberately included these elliptical fly-on-the-wall sequences in her edit ‘to downplay the potential didacticism of the more overtly activist content’ and to protect against positing the domestic workers as ‘other or victim’.26 What began as necessity becomes the formal aesthetics that keeps the video from being a campaign document in aid of the domestic workers cause.27 A dance sequence in episode four in which the women perform in front of their campaign banners to Shakira’s Waka Waka (This Time for Africa), 2010, is also important for complicating how the women are presented, avoiding the danger in representations of subaltern women whereby their alliances can function ‘as a point of revolution for an exhausted West’.28 Zaman, referring to the importance of the dance sequence for her own viewing of the women as subjects of pleasure rather than purely exploited workers, says: ‘The scene provides a fuller picture of J4DW where women come together to experience joy communally as well as campaign and struggle to seek an end to modern slavery’29 (Figure 12.2). As in the oscillation in Cannibals between the ‘therapeutic potential of the groups’ haptic experience’ and the way in which female empowerment is co-

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Figure 12.2 Rehana Zaman, Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

opted by neoliberalism, Zaman’s video also oscillates between exposing exploitative commodified values and an uncommodified therapeutic pleasure in group experience. This also occurs in the sequence that shows the women learning animation techniques at the Leeds Animation Workshop. Again, although the absence of close-up fixed point-of-view shots makes it difficult to ascertain what is precisely going on, what emerges from this sequence is the collective energy of being immersed in creative group activity without a singular product in mind. These scenes also reference the history of radical film-making as exemplified by the Leeds Animation Workshop, thereby further alluding to the uncommodified value of another type of collective ‘labour’. The question of uncommodified value is also raised for me in the compelling sequences in the video in which the women’s hands are framed in close-up as they continually rearrange the order of a series of Post-it notes on the workshop table. On the Post-it notes are written the words: home, faith, job, friends, security and politics – all terms loosely adapted from Abraham Maslow’s theory of the ‘hierarchy of needs’ as proposed in his 1943 paper ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’. This theory is usually visualized as a pyramidal diagram in which the more ‘physiological’ needs of food and shelter lie on the bottom with the individual attaining ‘safety’, ‘belongingness’ and ‘love’ as they move up the pyramid, before reaching the final achievements of ‘esteem’,

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‘self-actualization’ and ‘self-transcendence’. Both in the women’s adaptation and constant rearranging of these terms in the workshop discussions, which we overhear but cannot clearly determine, the items on the Post-its are transformed from hierarchical developmental needs, to becoming codependent, horizontally distributive needs for actualizing rather than merely sustaining life. The horizontal reorganization of the Post-it notes in Zaman’s video can be read in relation to Michel Feher’s concept of ‘self-appreciation’, as discussed in his essay ‘Self-Appreciation: Or, The Aspirations of Human Capital’, in which he contrasts the free labourer of Fordism, i.e. the subject of unionized employment, and the new subjectivity of human capital.30 Rather than harking back to the liberal idea of unionized employment, premised as it is on an unsustainable model of world resources, Feher advises embracing the neoliberal condition to ‘allow it to express aspirations and demands that its neoliberal promoters had neither intended nor foreseen’.31 Although much of his argument is dependent on subjects who – unlike the domestic workers under current UK visa legislation – are free to move,32 it offers a thought-provoking way of thinking about the possibilities of uncommodified values suggested in both Beech’s and Zaman’s videos. For Feher, although human capital eradicates the separation between the spheres of production and reproduction, this does not mean that it commodifies everything.33 For example, the pleasures of group activity in Cannibals’ collective exorcism of debilitating psychological behaviours, and the cannibalistic entropic transformation of the carnivalesque ‘feast’, need not be recuperated. They could instead be seen as investments in human capital, not in terms of the accruement of monetary profit, but in terms of collective wellbeing. Likewise, the list of needs on the Post-it notes in Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen propose a rethinking of the ‘required means for self-appreciation’.34 This was further brought home to me at a panel event at the ICA, London, in December 2015, by Marissa Begonia, co-ordinator of J4DW, who features in Zaman’s video.35 As well as discussing the campaign, Begonia also spoke about self-esteem and the pride she takes as the emotional and moral trainer for the child in her care, as well as the pleasure and importance of dressing well when going to meet with MPs or attending public events on behalf of J4DW. Of course, domestic workers need a living wage and the right to move employer, but, equally, their ‘transcendence’ and ‘joy’ need recognition

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in order to avoid situating them as victims in need of saving by art workers and activists in the Global North. In both videos, therefore, the transpersonal therapeutic and empathic relations between female bodies are made palpable. Neoliberalism engenders subjects who are supposed to be responsible for their own well-being, a subjectivity which is shown in Cannibals to walk a fine line between selfexploitative greed and potential liberation in solidarity. J4DW are selforganizing through necessity. They need legislation in order to enhance their capital so that they can live well despite the forced economic choices they have had to make in leaving their own families. Explored together, the videos underscore that we are unequally subjected to the same conditions of precarity that characterize forms of labour in post-Fordist neoliberalism, yet the pleasures of group solidarity is a value that escapes commodification. Its visualization in film complements political actions that might take place elsewhere.

Notes 1 Maria Ruido as quoted in Charlesworth, Amy (2015), ‘Caught Between the Factory and the Home’, Third Text, 29 (1 and 2): 89. 2 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2001), Empire, 290, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. 3 See Kunst, Bojana (2015), Artist at Work, Proximity of Art and Capitalism, Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, especially Chapter 5 for an expansion of this point. 4 Gill, Rosalind and Andy Pratt (2008), ‘In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work’, Theory, Culture & Society, 25 (7 and 8): 8. 5 Initially founded in 1972 in Italy by a group of women, including Silvia Federici, the International Wages For Housework Campaign was linked to Italian workerism or operaismo, proponents of which include philosopher Antonio Negri. Federici went on to found Wages For Housework in 1973 in New York. It is worth noting that this campaign influenced film collective projects on Britain, such as Women of the Rhondda (dir. Mary Capps and Mary Kelly, 1973) and The Berwick Street Film Collective’s Nightcleaners (1972 to 1975). See Hana Janečková’s web project online at http://artycok.tv/en/26980/novy-feminismus-nektere-zeny-jine-zeny-a-vsichni-tizahorkli-pivarinew-feminism-some-women-other-women-and-all-the-bittermen (accessed 21 October 2015), for a connection between Zaman’s film and the campaign.

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6 Silvia Federici as quoted in Vishmidt, Marina (7 March 2013), ‘Permanent reproductive crisis: An interview with Silvia Federici’, Mute. Available at: http:// www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/permanent-reproductive-crisis-interviewsilvia-federici (accessed 30 December 2017). 7 Federici, Silvia (2006), ‘Precarious Labor: A Feminist Viewpoint.’ http:// inthemiddleofthewhirlwind.wordpress.com/precarious-labor-a-feministviewpoint/ (accessed 30 December 2017). 8 See Rottenberg, Catherine (2014), ‘The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism’, Cultural Studies, 28 (3): 418–37 for an account of this feminist subject. 9 Charlesworth, ‘Caught Between the Factory and the Home’, 89. 10 The workshops were supported by curator and writer Amy Charlesworth, J4DW (London), Gill Park, Director of visual arts organization Pavilion, and artists Jo Dunn and Terry Wragg from Leeds Animation Workshop. In some of the workshops, Zaman used improvisational techniques derived from theatre, which is a characteristic method of her film-making practice. 11 The soap is a collaboration with screenwriter Joe Hepworth. 12 Aside from unregulated work conditions, the domestic workers are subject to the UK Government’s rescinding of their visa rights in 2012, making it impossible for them to change employer. This is the key issue that is discussed in the workshops. 13 Charlesworth, ‘Caught Between the Factory and the Home’, 91. 14 Lütticken, Sven (2005), ‘An Arena in Which to Reenact’, in Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, 17, Rotterdam: Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art. 15 Haraway, Donna (1991), Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 163, London: Free Association. 16 Ibid., 166. 17 Laura Guy as quoted in Zaman, Rehana and Laura Guy (April 2015), ‘Mindless Culture, Unskilled Labour: A Conversation’, Available at http://whereslefty.tumblr. com/post/121107183546/mindless-culture-unskilled-labour-a-conversation (accessed 14 October 2015). 18 Brunsdon, Charlotte (1981), ‘ “Crossroads” Notes on Soap Opera’, Screen, 22 (4). Also see Gill, Rosalind (2008), ‘Culture and subjectivity in neoliberal and postfeminist times’, Subjectivity, 25, 432–45. 19 Rottenberg, ‘The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism’, 412. 20 Beech in Sinead Nunes, ‘In Conversation with Selected 5 Artist Lucy Beech’. Available online http://www.fact.co.uk/news-articles/2015/06/in-conversationwith-selected-5-artist-lucy-beech.aspx (accessed 30 December 2017). 21 Rottenberg, ‘The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism’, 420. 22 The phrase ‘comic crownings and uncrownings’ in particular.

