Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks

TL;DR: Blaetz as mentioned in this paper describes a critical framework for women's experimental cinematography: "Critical Frameworks" and "Different/Same/Both/Neither": the Polycentric Cinema of Joyce Wieland and Gunvor Nelson's Films.

Abstract: Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks / Robin Blaetz 1 Swing and Sway: Marie Menken's Filmic Events / Melissa Ragona 20 Different/Same/Both/Neither: The Polycentric Cinema of Joyce Wieland / Paul Arthur 45 Evacuating Visual Fields, Layering Auditory Frames: Signature, Translation, Resonance, and Gunvor Nelson's Films / Chris Holmlund 67 Moving and Moving: From Minimalism to Lives of Performers / Noel Carroll 89 Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann / M.M. Serra and Kathryn Ramey 103 "Absently Enchanted": The Apocryphal, Ecstatic Cinema of Barbara Rubin / Ara Osterweil 127 Amy Greenfield: Film, Dynamic Movement, and Transformation / Robert A. Haller 152 Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History / Chuck Kleinhans 167 Chick Strand's Experimental Ethnography / Maria Pramaggiore 188 Amnesis Time: The Films of Marjorie Keller / Robin Blaetz 211 In the Ruins of the Image: The Work of Leslie Thornton / Mary Ann Doane 239 Sounds, Intervals, and Startling Images in the Films of Abigail Child / Maureen Turim 263 Peggy's Playhouse: Contesting the Modernist Paradigm / William C. Wees 290 Su Friedrich: Breaking the Rules / Janet Cutler 312 The Experimental "Dunyementary": A Cinematic Signature Effect / Kathleen McHugh 339 Women's Experimental Cinema: Some Pedgogical Challenges / Scott Macdonald 360 Appendix: Film Distribution 383 Bibliography 385 Contributors 401 Index 405

Summary

Augusta and Miranda,

• This project benefited from the generosity of the American Association of University Women in the form of a Summer Research Grant and from a number of Faculty Research Grants from Mount Holyoke College.
• I am grateful to all the writers who have been part of this project for their enthusiasm and commitment and for their substantial and passionate work.
• I want also to express my gratitude to my colleagues at Mount Holyoke College, particularly Elizabeth Young, Tom Wartenberg, Paul Staiti, Ajay Sinha, and Jenny Perlin, and to a number of others, including Cosmas Demetriou, Chris Holmlund, Kathleen McHugh, Adrienne McLean, James Meyer, Gordon Spencer-Blaetz, Ann Steuernagel, Patty White, Ken Wissoker, and two most helpful anonymous readers.

MELISSA RAGONA

• Swing and Sway Marie Menken’s Filmic Events b Marie Menken (1910–70) is one of the least recognized experimental filmmakers of her generation.
• White, abstract forms (photographic fragments of the sculpture) seem to soar through space, reminding us of her ability to animate the most static of objects—to confront us, through film, with the plasticity of sculpture and, in turn, with the sculptural aspects of film.
• Embedded in Menken’s work is an explicit critique of the lyricism of abstract expressionism, as well as any direct equations made between poetry and film.
• As has been documented in the scant literature on Menken, she and Willard Maas threw some of the most important MARIE MENKEN ∏ 37 star-studded parties (hosting Edward Albee, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Truman Capote, et al.) long before Warhol’s Factory attracted a ‘‘scene.’’.
• Her films, like Warhol’s canvases, depict not images or pictures, but rather, to borrow from George Brecht, an event.

CHRIS HOLMLUND

• Excavating Visual Fields, Layering Auditory Frames Signature, Translation, Resonance, and Gunvor Nelson’s Films b Of Signature and Translation Swedish artist Gunvor Nelson (b. 1931) is well established within avantgarde circles.
• With twenty films, five videos, and one video installation≤ to her credit as of 2006, one might well say, with Steve Anker, that her ‘‘films compose one of the great bodies of independent work in the history of the medium.’’≥.
• In the five ‘‘field studies’’ (that is, Frame Line, Light Years, Light Years Expanding, Field Study #2, and Natural Features),∞∂ Nelson juxtaposes, morphs, and examines photographed, painted, sketched, and real elements within a single frame and frame to frame, using animation stands and optical printers.
• In Kristina’s Harbor and especially in Old Digs, sounds break away from images while silences interrupt and pace sounds.
• At issue with Nelson’s films must also be resonance, not just signature or translation.