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23 Beech as quoted in Nunes, ‘In Conversation with Selected 5 Artist Lucy Beech’. 24 See Wilson, Siona (2015), Art Labor, Sex Politics: Feminist Effects in 1970s British Art and Performance, 25–7, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Wilson presents the argument between art historians Judith Mastai, who considered the film an ‘alienating formal experiment’ and Griselda Pollock, who claimed the film’s ‘avant-garde poetics’ as a mark of avant-garde success. According to feminist social historian Sheila Rowbotham, campaign activist May Hobbs ‘was exasperated because instead of the short campaign film she had expected, the film was long, many-layered and far from celebratory’, Rowbotham, ‘Jolting Memory: Nightcleaners Recalled’, in M. Ruido (ed) (2008), Plan Rosebud: On Images, Sites And Politics Of Memory, 13, Santiago de Compostela: CGAC. Thanks to Rehana Zaman for sending me this text. 25 In this regard, Zaman has highlighted the following sentence from Rowbotham’s article: ‘The effort to communicate across the gulf of class and political aspiration appears in the relationship between the cleaners and the leafletters and between the women and the film-makers’ 14. 26 Zaman and Guy, ‘Mindless Culture, Unskilled Labour: A Conversation.’ 27 Terry Wragg and Jo Dunn from the Leeds Animation Workshop later made an animation campaign film in consultation with the domestic workers called They Call Us Maids: The Domestic Workers’ Story (2015). 28 Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri (1988), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 24–8, London: Macmillan. 29 Zaman and Guy, ‘Mindless Culture, Unskilled Labour: A Conversation.’ 30 Feher, Michel (2015), ‘Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital’, Public Culture, 21 (1): 22. 31 Ibid., 25. 32 Feher’s only example of turning neoliberalism’s imperative of self-reliance from something exploitative into something collectively productive is the Scandinavian labour unions, which, rather than rejecting workfare programmes, work through them by deploying a concept of ‘flexsecurity’. 33 Ibid., 30. 34 Ibid., 39. 35 This panel, ‘On Social Reproduction’, was part of the curatorial programme ‘Now You Can Go’, which was developed by participants from the Feminist Duration Reading Group coordinated by Helena Reckitt with Dimitra Gkitsa and including Angelica Bollettenari, Giulia Casalini, Diana Georgiou, Laura Guy, Irene Revell and Amy Tobin.

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I think it’s tricky, if we said “male filmmaker” when describing a male one then it will work to have female for us. but often it’s just for women that it’s used . . . but it also make some kind of sense, as we are still in the minority. I guess it needs acknowledgement . . . but I consider myself more a filmmaker than a female one. Laure Prouvost1 People have at times asked if you can tell someone’s race by their voice – say, if you were calling them over the phone to sell them something or pitch them a political candidate. Not by their accent, or their dialect, but by the timbre of their vocal cords. Now, this is a clear proxy for racism: followed through, it suggests that a person’s vocal cords are changed, shaped by their race or ethnicity – that they are physiologically different from others. The idea that you can tell someone’s race in this way exists within a context of racial binaries, in which white is the privileged term, belonging to the asker, the investigator, the study-leader and the scientist, and black is the subject under investigation. Of course, you can’t tell someone’s race over the phone. Manifold studies have proved this. But that is beside the point: the question itself is suspect. It is with this caveat that I pose the question of this text: can you tell if an artwork was made by a woman? Do women have a particular approach

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to style, a particular sensitivity, a proclivity towards certain aesthetics or subject matter that makes their gender legible? That gender should be legible is not so controversial: indeed, it is a founding tenet of this book, which accepts that being a ‘woman artist’ is enough of a signifying category that it can mark out some artists and not others for analysis in these pages. I want to speculatively test this hypothesis, for its accuracy determines whether the category ‘woman artist’ still exists as meaningful or whether it remains a marginalizing epithet, consigning and restricting the contributions of women to a separate, and perhaps not equal, realm.2 This query is prompted by the fact that the majority of women I interviewed for this text themselves disavow the term. In canvassing artist film-makers – in order to narrow down the field addressed by this text – a consistent complex of reactions to the term appeared: that it was understandable and accurate, yet fundamentally regrettable. As Laure Prouvost says in the email quoted above: ‘I guess it needs acknowledgement . . . but I consider myself more a film-maker than a female one.’ (Artists and curators generally used ‘female’ and ‘women’ interchangeably as qualifiers, and I have followed this lead here.) With this in mind I want to look at the three primary ways that the term ‘woman artists’ is used (and not used) in order to suggest a disconnect between the forms of mediation of a work and the work itself, and to suggest some ways we can credibly understand ‘femaleness’, understood as a social category, to appear. This is large territory in a very short text. What do we even mean by ‘woman’? This isn’t some masochistic attempt to broaden the query out even further, but to acknowledge that the question of female difference is the question of feminist scholarship. Indeed, the premise of this paper is in many ways textbook third-wave feminist or post-feminist thought, reflecting the multiplication of the meaning of feminism and its concerns. Through the work of writers such as Donna Haraway, Rebecca Walker, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, feminism has been broadened to take on forms of racial, class, bodily and geographical marginalization. The fixing of gender implied in the term ‘woman’ has also been challenged via the live debate on what that term might mean for transwomen versus ciswomen. This paper is situated within this field, and, conscious of the field’s magnitude, aims to suggest some speculative propositions as much as definitive answers.

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Identification Where does the term ‘woman artist’ appear? The primary usage of the phrase is in advocacy, such as in this volume, which is aware of the questions above, but also of gendered under-representation. It essentially wagers that the gains made by analysis of the work will offset the marginalization and broad identity strokes inherent in the term. In film terms,‘female’ is also often read as a cipher for ‘feminist’. This reductive misinterpretation may stem from a conflation of the feminist content foregrounded in the films by the Women’s Movement of the 1970s and 1980s with films made by women since. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), for example, is often read as an addendum to Mulvey’s famous theory of the gaze, in that the form of the film itself – broken up into separate and non-narratively related chapters – is a mode of opposition to the male scopophilia that Mulvey famously related to the forward-driving narrative of classic Hollywood film. The fact that the Berwick Street Collective’s Nightcleaners (1975) was made as part of a campaign to unionize women who worked night shifts likewise plays a major role in its reception, though the film was always intended as an experimental documentary, and continues to sit equally between the poles of activism and formalism. Artists’ and curators’ rejection of ‘female’ is shadowed by their desire to broaden out their work beyond purely feminist readings. Consequent with this distancing, feminist content is now explicitly framed in contemporary work within wider enquiries. Emily Wardill’s focus on the body throughout her film work, for example, forms part of a larger investigation around how the body – male or female – sits within power structures and discourse. In Hito Steyerl’s video November (2008), a story of her friend Andrea Wolf, who became a PKK fighter and was martyred in the Kurdish territories of Turkey, Steyerl excerpts the first film she ever made, at the age of sixteen with Wolf, in which women were the heroes and men the bad guys; this nod to budding feminism is couched within the film’s larger critique of violence and representation. (In my research for this paper Steyerl supplied one of the best responses to the question of how she felt about the label female film-making: ‘I like feminist. Female is meh.’3) Again, this is the broadening that third-wave feminism tracks and accelerates, and suggests that we might take women

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artists’ disavowal of the term as consistent with artistic praxis. Likewise, if a woman does not self-identify as a woman artist, then, we need to look at places where she is seen by others as a woman, or when she occupies a relationally constructed position of gender identity. Thus, in response to artists’ own varied forms of ambivalence towards the label, already apparent in Prouvost’s opening comment, I want to focus on the social arenas of production and reception of moving-image works that bracket the aesthetic work.

Production On a casual level, it is easy to see how external conditions of production are legible in the final work. It can be as basic as the fact that a bigger budget means a longer film, or with more intricate digital effects, or that working on location means a lack of consistency about the light levels of shots. In a similar way it could be argued that biases about competencies, ambition and scale of production can make it difficult for women to secure the necessary funds to make video or film work, and that these biases might then also be legible in the work. Work by women might have lower production values, and consequently valorize arte povera techniques. When women work in an ethnographic or observational paradigm, going abroad or working within different subcultures, prejudices against her authority can be at play as she tries to direct the others around her. Subjects might look back at her in a different way, or her lack of welcome in certain situations might show. For example, Rosalind Nashashibi’s Jack Straw’s Castle (2009) (Figure 13.1) is a seventeen-minute film about the all-male cruising area of Hampstead Heath. The portrayal of queer male sexuality in this work is one of invisibility: imagined encounters behind the park’s branches and bushes that the film trains its static lens on. The swaying and textured means of leafy occlusion function to elicit a haptic response from the viewer, a tactile way of hiding that is echoed in the graininess of the 16mm film stock used, which becomes both the means of making visible but also – in what Laura Marks calls the skin of the screen – a textural surface. It is not hard to think of the film itself as occluding our access to these encounters; it stages being other in this area for the viewer. Significantly, Nashashibi used her mother as an assistant when

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Figure 13.1 Rosalind Nashashibi, Jack Straw’s Castle, 2009, production still. Courtesy the artist and LUX, London.

filming this work, contrasting the scene of homosociality from which they are barred with one of the maternal dyad, which in many ways encapsulates the defining roles of cisgendered experience. Here, as in other representations of female identity and homosocial experience that Nashashibi examines in her practice (such as Bachelor Machines Part 1 [2007], when she lived as the only woman among a crew of male sailors aboard a cargo ship travelling from Italy to Ireland), Nashashibi studies the presentation of identity in a social field, which includes the scene represented as well as the scene of production, though Nashashibi herself remains visually absent throughout her work. Expanding this enquiry to works that do not use a mode of self-reflexion is less straightforward. Catherine Russell’s critical methodology of experimental

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ethnography has aimed to understand the social field as a signifying property of the work itself: ‘Especially in the age of video’, she writes, ‘aesthetic value is deeply implicated in technique as a cultural phenomenon and in social relations of production.’4 She takes ‘technique’ from Benjamin’s use of the term, which is itself connected to the social: ‘technique refers to neither form nor content, but the means by which a work engages with social relations.’5 Focusing on historical and contemporary ethnographic film, Russell thus sheds light on the construction of ‘otherness’ as a discursive category that pre-dates any representation of it. Her argument could be broadened, I would argue, to understand femininity as a discursive category that characterizes both the subject under representation and the artist making the representation. Using the tools of ethnography for feminist analysis could thus allow ‘female’ to operate as a constructed category that interpellates an artist rather than defines her. But in the less narrowly defined field of artists’ moving image, assimilating conditions of production into a study of the work is in practice not so easy a proposition, as tempting as it might seem. The conditions of production – even if they are consistently difficult – vary from project to project, and do not translate consistently into the final work. Moreover, it is difficult to credibly theorize the social field unless these conditions of production are documented and this documentation actively disseminated. But it also seems necessary: why date the meaning of the work to the time stamp ‘00.00’ at which the images start rolling? Disallowing intention and conditions of productions enables the imaginary of an idealized subject as artist, rather than a particular individual.

Reception The term ‘woman film-maker’ is also absent from the immediate mediation of a work: the hand-outs, press releases, wall text, biennial write-ups and Q&As that accompany a work’s initial viewings and help form and direct its meaning. In this sense I use ‘reception’ not in terms of reviews, essays and academic historization, but rather as the informational infrastructure around screenings. My research for this chapter has shown that within the discursive apparatuses that surround a film, gender is significantly downplayed, even to the point of being entirely absent. Rather than that closing the question, however, I want to

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look at the way this non-treatment of gender enables a certain relationship to form between the artwork and identity. The tendency for the epithet ‘female film-making’ to become allencompassing – a kind of magic word that makes a whole film or video about gender once the label is invoked – is particularly acute for artists’ moving image work because of its liminal position between film and art. Moving image work belongs both to the film festival and the art world circuit and to neither; it is the hybrid arena for which Ian White coined the term ‘Kinomuseum’ of moving image work ‘experienced in the space and time of the auditorium’.6 This position is important to note because the mediation of artists’ moving image work reflects both traditions, and is further inflected by the specific circumstances of its extensive apparatuses of projection. Like the discourse itself, the mediation of moving image work sits between the film world’s mode of promotion and the art world’s convention of integral textual mediation. Thus, on one hand we have Hollywood’s mediation, which is informational and promotional: trailers, reviews, interviews and print advertisements aim to tell you about the film in order to persuade you to part with your money to go and see it. You know what you are getting – or you don’t go. Information operates similarly for experimental films on the festival circuit, when you might hear from colleagues about which screening to go and see, and you will have a blurb explaining the film in the booklet you are given. Art’s web of information, by contrast, contributes often integrally to the meaning of a work. At the 2012 Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany, for example, Christodoulos Panayiotou showed the installation Independence Street (2012), five long weathered wooden poles that lay on the floor. Some of them had wire and bits of plastic attached to them, while others were bare. The poles themselves spoke immediately of time passing, a certain authenticity was communicated by the natural material, and their presentation spoke too of disuse and desertion. These affective resonances were elaborated by the information given in the biennial guide, in which the viewer (or ‘viewer’) learned that these were in fact utility poles from the artist’s native Cyprus, which bore the scars of the years of fighting between 1960 and 1977, the year before the artist was born. I would argue that the integration here of the discursive apparatus allows a more embedded and complex presentation of identity than a work might enjoy without textual mediation. The full

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significance of Panayiotou’s prone poles is unavailable to the viewer without having read the supplementary information. Panayiotou’s identity is specified as a multiplicitous function of social and historical context: a broadening enabled by the convention of mediation and by the close wedding between mediation and work itself. This giving of information can take on an ontological function for work whose artistic character is not apparent, such as found objects, appropriated images, and social performances and encounters. In contrast, for moving image work the required apparatus for exhibition (projected or digitized moving images, projector, screen, speaker) immediately marks any projected images out as a certain type of representation of the world, whether one on the art or film circuit or not. Contextualization helps gloss the content – it tells us whether a work is a music video or artist’s video, a YouTube excerpt or an exploration of identity, and helps us elaborate the significances of the images – but does not approach the same imbricated or co-dependent relationship that at times appears in the art world. Moreover, the type and extent of mediation surrounding moving-image work is not as uniform as it is in the art world, where conventions of press release, biennial guide or wall text/ brochure are largely standardized. The variation in informational apparatuses that surround the initial exhibition of a moving-image work, sitting as it does between these two poles of the film and the art worlds, ranges from the factual to the extensively theorized. Light Industry in New York, for example, accompany each screening with a substantial text of around 800 words, though they do not distribute any material at the screenings per se; what it has is solely online on its web page and on its social media outlets, occupying, perhaps, a particularly high-brow form of advertisement. At the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, then-curator Mason Leaver-Yap wrote that the film department produces brochures that include 1,800-word essays on new work and which often reproduce previously published contextual material. Brochures distributed at the Tate Modern include blurbs on each of the films screened, but generally no over-arching essay. At some screenings curators simply distribute a 100-word description.7 Interestingly, live mediation is more standard than what is distributed. Nearly all screenings, regardless of site, include an introduction by the curator – not pro forma but one that gives serious attention to the work. Q&As with the artist afterwards offer

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another frequent and important, though often undocumented, form of mediation. If the extent isn’t consistent, the mode of discourse is: the texts that are produced are by and large written in the objective, hoch art-writing register of pseudo-academic investigation, which means that rather than focusing on identity or intentions as an integral part of the work itself, they take an external standpoint of interpretation. The most used qualifier of an artist is geography (the ‘New York-based artist . . .’, the ‘London film-maker . . .’), rather than gender (‘the woman film-maker . . .’), or indeed race or sexual orientation. The focus is on the work, and not on the maker. When it is addressed, gender is seen through the historical prism of feminism. For example, even though Leslie Thornton’s Adynata (1983) engages with issues around identity, these facets are left out of the long description of her work produced to accompany her screening in March 2015 at Light Industry in New York.8 The text avoids mention of feminism or her gender, though the theorists the Light Industry text cites – Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane, Liz Kotz – all work within feminist theory. In the longer text on Thornton’s work that Light Industry co-founder Ed Halter wrote for Artforum, he discusses as part of a historiography how the feminist critique in her work of the 1980s came as an antidote to the ‘all male trinity’ of structural film, but here again gender is not the lens her work is read through.9 These decisions are actively taken to allow the work to unfold as something other than a work by a ‘woman film-maker’: the Light Industry press release and Halter’s Artforum analysis ignore her gender in order to focus on cinematic form or language. This downplaying of gender likewise occurs in situations where specific female concerns are the manifest content of the work, such as in Laure Prouvost’s We Will Go Far (On Ira Loin, 2015) (Figure 13.2). Prouvost’s video intersperses scenes of teenagers on mopeds and in cars, smoking and caressing their plastic mobile phones, with disparate images that evoke a pan-sensuality of natural reproduction: cows licking, sheep baaing, the film-maker’s submerged pregnant body, her leaking breast, her baby suckling at her nipples and on fingertips. Taken against the narrative of the group of teenagers, these images create a complex arc between the extreme dependency of the baby postpartum and the teenage desire to escape and achieve independence. This balance between the video’s two themes is not given in the write-ups of the film, however. The text