Notes

• Warmest thanks to Gunvor Grundel Nelson for her suggestions and feedback.
• Thanks also to Steve Anker and Paul Arthur for stimulating discussions about Nelson’s work, and to John Sundholm, Astrid Söderbergh Widding, and Anders Pettersson for engaging conversations and for sharing their own essays, in English and Swedish, on Nelson.
• Once again, Nelson’s word play combines Swedish (which translates to ‘‘in sound and image’’) with English; it also evokes time (‘‘still moving’’), travel (‘‘moving’’), and, of course, core aspects of film and video, that is, stills and movement.

NOËL CARROLL

• Moving and Moving From Minimalism to Lives of Performers b.
• The film begins with rehearsal footage of the dance Walk, She Said, which gives every appearance of being a minimalist exercise devoted to the exploration of movement as such.∞.
• For while aspiring to tell stories about the loves of performers, Rainer also, at the same time, wants to comment analytically on the nature of narrative—or, at least, certain aspects thereof—in this film.
• Thus, in Lives of Performers, characters are often played by different actors,∞∞ and scenes are putatively rehearsed and played in alternative ways, though each instantiation of the written text appears absolutely authoritative visually.
• Nevertheless, if most of the film brackets or deemphasizes the bodily expression of emotion, concentrating on the mental or propositional content of the emotive states portrayed, the bodily realm is not forgotten.

ROBERT A. HALLER

• Amy Greenfield Film, Dynamic Movement, and Transformation b Amy Greenfield’s cinema is bound up in the dynamism of movement, in the voice of the human body, and the transformation of both through the language of film.
• While performing in other people’s films, she wrote about what had been done, and the possibilities of what could be done with the cinematic treatment of human movement.
• The ways in which cinema can give meaning to, transform, and enlarge the energy of movement set Greenfield’s work apart from most of her contemporaries.
• The tactile sense of physical sensation in Greenfield’s films is due to the kinetic force of camera movement and proximity, and the framing and angled vision of her work, which give it a palpable tension.
• She wrote of identifying with being trapped in the coils of destiny, yet overcoming her fear through her choice of action.∞∞.

CHUCK KLEINHANS

• Barbara Hammer Lyrics and History b Barbara Hammer (b. 1939) is a remarkably productive and innovative filmmaker.
• Understanding her originality demands breaking some of the easy commonplaces of current media criticism.
• Yet Hammer’s work deserves attention for addressing personal, aesthetic, and social issues with a complexity and density rare in fictional narrative or social documentary forms.
• Given the pioneering work of lesbian historians, both academic and amateur, today’s queer audience knows a great deal about many aspects of the past revolving around visual misrepresentation and the way the community itself appropriated and reinterpreted mass culture.
• Often falling between an innovative eclecticism of form and theme on the one hand and an underdeveloped thoughtfulness and pathetic restaging on the other, overall the film intrigues and aggravates.

MARIA PRAMAGGIORE

• Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography b I am a believer that art can always be tampered with.
• Before turning to a discussion of the way four of Strand’s films use poetic images and ironic structure to produce experimental ethnography, I briefly summarize relevant biographical and historical information.
• Close-ups and personal narratives immerse viewers in the two women’s subjective experiences as sister Isabel proudly comments on the civilization the Spanish have brought to the Indians and Carmelita describes her upbringing, marriage, and motherhood.
• Because the film is an assemblage, a viewer might expect that an important key to meaning should rest in the metonymic connection between images—the chain of proximity that builds meaning.

MARY ANN DOANE

• In the Ruins of the Image The Work of Leslie Thornton b Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.
• The incorrigible incompletion characterizing her work is intimately linked to the use and recycling (within her own oeuvre) of found footage, the tendency to implant it within varying contexts and syntaxes, extending the life of an image as though it were a word in some fantastic and obscure vocabulary that she is trying to make legible.
• As Jonathan Rosenbaum points out, spectatorial engagement with such a discourse reveals ‘‘all sorts of ideological positions and forms of ignorance about the Orient,’’ demonstrating that ‘‘one’s misconceptions and uncertainties about what one sees and hears are not a distraction from the film’s focus but part of its subject.’’∞≠.
• Thornton has become something of a collector of marvelous images, both her own and those she discovers in the debris of film history, subjecting them to a working and reworking which seems to be without limit, and which reveals the aspirations of intermediality.