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Figure 13.2 Laure Prouvost, We Will Go Far (On Ira Loin), 2015. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia.

on the website of LUX, which distributes the video, says it ‘centres on teenagers living in the countryside experiencing their first amorous adventures – dreaming of escaping and striking out on their own’.10 The press release produced by the Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art, which commissioned the work, likewise avoids any mention of the film’s explicitly female imagery, and again focuses on the storyline of teenagers breaking out on their own, rather than the Yeats-like dedication of the video’s title (I am thinking here of his ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’) and the appearance of her son and reproducing body within it. Here, the avoidance of ‘femaleness’ is rather remarkable, though again understandable, and I must admit my sympathies for the omission: there is the fear that it reduces the film to a biography, making We Will Go Far solely about the fact that it was made shortly after Prouvost gave birth to her second child (Plate 2.8). I want to suggest that, here, passing over a discussion of gender is a symptom of anxiety and is accomplished in arenas where there is a duty of care to the moving image artist. The Rochechouart press release and LUX blurb are both charged with speaking for Prouvost the artist – they use the language of distanced interpretation but are written from the position of advocacy. As the example of Panayiotou shows, there are myriad ways to open a work up to personal identity via mediation. But ‘woman’ emerges as a particularly vexed qualifier.

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Academia Indeed, my hunch is that the grouping ‘woman artist’ inheres where there is a disconnect between an artist and her interpreter: not in its modes of presentation to the public but in academia. The term ‘women artist’ forms part, as we mentioned before, of the methodology whereby one takes a group of artists, identifies a shared characteristic among them and discerns particular modes among their work. The problems of this overarching thesis, which also apply in the case of group shows, are well-known: it subsumes the individual particulars of a work to the general argument that is put forward. Instead of being about multiple questions, for example, each work in a show about the body becomes about the body. This challenge has plagued numerous exhibitions of female work, such as the sprawling, 120-person show of ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution’, at MoCA Los Angeles in 2007, which was criticized for not ultimately saying much of anything about the work it surveyed, save that it was all made by women. The term ‘woman’ offers a false universality that manifests itself in the discursive breach between the anecdotal and the academic: how do we talk about the female experience of motherhood, for example, when not all women, nor all viewers, experience it? It also ignores the fact that so much of what ‘female’ means exists not in the performance of gender but, as Julia Serano notes, in its reception: ‘how our genders are perceived and interpreted (and sometimes misinterpreted!) by others.’11 Because gender is seldom discussed in the immediate information disseminated around moving-image works, the later re-entrance of the term ‘woman’, for example in academic speculations on the conditions of production or on certain perceived constants about style, suggests that the term can operate separately for the academic, as for the maker. This problem is compounded by the unresolved attitude towards the role of intentionality in interpreting artworks. Put through its paces with structuralism and deconstruction, methodologies of interpretation have altered considerably over the past century, with one clear convention emerging that the subject is the work, and an artist’s intentions are not absolutely necessary to proper interpretation. Thus, one way to move towards a recognition of women rather than ‘woman’ or ‘female’ might be to allow a greater role for artists in the immediate and second-order mediation of their work, concerning their

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position on the question of gender, as well as on the more basic clarifications of aesthetic and appropriative decisions. Or perhaps the fault is not in ‘woman’, but in what we currently mean by ‘woman’ – a restrictive biological or relational construct, rather than a term that could be as open and multiplicious as the artworks themselves.

Notes 1 Email to the author, 12 May 2016. I have reproduced the (rather poetic) orthography as it was sent to me. 2 I would like to dedicate this essay to Catherine Elwes, who was my editor on a previous text that looked at shared characteristics of a group of film-makers working in the early 2000s in Britain, ‘Observational Film: Administration of Social Reality’, MIRAJ , 1 (2): 169–79. Though they all happened to be women, I pulled back from focusing on female film-making as a categorization, and Elwes called me up on it: what is one generation’s mode of marginalization is another generation’s feminism, and we owe forums like the present volume to female artists and thinkers such as Elwes and others. 3 Email from the artist, 1 June 2016. 4 Russell, Catherine (1999), Experimental Ethnography, 23, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 5 Ibid. 23. 6 See Sperlinger, Mike and Ian White (eds) (2008), Kinomuseum: Towards an Artists’ Cinema, Cologne. See also Connolly, Maeve (2013), ‘Shared Viewing: Moving Images in the Cinema and Museum’, Millennium Film Journal, 58, 18–27. 7 The discrepancies here also point to the variation in budgets for artists’ movingimage programmes, which are typically less well-funded than ‘mainstream’ art programmes. 8 See the online screening notes for ‘Leslie Thornton’s Adynata + Abigail Child’s Mayhem’, 24 March 2015, Light Industry, New York. Available at http://www. lightindustry.org/adynata-mayhem (accessed on 22 May 2016). 9 See Halter, Ed (2012), ‘Hell Is for Children’, Artforum, 514–21. 10 ‘Laure Prouvost: We Will Go Far’, anon., available at https://lux.org.uk/work/ we-will-go-far. 11 Serano, Julia (2016), ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 1–10, London, ebook edition.

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Index 2 into 1 (1997), 205–6, 205 A Field Guide to the Ferns (2015), 122–3, 123, 124 A Study in Choreography for the Camera (Deren), 81 Abramovic, Marina, 5 Absolute film-making, 45 abstraction, 108 active vanishing, 200, 203, 206 ACTT Video Workshop Declaration, 101 Adventures of the Black Square (Rhodes), 22–3 advertising, 96 advocacy, 11, 247 Adynata (1983), 253 aesthetic labour, 172, 175 African diaspora history, 78 Afrocentrist black feminism, 76 Aftershow (Lorenz), 29, 35 Agamben, Giorgio, 93–4, 156–7, 163 n.10 agency, 8–9, 162 agential cut, the, 32 Akerman, Chantal, 172–3 Alaimo, Stacy, 135–7 Alsharif, Basma, 12, 115–24 Deep Sleep, 119–20, 125 n.4 feminism, 118–9 A Field Guide to the Ferns, 122–3, 123, 124 gallery work, 121 Home Movies Gaza , 116–7, 117 Ouroboros, 124 Post-Palestinian position, 118, 119–20 practice, 115, 120–1, 124 alter egos, 202 Amanuensis (1973), 23, 199 Andra, Fern, 54 n.55 Anger, Kenneth, 144 animation, 39–51, 88, 239 anonymity, 202

anorexia, 128, 132–3 anti-fascist activism, 100 Antin, Eleanor, 202 anti-Semitism, 106, 107, 111 n.30 Appendix to an appeal (1972), 200 Aspesi, Lucia, 11 Appropriazione, A propria azione, Azione propria, Sole in mano [Appropriation, one’s own action, proper action, sun in hand] (1973), 89, 89, 90 Après La Reprise, la Prise (2009), 223 Arab feminisms, 187–8 Arnheim, Rudolph, 40 Arrows (1984), 128, 132–4, 135 art world, 189–90 Arte Povera, 87 Arte Programmata, 87 Artists’ Union, 194 Arts Council, 101 Asante, Kariamu Welsh, 79 Asante, Molefi Kete, 75 audience, 31, 185, 191–2 participation, 94–6, 95 authenticity, 106 author-centric monographic approach, 189–90 autobiographical reference, 1 avatars, 13, 220, 221 Bachelor Machines Part 1 [2007], 249 backstage, 32, 32–3, 36 Bag, Alex, Untitled Fall ’95, 204–5 Balázs, Béla, 43, 51 Balducci, Temma, 139 Bale, Miriam, 73–4 Balsom, Erika, 12, 204 Bambara, Toni Cade, 73 Daughters of the Dust, 73, 76

271

272

Index

Barad, Karen, 32 Barri Holstein, Lauren, 208 Barthes, Roland, 140–1 Bartosch, Berthold, 46 BBC, 50 BBC Arena, 29 Beard, Mary, 208 Beatty, Talley, 81 beauty, 154, 172–3 Beech, Lucy, 14 Cannibals , 229, 231, 234–7, 235, 238–9, 242 Beecroft, Vanessa, 203, 204 Begonia, Marissa, 240–1 Bergstrom, Janet, 1, 7 Berlin, Deutsches Theatre, 45 Berlin Horse (1970), 120 Berwick Street Collective, 237–8, 247 Bete & Deise (2012), 217, 217–8, 221–2, 222, 223–5, 226 n.10, 227 n.23 Betterton, Rosemary, 204 Bhabha, Homi, 103, 169 Bignardi, Umberto, 96 Birnbaum, Dara, 202, 203 Birthday Suit–with Scars and Defects (1974), 200 Black Audio Film Collective, 102, 103, 105–6 Black British film, 102–9 black expansiveness, 80 Blaetz, Robin, 4 body, the, 12–13 centrality of, 90–4 colonizing forces, 127–8 corporeal vulnerability, 127–37 as fetish object, 168–9, 175 and gaze, 200–2, 201 hegemonic readings, 12 hypersexualized, 169 and landscape, 92 overexposure, 130–1 sexualized images of, 168 Boltanski, Luc, 216 Bolton, Lucy, 82 Borden, Lizzie, Born in Flames, 183–4 Born in Flames (1983), 183–4 Boudry, Pauline, 10, 29–37, 30, 33, 209 N.O.Body, 30 Silent , 31

Bratcher, Melanie, 80 Brecht, Bertolt, 32 British Film Institute, 41, 42, 183 British Museum, 66–7 Brooks, Daphne A., 77 Brown, Wendy, 235 Browne, Sarah, 14, 217 Peripherals, 223 Something from nothing, 217, 217–8, 219–21, 220, 222–3, 222, 225, 226 n.10 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 234 Bruyn, Eric de, 223 Bruzzi, Stella, 147 Burgon, Ruth, 199 Bustin, John, 101 Butler, Judith, 131–2, 133, 134, 140, 141, 208 Butler, Octavia, 82–3 Camera Obscura, 1, 5, 6 Campion, Jane, 82 Candy Girls (2014), 168–9 Cannibal Holocaust (1980), 122 Cannibals (2013), 229, 231, 234–7, 235, 238–9, 242 Caponi, Gena Dagel, 80 Carnevale, Fulvia, 206 Carretti, Gigliola, 91 Carry Greenham Home (1983), 192 Carter-Knowles, Beyoncé, Lemonade , 74 Cartwright, Lisa, 7, 8, 10 Casini, Silvia, 157 celebrity, 169 Center Jenny (2013), 208 Certain Measures: Index of Disbelief (Rhodes), 19, 25 Charlesworth, Amy, 232 Chiapello, Eve, 216 Chicago, Judy, 139 childcare, 65 Christiani, Rita, 81 Chronicle of a Tape Recorded Over (2010), 158 Cinderella (1922), 39, 40, 40, 46 cinema, women’s contributions, 1–2 Cinenova, 69 Ciret, 80 Cixous, Hélène, 199

Index clapper boards, 31–2 Clark, VèVè A., 3 Clarke, Shirley, 139 Cleghorn, Elinor, 10 Club des Femmes film collective, 13–14, 181–95, 189, 190, 193 Cold War, the, 153 collaboration, 185 see also Riddles of the Sphinx (Mulvey and Wollen) collectivization, 156 Collins, Patricia Hill, 77 Columpar, Corinn, 5 Combahee River Collective, 76 community, 99, 104–5 complacency, 192 Confess all on video . . . (1994), 203 Connolly, Maeve, 14 consciousness, 87 consciousness-raising, 187, 188, 193 contextualization, 252–4 convergence, space of, 7 Cook, Olive, 46 corporeal vulnerability, 12–13, 127–37 Corps étranger (1994), 201–2 counter-hegemonic identity, 99 Crenshaw, Kimberlé, 73 critical disinterestedness, 7 Crown Film Unit, 50 Cruz, Maria Palacios, 12 cultural icons, 202–3 cultural labour force, feminization of, 193 curating, 13, 34–5, 181–2, 183, 184–5, 188–91, 193–4 Curlis, Hans, 46 Cutler, Janet K., 74, 81 cyberfeminism, 206 Danino, Nina, 202, 203 Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari (1920), 47, 55 n.55 Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Loving Heart) (1919), 46 Dash, Julie, 11 see also Four Women (Dash) Daughters of the Dust (Bambara), 73, 76 deauthorized subjects, 140 Decline of Western Civilization trilogy (1981, 1988, 1998), 149

273

Deep Sleep (2014), 119–20, 125 n.4 deep time, 157 Demetrakas, Johanna, 139 Deodato, Ruggero, 122 Deracination (2010), 207 Deren, Maya, 3, 5, 11, 75 Meshes of the Afternoon, 82 Ritual in Transfigured Time, 81–2 A Study in Choreography for the Camera, 81 desubjectivisation, 206 Deutsche Filmliga für unabhängigen Film, 52 n.28 Deutsches Theatre, Berlin, 45 dialogue, 11, 183 Dick, Vivienne, 184, 185 Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) (1926), 41, 43, 46, 49–50 digital economy, 171–2 digital technology, materiality of, 13 Dimitrakaki, Angela, 232 Direct Cinema, 147 discursive apparatuses, 250–4 disillusionment, 204 distancing devices, 166 Documenta exhibition, 251–2 domestic femininity, internal exile of, 49 domestic labour, 172–3 double consciousness, 77 Dozier, Ayanna, 74, 78 DuBois, W.E.B., 76, 77 Dulac, Germaine, 3 Dunham, Katherine, 81–2 Durkin, Hannah, 81–2 écriture feminine, 199 Edge (1986), 128–9, 129, 131, 135 Eisenstein, Sergei, 51 Eisner, Lotte H., 41 Elder, R. Bruce, 41 Eleven Men (2016), 153 Elias, Ana Sofia, 172, 175 Elwes, Catherine, 13, 256 n.2 There is a Myth, 200, 201 Emilia-Amalia Working Group, 187 Emin, Tracey, 203, 204 emotional labour, 215 empowerment, 238–9

274

Index

enunciation, 6–7 Epremian, Pia, 91 equality, 182–3 erotic capital, 197 essay films, 151–62 ethnic minorities, cultural needs, 101 Eurocentrism, 74, 102–3 Excellences and Perfections (2014), 168, 176 n.4 Expressionism, 47, 53 n.33 Fabro, Luciano, 93 Faludi, Susan, 194 Fanon, Frantz, 103 Farocki, Harun, 152 Fatima’s Letter (1992), 107–8, 109, 109 Federici, Silvia, 215, 230–1 Feed Me (2015), 166–7, 166 Feher, Michel, 240 Feldstein, Ruth, 77 feminine identity, 66 femininity, 139, 250 as labour, 165–75 mythologised, 204 paradox of contemporary, 208 patriarchal fears of, 61–2 as site of resistance, 206 Feminism, Fiction and the Avant-Garde season, 1 Feminism Inshallah: A History Of Arab Feminism (2014), 187–8 feminist activism, 13 feminist art, renewed interest in, 167–8 feminist content, framing, 247 feminist discourse, 2 Feminist Duration Reading Group, 181, 185–8 feminist methodology, 9, 15 feminist pedagogy, 186–7 feminist validation, 51 femmage, 173 Femminile, Rivolta, 14 Field, Felicity, 39 Film as Film: Formal Experiments in Film exhibition, 3 film studies, 61 Film-Ambiente (The Environmental Screen) (1969), 89, 94–7, 95 Film-Ambiente system, 94–7

Filmeco, 88 Fischinger, Oskar, 41, 45 Fisher, Anna Watkins, 208 Fitch, Lizzie, 208 Fonoroff, Nina, 7, 8, 10 Fontaine, Claire, 206 Fordism, 229, 230 Foschi, Rosa, 91 found footage manipulations, 12–13 Four Women (1975), 11, 73–83, 79 Aunt Sarah, 80 auteurial presence, 74 characters, 76 choreography, 78–82 cinematographic choices, 74–5 fourth woman, 82 inspiration, 75 intersectional feminism, 73–4 invisibility, 75–6 multi-dimensionality, 73 opening sequence, 80 Peaches, 81 reading, 74 Saffronia, 80–1 soundtrack, 75 woman validation ceremony, 76 ‘Four Women’ (Simone), 76–7 Fraser, Andrea, 203–4 Free White and 21 (1980), 202 French cinema, 3 Freud, Sigmund, 62 Fukushima nuclear disaster, 157 funding, 190–1 Fusco, Coco, 7 Gabriel (1976), 199 Gaines, Malick, 76, 77 Gale, Peggy, 202 gallery context, 4 Garfield, Rachel, 11 Gathering, The (2006), 206 gaze, 247 and self-presentation, 200–2, 201 gender, 14, 182, 246, 255 discrimination, 7 identity, 8–9, 15 politics, 11 roles, 142–4 stereotypes, 169