MAUREEN TURIM

• Sounds, Intervals, and Startling Images in the Films of Abigail Child b Abigail Child (b. 1948) has been making films for over twenty years.
• Work ranges from the saccadic frame repetitions and variations of Martin Arnold in Pièce Touché (1989) to work that analyzes home movies such as Alan Berliner’s The Family Album (1988) to Peter Tscherkassky’s cinemascope trilogy of the 1990s that turns found footage into a highly abstracted visual mon- ABIGAIL CHILD ∏ 265 tage.
• Women’s faces and their bodies dominate the imagery, creating a swirl of sensuality, of performance for the camera, alternately self-aware or captured in unsuspecting innocence.
• Throughout these visually delineated sequences loosely organized as narrative threads, an active, independent sound montage further cuts into the images.
• Seemingly inspired by Jean Rouch’s cinema verité, but shot and edited in Child’s characteristically rhythmic ABIGAIL CHILD ∏ 281 style, the film never apologizes for its onlooker observation, instead seeing its deep look at this scene as its own form of respect.

WILLIAM C. WEES

• Peggy’s Playhouse Contesting the Modernist Paradigm b I like it when a work involves the viewer in some kind of dilemma about how to read its meaning.
• There she continued working in the arts and met a number of filmmakers, musicians, and photographers.
• Dargis refers to a ‘‘deceptively thrown-together feel’’ in Martina’s Playhouse and the Super 8 films that preceded it,∂ and Lia Gangitano has noted that Ahwesh’s techniques ‘‘could be viewed as indulgent, undisciplined, pointless,’’ though, in fact, they serve ‘‘an aggressive feminist aim that demands a form that does not comply with existing authoritative narrative structures.’’∑.
• Her films and videos also reflect a major change in the interests and intentions of North American avant-garde filmmakers who, like Ahwesh, came to prominence in the 1980s.
• As P. Adams Sitney has noted, ‘‘Younger artists were energized by the issues the older generation sidestepped,’’∏ and Tom Gunning announced that ‘‘avant-garde filmmaking has suddenly gained a new influx of energy’’ leading to the production of films notable for ‘‘their freshness, their distance from the dominant [avant-garde] films of the last two decades.’’.

Martina’s Playhouse

• I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I like not knowing.
• In most movies, the plan of the producers is there, the directorial position of the filmmaker is there.
• As Manohla Dargis’s reference to the ‘‘deceptively thrown-together feel’’ of Martina’s Playhouse suggests, the underlying logic of those connections is not always apparent, even to astute and experienced viewers of avant-garde films.
• A close-up of a flower also accompanies an extract from Jacques Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
• This connection via montage establishes Martina and Montgomery as the principal reference points for the various issues raised in the film, one of which is how a little girl and a grown woman present themselves to Ahwesh’s camera and relate to Ahwesh herself—which is pretty much the same thing.≤π.

JANET CUTLER

• Su Friedrich Breaking the Rules b New York–based filmmaker Su Friedrich (b. 1954) has created a rich body of work that has established her as a major figure in contemporary avantgarde cinema.
• Friedrich lends her works emotional resonance and intellectual clarity through a variety of strategies.
• She mixes intimate recollections with elements of popular culture and gender politics, placing her own experience in a broader social context.
• At once angry and droll, wounded and analytic, Friedrich embraces and critiques her chosen subjects: the film medium and her own life.
• Her expression of these tensions and ambiguities— her following the uncertain path—enlivens her thinking and technique, adding surprise and depth to her films.

KATHLEEN MCHUGH

• The Experimental ‘‘Dunyementary’’ A Cinematic Signature Effect b I am my own text.
• A simple but telling anecdote—Janine chastising Cheryl for not using shampoo correctly—captures Janine’s role in the relationship, a role which Cheryl accepted at the time, but then realized was a misrecognition in which she herself participated, and which she documented in the video.
• The Dunyementary animates and textualizes several convergences or crossovers: between the singularity of the proper name and the textual community of genre, and between autobiography and documentary, life and art, biology and biography.
• Dunye ‘‘casts [her] own history as an allegory for a community or culture that cannot be essentialized,’’ even as she inscribes this allegory in her selfportrait of the artist she is becoming.≤≤.
• Her identity as actor and filmmaker appear, or surface, in the body of and in the place of her character and subject—the life, loves, and professional labors of a black lesbian.