Index gendered hierarchy, 42 General Post Office, 50 Genet, Jean, 29 Germs (2013), 171 gesture, 153, 163 n.10 Gill, Rosalind, 172 glamour labour, 172, 175 Gleeson, Erin, 162 Gliese, Rochus, 47, 53 n.32 Goffman, Erving, 175, 218 Gordon, Bette, 184 Variety, 183, 184 government policy, 11 Grant, Catherine, 10–11, 208–9 Great Britain identity politics, 99–109 inner-city riots, 101 racism, 100–1 Greenham Common anti-nuclear protests, 185 Gronlund, Melissa, 14–5 Guy, Alice Blanche, 3 Guy, Laura, 233 Hall, Stuart, 103 Hammer, Barbara, 3–4, 190 Handsworth Songs (1986), 105–6 Hanoi Doclab, 151, 152 Hansberry, Lorraine, 76 haptic visuality, 133 Haraway, Donna, 206, 232–3 Harbord, Janet, 157 Hatoum, Mona, Corps Étranger (1994), 201–2 Hayward Gallery, 3 Hedditch, Emma, 10–1, see also Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Mulvey and Hedditch) Henning, Hanna, 54 n.55 hierarchy of needs, 239–40 Hirsch, Marianne, 115 Hirsch, Werner, 29 Hirsh, Ann, 176 n.4 historical contingency, 157 historiographic continuum, trap of, 5 History Group, the, 62 Hochschild, Arlie, 215, 218 Hodson, Millicent, 3 Holland, Faith, 176 n.4

Hollywood, 2, 45, 103, 251 Holocaust, the, 132, 138 n.7 home cultural construction of, 115 representation of, 116–7 Home Movies Gaza (2013), 116–7, 117 homeworkers, 14 homosexuality, 103 hooks, bel, 4, 66, 79 Hoover, Nan, 201 horror film, 122–3 human capital, 240 human rights, 182 Hutchinson, Robert, 101 Hylton, Richard, 100 hypersexualization, 175 hypervisibility, 100 I Don’t Know (1977), 139–49, 143 bathtub sequence, 145–6, 146, 147, 148 conclusion, 147–9 gender roles, 142–4 historical actuality, 145 interview sequences, 145–7 knife sequence, 146–7 mise en scène, 144 opening sequence, 139 performance styles, 139 Pride Parade sequence, 144–5 relevance, 149 soundtrack, 142, 143, 144–5, 147–8 I want (2015), 35–6 identification, 247–8 identity, 115, 165, 252, 254 counter-hegemonic, 99 creation, 65–6 gender, 8–9, 15 Jewish, 106–7 Occupational, 6 sense of, 65–6 sexual, 12 identity politics, 99–109 Il Lago (soggettivo-oggettivo) [The Lake (Subjective-Objective)] (1965), 92 immaterial labour, 231, 232–3 In Our Hands (1984), 186 inclusiveness, 149 individualism, 156

275

276

Index

Indumenti [Clothing] (1967), 93–4 inequality, 111 n.19, 118–9, 175 inflection, 6–7 Ingawanij, May Adadol, 12 intentionality, in interpretation, 255–6 intercorporeality, 134 intergenerational engagements, 185 interior voice, representation, 65 International Women’s Movement, 10 internships, 193 interpretation, intentionality in, 255–6 intersectional feminism, 73–4, 184 intersectionality, 18 n.23, 73, 99–109, 149 Inter-vento (1969), 92 interviews, 29, 145–7 invisibility, 75–6, 88–9, 89, 215, 230 Islamic feminism, 185–6 Italian economic miracle, the, 90–1 Italian feminisms, 181–2, 182–3, 186 Italian Film Cooperative, 87, 97 n.2 Italian Independent Cinema Cooperative, 91 Italy, 87–97 It’s What’s Inside That Counts (2016), 169–70, 170 Jack Straw’s Castle (2009), 248–9, 249 Jacquin, Maud, 12 James, David, 75 Jarman Derek, 34 Jarrett, Kyle, 216 Jewish identity, 106–7 Johnson, Claire, 2 Jones, Amelia, 7, 10, 168 Julien, Isaac, 102, 105–6, 111 n.23, 112 n.33 Justice for Domestic Workers (Leeds), 229, 232, 233, 238, 240–1 Kahn, Naseem, 101 Keane, Tina, 127, 130 In Our Hands, 186 Kelly, Mary, 182 klezmer, 106 Knight, Julia, 54 n.55 Koch, Carl, 46 Kokoli, Alexandra, 42, 49, 204 Kracauer, Siegfried, 47–8 Kruger, Barbara, 171 Kweli, Talib, 77

L.A. Rebellion, 75, 76 La Rocca, Ketty, 91 Appendix to an appeal, 200 labelling, 118 labour boundaries of, 225 conditions, 14 emotional, 215 and female solidarity, 229–41 femininity as, 165–75 feminization of, 216 histories of, 223–5 immaterial, 231, 232–3 migrant, 230, 232 reproductive, 215, 216, 219–20 sexual division of, 231 uncommodified value, 239–40 unwaged, 215 women’s work, 215–25 Lahire, Sandra, 12, 127–37 anti-nuclear films, 129–30, 130, 131, 136 Arrows , 128, 132–4, 135 Edge , 128–9, 129, 131, 135 Living on Air (1991 to 1999), 127 objective distance, 134 Plutonium Blonde, 129–30 Serpent River, 129–30, 134, 136 techniques, 132, 133 Terminals , 129–30, 130, 134 Uranium Hex, 129–30, 134 vocabulary, 130 landscape and the body, 92 colonial trope, 160 subjective experience of, 115 Landscape Series #1 (2013), 153 language, non-patriarchal, 103 Laurentis, Teresa di, 2 Le Grice, Malcolm, 120, 127 Leaver-Yap, Mason, 252 Leeds Animation Workshop, 239 Legend of Maya Deren, The (research project), 3 Lemonade (2016), 74 Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, 32 Leslie, Esther, 45 Let It Go (2015), 173–4

Index Letters from Panduranga (2015), 153, 157–8, 158 Letters from Siberia (1957), 158 Levine, Sherrie, 171 Life & Letters Today, 39 light Film-Ambiente system, 94–7 projected, 88–9 Light Industry, 252, 253 Light Reading (1978), 23–4, 198–9 Lippard, Lucy, 48, 49 literature, 2–5 Living on Air, 127 Lloyd, Karen, 191 lolcats, 174–5 Lolcats (2012), 172 London Feminist Film Festival, 193 London Film-makers’ Co-operative, 1, 2, 8–9, 12, 127, 130, 137 London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, 190–1 London Women’s Liberation Workshop, 62 Long, Catherine, 207 Lonzi, Carla, 13, 14, 90, 92, 93, 206 Autoritratto, 91, 98 n.7 loops, 31, 33 Lorenz, Renate, 10, 29–37, 30, 33, 209 Aftershow, 29, 35 I want, 35–6 No Future, No Past, 34 N.O.Body, 35 Toxic, 29, 32–3 Lori, Ope, 206–7 Deracination , 207 Lucas, Sarah, 203 Luce Movimento [Light Movement] (1967), 88 Lunch, Lydia, 185 Lütticken, Sven, 223 LUXONLINE, 190, 254 McCormick, Richard, 54 n.55 McCullough, Barbara, 75 McCullough, Kate, 221 machinery, 184–5 McLaren, Norman, 88 MacLean, Rachel, 165–75, 168–9 Candy Girls, 168–9 characters, 165

277

distancing devices, 166 Feed Me, 166–7, 166 Germs, 171 It’s What’s Inside That Counts, 169–70, 170 Let It Go, 173–4 Lolcats, 172 Make Me Up, 165–6 Over the Rainbow, 174 techniques, 170–1 McQueen, Steve, 108 Made for TV (1984), 202 Mafai, Mario, 90 Magnuson, Ann, 202, 203 Make Me Up (2018), 165–6 Makhmalbaf, Samira, 5 male gaze, 169, 200 Manning, Chelsea, 35 marginalization, 6–7, 48, 159, 162, 246 Marker, Chris, 158 Marks, Laura U., 133, 248 Marotta, Gino, 94 Martin, Agnes, 199 Gabriel, 199 Marx, Karl, Capital, 63 Marxist feminism, 76 Masilela, Ntongela, 75 Maslow, Abraham, 239–40 mass culture, 168 maternal ambivalence, 205 Matthee, Jean, 130, 202 Mayer, Sophie (So), 5, 11 Mayne, Judith, 2 mediation, 14, 252–4 Mekas, Jonas, 139 Mellencamp, Patricia, 3, 4, 5, 8, 203 meme, definition, 177 n.18 Menken, Marie, 4 Mercer, Kobena, 102 Merck, Mandy, 61, 68 Meshes of the Afternoon (1942), 82 microphones, 30–1 migrant labour, 230, 232 Milan Women’s Bookstore collective, 181, 183 Millar, Phil, 169 millennial generation, 192–3 mimetic videos, 173 mise en scène, 108