The Potluck and the Passion:

• Realizing, not Idealizing, Community The Dunyementaries feature recurring characters, in the mode of a sitcom, and Dunye is the one who runs through them all, although her characters have different names (for example, Shae in She Don’t Fade).
• Once the party begins, very little screen time is devoted to Linda and Nikki, but rather the story revolves around several people whose direct address to the camera punctuates footage of the dinner and of one couple (Lisa and Kendra) trying to make it to the dinner.
• The Dunyementaries investigate their filmmaker documenting herself as constructed— and, further, constructed as becoming a member of a profession and becoming an identity that does not yet exist.
• The Watermelon Woman, Dunye makes the film she set out to make in 1990 about African American women artists, a film that both invents an artistic predecessor with whom she can identify and also ‘‘finds’’.
• The descriptions alone led him to accuse the nea of funding child pornography in addition to obscene material (Su Friedrich’s Hide and Seek, a coming-of-age narrative about adolescent girls, is an example of the films included on the list).

Full text

critical frameworks
Women’s Experimental Cinema
R o b i n b l a e t z , editor
b l a e t z ,
editor
Women’s Experimental Cinema
d u k e
F i lm s t u d i e s / W o m e n ’ s s t u d i e s
Women’s Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant-
garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the s and many of whom
are still working today. In each essay in this collection, a leading film scholar considers a
single filmmaker, supplying biographical information, analyzing various influences on her
work, examining the development of her corpus, and interpreting a significant number of
individual films. e essays rescue the work of critically neglected but influential women
filmmakers for teaching, further study, and, hopefully, restoration and preservation. Just
as importantly, they enrich the understanding of feminism in cinema and expand the ter-
rain of film history, particularly the history of the American avant-garde.
e essays highlight the diversity in these filmmakers’ forms and methods, covering
topics such as how Marie Menken used film as a way to rethink the transition from ab-
stract expressionism to Pop Art in the s and s, how Barbara Rubin both objecti-
fied the body and investigated the filmic apparatus that enabled that objectification in
her film Christmas on Earth (), and how Cheryl Dunye uses film to explore her own
identity as a black lesbian artist. At the same time, the essays reveal commonalities, in-
cluding a tendency toward documentary rather than fiction and a commitment to nonhi-
erarchical, collaborative production practices. e volume’s final essay focuses explicitly
on teaching women’s experimental films, addressing logistical concerns (how to acquire
the films and secure proper viewing spaces) and extending the range of the book by sug-
gesting alternative films for classroom use.
“Women’s Experimental Cinema is an invaluable resource for students and devotees of
experimental cinema and feminist film, fields defined by remarkable films and a dearth
of critical attention. It brings to light the social and political roots and cultural impact of
women’s experimental film, and the specific female, feminine, and feminist practices of
an exceptional group of women artists.”—a l e x a n d R a J u h a s z , editor of Women of
Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video
“is definitive volume on U.S. women’s experimental cinema fills a significant and long-
lamented gap within film studies, and in feminist film studies in particular. Together,
these essays offer us a richly nuanced picture not only of women’s experimental film but
of avant-garde filmmaking in general from the s to the present.”—s h a R o n W i l l i s ,
author of High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film
R o b i n b l a e t z is Associate Professor and Chair of the Film Studies Program at Mount
Holyoke College. She is the author of Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film
and Culture.
d u k e u n i v e R s i t y P R e s s
Box , Durham, NC -
www.dukeupress.edu
: From Peggy Ahwesh’s e Color of Love, .
Courtesy of Peggy Ahwesh.

Women’s Experimental Cinema

b

ROBIN BLAETZ,
editor
Women’s Experimental Cinema
critical frameworks
Duke University Press Durham & London 2007

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Publication Data appear on the last printed
page of this book.
Noël Carroll’s article ‘‘Moving and Moving:
Minimalism to Lives of Performers’’
originally appeared in Millennium Film
Journal 35–36 (2000). Reprinted with
permission.
Duke University Press gratefully
acknowledges the support of the American
Association of University Women, which
provided funds toward the production of
this book.