278

Index

misogyny, 170 modernity, 99 Moffat, Tracey, 5 montage, 108, 132 Morgan, Marcyliena, 77 Moritz, William, 41, 42, 51 Morrison, Toni, 82 Moser, Gabby, 187 Mother Nature, 145 motherhood, 61–2, 200 motivation, 189, 194 moving surface, art of the, 47 multiculturalism, 11, 99–100 Mulvey, Laura, 1–3, 8–9, 9, 10–11, 197–8, 247 Hedditch’s dialogue with, 10–11 manifesto, 67–70 political interests, 61 ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, 58, 59, 68 see also Riddles of the Sphinx; Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Mulvey and Hedditch) Muñoz, José, 34 Murnau, F.W, 47 Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, 8 music, 185 Mutaflor (1996), 207 mythologised femininity, 204 nakedness, 200–1, 207 Narciso [Narcissus] (1966), 90, 92 narcissism, 148, 208 narrative form, 2 Nashashibi, Rosalind Bachelor Machines Part 1, 249 Jack Straw’s Castle, 248–9, 249 National Women’s Council of Ireland, 223 nationalism, 116 Neely, Sarah, 13 negative capability, 199 Neiman, Catrina, 3 Nelson, Guvnor, 6 neoliberalism, 235, 239, 240, 243 n.32 networked self, the, 208 Neutral, the, 140–1 New American Cinema, 97 n.2

Nguyen Trinh Thi, 151–62 arrest, 159 Chronicle of a Tape Recorded Over, 159 Eleven Men, 153 exhibitions, 163 n.3 found footage manipulations, 12, 152–6, 155 freeze frame image of Nhu Quynh, 12, 154–5, 155 Landscape Series #1, 153 Letters from Panduranga , 153, 157–62, 158 practice, 151–2, 155, 156 Song to the Front, 153–7, 155 Nhu Quynh, 152–6, 155, 157 Nicolson, Annabel, 3 Nightcleaners (1972 to 1975), 237–8, 247 No Future, No Past (2011), 34 N.O.Body (2007), 30, 35 Nosferatu (1922), 47 Novaczek, Ruth, 11, 99, 105–7, 108 Rootless Cosmopolitans, 106–7, 109 Tea Leaf, 105–6, 111 n.27 November (2008), 247–8 ‘Now You Can Go’ programme, 181–2, 195 n.1 nuclear power, 129–30, 130, 131, 136, 157–62 O’ Brien, Treasa, 192 Ó Conchúir, Fearghus, 222 objectification, 200 objects, 30 Occupational Identity, 6 oppression (theories of), 63 Otolith Group, 108 Ouroboros (2017), 124 outsourcing, 230 Ove, Horace, 99, 102, 102–3 Over the Rainbow (2013), 174 Oxford Women’s Studies Committee, 1 Palestine, 116–8, 124, 125 n.8 Panayiotou, Christodoulos, 251–2, 254 Paris Police Archives, 32 Parker, Rozsika, 198, 205 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 125 n.8 Passion of Remembrance, The (1986), 102, 104–5, 104, 107, 108, 108–9, 111 n.22

Index patriarchal fears, 61–2 patriarchal marginalization, 6–7 patriarchy, 6, 7, 49 Peazant, Nana, 79 Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (Mulvey and Wollen), 2, 59 performativity, 208 Peripherals (2013), 223 Pertinho de Alphaville (2010), 223–4 Petro, Patrice, 42 Petrolle, Jean, 4–5, 50 Phelan, Peggy, 200 Piccinini, Laura, 204 Piccinini, Patricia, The Gathering, 206 Pindell, Howardena, 202 Pinschewer, Julius, 46 Pirelli, Giovanni, 88 Pirelli, Marinella, 11, 87–97 Appropriazione, A propria azione, Azione propria, Sole in mano [Appropriation, one’s own action, proper action, sun in hand] , 89, 89, 90 and the body, 90–4 Documenti [Documents], 93–4 Film-Ambiente (The Environmental Screen), 89, 94–7, 95 Film-Ambiente system, 94–7 Il Lago (soggettivo-oggettivo)/nl[The Lake (Subjective-Objective)], 92 Indumenti [Clothing], 93–4 Inter-vento, 92 and invisibility, 88–9, 89 language, 92–3 and light, 88–9, 94–6 Luce in Movimento [Light in Movement], 88 Narciso [Narcissus], 90, 92 techniques, 93 Plant, Sadie, 227 n.18 Plath, Sylvia, 127, 128, 130, 132–3, 135, 138 n.7 Plutonium Blonde (1987), 129–30 police photography, 32 political consciousness, 65–6 Pollock, Griselda, 198 pop culture, 165 pop music, 165 pornography industry, 145–6 post-Fordism, 230, 233

279

postmemory, 115 Post-Palestinian, the, 118, 119–20 potentiality, aesthetics of, 151–62 Potter, Sally, 5, 6, 13, 200 powerlessness, 162 precarity, 230 Pressure (1976), 102, 102–3, 104 production, conditions of, 248–50, 249 production values, 248–50, 249 ‘Prospect 71’ exhibition, 97 Prouvost, Laure, 14, 246, 248 We Will Go Far (On Ira Loin), 253–4, 254 psychoanalysis, 62, 65, 68 psychoanalytic readings, 6 Pucill, Sarah, 133 Punk, 184 Quynh, Nhu, 12 Rabinovitz, Linda, 3 racialized body, the, 206–7 racism, 100–1 Raengo, Alessandra, 80 Rainer, Yvonne, 5, 33 Ramose, Mogobe B., 78 Rascaroli, Laura, 159 Real Time (2003), 229 reality, 90 reception, 14, 250–4 Reckitt, Helena, 13, 181–95, 209 recuperation, practices of, 10 Reinhardt, Max, 45 Reiniger, Lotte, 10, 39–51 aesthetic, 46–7 background, 42 career, 40–1, 42–7, 50 Cinderella, 39, 40, 40, 46 commitment, 50 Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Loving Heart), 46 Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed), 41, 43, 46, 49–50 dismissal of art as craft, 48–9 innovations, 41, 47 invisibility, 41–2 output, 50

280

Index

relevance, 47–8 ‘Scissors Make Films’, 44 Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, 48–9, 50 status, 41–2, 50–1 techniques, 41–2, 42–5, 44, 48–9 UK reception, 51 n.7 writings, 39, 44, 48–9, 50 Renoir, Jean, 50 reproductive labour, 215, 216, 219–20 Revell, Irene, 10, 29–37 Rhodes, Lis, 3, 5, 9, 19–25, 127 Adventures of the Black Square, 22–3 Amanuenis, 23, 199 Certain Measures: Index of Disbelief, 19, 25 Light Music, 20–1 Light Reading, 23–4, 198–9 Running Light, 24–5 ‘Whose History?’, 22 Rich, B Ruby, 4 Richter, Hans, 41, 45, 47, 52 n.28 Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), 2, 10–11, 57–70, 247 comparison with Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 58, 67–70 creative agency, 14 development, 59 dialogue, 57, 58 figure of the Sphinx, 58, 61, 64, 66, 70 final scene, 66–7 friendship with Maxine sequence, 64–6, 64 funding, 69 ‘Laura listening’ sequence, 62–4, 63 ‘Laura speaking’ sequence, 59, 60, 61–2, 68–9 manifesto, 67–70 Mulvey’s presence in, 57 ‘Opening pages’ sequence, 59, 60, 61 and reading, 61, 68 representation of womanhood, 66 sections, 57 as a theory film, 57, 58–9 title, 57 Riley, Bridget, 199 Rio de Janeiro, 221–2 Rist, Pipilotti, 207 Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), 81–2

Rivolta Femminile, 90 Robertson, Selina, 13 Rochechouart Museum of Contemporary Art, 254 Rock Against Racism, 101 Rootless Cosmopolitans (1990), 106–7, 109 Rosenberg, Jan, 6 Rosler, Rosler, Martha, 172–3, 175, Vital Statistics of the Average Citizen Simply Obtained, 200–1 Rottenberg, Catherine, 235, 236 Ruido, Maria, Real Time, 229 Russell, Catherine, 249 Ruttmann, Walter, 41, 45, 46, 49–50, 52 n.28 Salomania (2009), 33, 33, 209 Sankofa collective, 11, 99, 102, 103, 111 n.23 Sauzeau-Boetti, Anne-Marie, 199 Scarman Report, 100–1, 110 n.6 scepticism, 6 Schapiro, Miriam, 139, 172–3, 175 Scharff, Christina, 172 Schneemann, Carolee, 6, 7 science fiction, 105 Scorpio Rising (1963), 144 Screen, 62 Scuola Senza Fine (School Without End) (1983), 186–7 second-wave feminism, 57, 67, 198, 200 Sedira, Zineb, 108 self portraiture, 13 self-appreciation, 240 self-definition, 77 self-effacement, 198–9 self-exploitation, 234–7 selfie culture, 172 self-presentation, 197–209 contemporary, 206–9 and gaze, 200–2, 201 masquerade, 202–3 self-effacement, 198–9 self-revelation, 203–6, 205 and women’s work, 218, 219 self-revelation, 203–6, 205 September 11 terrorist attacks, 183-4, 183

Index Serano, Julia, 255 Serpent River (1989), 129–30, 134, 136 sex, selling art with, 203–4 sexual identity, 12 sexualized images, 168 Shabazz, Menelik, 102 Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films (Reiniger), 48–9, 50 shared experience, 139 Sherman, Cindy, 167, 171 She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry (2014), 193 Shifman, Limor, 173 Shirky, Clay, 174 Sight & Sound, 39, 44 Silent (2016), 31 Simone, Nina, 74, 76, 76–7 Slut (1993), 203 smartphones, 219–20, 222–3, 222 Smith, Sarah, 13 soap operas, 234, 238 social media, 14 solidarity, female, 229–41 Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen (2014), 229, 231, 231–4, 237–8, 239, 240 Something from nothing (2014), 217, 217–8, 219–21, 220, 222–3, 222, 225, 226 n.10 Song to the Front (2011), 153–7, 155 Sontag, Susan, 122–3 Soul II Soul, 100–1 South London Gallery, 32 Spheeris, Penelope, 12 Decline of Western Civilization trilogy, 149 I Don’t Know (1977), 139–49 Wayne’s World, 149 Spice Girls, 192 spiritual resistance, 82–3 Starr, Cecile, 41 Steele, Lisa, Birthday Suit–with Scars and Defects, 200 Stehli, Jemima, 203, 204 Steinm Gertrude, 29 stereotypes, 100, 169, 207–8 cultural, 202–3 definition, 211 n.23 Steyerl, Hito, 247–8

281

Strand, Chick, 4 Suárez, Juan, 144 subaltern women, 238 subjectivity, 62, 108–9 suffragette movement, 166 Supposing I Love you and you also love me (2011), 223 Syed, Alia, 11, 99, 108–9, 112 n.33, 112 n.34 Fatima’s Letter, 107–8, 109, 109 Tate Modern, 252 Taylor, Clyde, 73, 75 Taylor, Nora, 152, 159 Taylor-Johnson, Sam, 203, 204 Tea Leaf (1988), 105–6, 111 n.27 technique, as a cultural phenomenon, 250 technologization, 128 Terminals (1986), 129–30, 130, 134 Territories (1984), 102, 105 Thal, Andrea, 34 Thatcher, Margaret, 233 theory film, 57, 58, 58–9, 69 There is a Myth (1984), 200, 201 Thew, Anna, 130 third-wave feminism, 247–8 Thornton, Leslie, Adynata, 253 Toronto, 187 Toxic (2012), 29, 32–3 trans-corporeality, 136–7 Trecartin, Ryan, 208 Trini, Tommaso, 96 Trump, Donald, 182, 192 Tsang, Wu, 33 ubuntu, 77–8 Ullman, Amalia, Excellences and Perfections, 168, 176 n.4 uncommodified value, 239–40 universalism, 99 Untitled (2006), 203–4 Untitled Fall ’95 (1995), 204–5 Uranium Hex (1987), 129–30, 134 van der Rohe, Mies, 52 n.28 van Oldenborgh, Wendelien, 217 Après La Reprise, la Prise, 223 Bete & Deise, 217, 217–8, 221–2, 223–5, 226 n.10, 227 n.23

282

Index

Pertinho de Alphaville, 223–4 Supposing I Love you and you also love me, 223 Variety (1983), 183, 184 ventriloquism, 13 victimhood, hierarchy of, 106–7 Vietnam, 12, 151–62 Vietnam Feature Film Studio, 154, 156 Vietnam War, 151, 152 violence, 169 Virno, Paolo, 216, 218 virtuoso performance, 216, 217–8 Vishmidt, Marina, 208 visibility, 171, 191, 197, 208 visual arts contexts, 4 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Mulvey and Hedditch), 58, 67–70 Vital Statistics of the Average Citizen Simply Obtained (1977), 200–1 voting rights, 166 vulnerability, 12–3, 127–37 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s exhibition, 8, 255–6 WAGE, Working Artists in the Greater Economy, 194 Wages For Housework campaign, 230–1, 242 n.5 Waiting (Wilding), 65 Wakeford, Nina, 208 Walker Art Center, 252 Walsh, Maria, 14, 205, 206 Warner, Marina, 46, 49 Wayne’s World (1992), 149 We Will Go Far (On Ira Loin, 2015), 253–4, 254 Wearing, Gillian, 203 2 into 1 , 205–6, 205 Wegener, Paul, 45, 46, 47, 53 n.32 Wexman, Virginia Wright, 4–5, 50 White, Eric, 43 White, Ian, 251 Wiene, Robert, 47, 55 n.55 WikiLeaks, 35 Wilding, Faith, Waiting, 65 Willcox, Toyah, 34 Williamson, Judith, 103

Windrush children, 110 n.4 Wissinger, Elizabeth, 172 Wohlbrück, Olga, 54 n.55 Wollen, Peter, 2, 10–11 political interests, 61 ‘The Two Avant-Gardes’, 59 see also Riddles of the Sphinx woman, definition, 15, 246 woman validation ceremony, 76 womanhood Black, 73–4 Womanhouse (1972), 139–40 Womanhouse (1974), 139 women lack of recognition, 1–2 women artists existence, 245–56 false universality, 255–6 identification, 247–8 production conditions, 248–50, 249 reception, 250–4 self-definition, 246 Women Empowering Women, 231, 234–7 women’s craft, 48–9 women’s liberation, and film, 61 women’s studies, 61 women’s work, 215–25 boundaries of, 225 on camera, 219–23 emotional labour, 215 and female solidarity, 229–41 histories of, 223–5 invisibility, 215, 230 reproductive labour, 215, 216, 219–20 and self-presentation, 218, 219 uncommodified value, 239–40 unwaged, 215 virtuoso performance, 216, 217–8 Wood, Sarah, 13 Wynter, Sylvia, 74 Young, Linda Martina, 11, 78–80 youth, fetishization of, 166–7 Zaman, Rehana, Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen, 229, 231, 231–4, 237–8, 239, 240–1 Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska, 156–7

283

284

285

286

Plate 1.1 Catriona Shaw, Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Peaches during the shooting of To Valerie Solanas And Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation, 2013. Courtesy Boudry/Lorenz.

Plate 1.2 Lotte Reiniger and assistants working on Prince Achmed, Berlin 1923, photograph taken from Shadow Theatres and Shadow Films, Batsford Books (London, 1975). Courtesy Batsford and Pavilion Books.

Plate 1.3a and 1.3b Laura Mulvey with Emma Hedditch, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 2008, screen grabs. Courtesy Emma Hedditch.

Plate 1.4 Julie Dash, Four Women, 1975. Courtesy Julie Dash.

Plate 1.5 Marinella Pirelli, Doppio autoritratto, 1974. Courtesy Archivio Marinella Pirelli, Varese.

Plate 1.6 Ruth Novaczek, Tea Leaf, 1988/2016, screengrab. Courtesy the artist.

Plate 1.7 Basma Alsharif, Deep Sleep, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris.

Plate 1.8 Sandra Lahire, Serpent River, 1989. Courtesy LUX, London.

Plate 2.1 Penelope Spheeris, I Don’t Know, 1970. Courtesy Penelope Spheeris and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Plate 2.2 Nguyen Trinh Thi, Letters from Panduranga, 2015. Courtesy the artist.

Plate 2.3 Rachel Maclean, Over the Rainbow, 2013. Courtesy Collective Gallery and The Banff Centre, Canada.

Plate 2.4 Pablo Pakula performance interruption as part of ‘On Social Reproduction’ discussion, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, as part of ‘Now You Can Go,’ December 5, 2015. Photograph: Christian Luebbert.

Plate 2.5 Ope Lori, Deracination, 2010. Courtesy the artist.

Plate 2.6 Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Bete & Deise, 2012. Courtesy Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam, LUX and the artist. Co-produced by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam), Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam; with the support of the Mondriaan Foundation and the Culture Programme of the European Union.

Plate 2.7 Lucy Beech, Cannibals, 2013. Courtesy the artist.

Plate 2.8 Laure Prouvost, We Will Go Far, 2015. Installation view, Collection Musée départmental d’Art cotemporain de Rochechouart. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia.