Feminism and Video: A View from the Village

Ewva European Women's Video Art in The 70sand 80s, 2019

The German Cinema Book , 2020

In 2001, the feminist director Jutta Brückner wrote that films by women were the product of an often arduous "quest for traces. " 1 Her comment echoed an interview three decades earlier, when Brückner had spoken of film as a means to "reconstruct symbolically" the "disrupted physical integrity" of women in history. 2 The reference in both instances was not only to her own work but in general to filmmaking by women who seek new forms of articulation for feminine subjectivity and experience. Brückner's observations have resonance too for a different cultural practice of retrieval, that of history-writing in respect of women's film. This chapter attempts a reconstruction of key moments in German women's filmmaking, which we explore in particular, but not solely, in its relation to feminism. Like Brückner's film narratives, our history-which for reasons of space is necessarily partial-starts from an assumption of "disrupted integrity, " though not, as for Brückner, in the physical or symbolic body of woman, but in the similarly fractured cinematic body of work by women over twelve decades of German film. It is, moreover, not only Brückner's understanding of film as a medium capable of lending tangible presence to an otherwise invisible or fragmented gendered experience that is useful for this chapter. Her filmmaking method offers further helpful insights for approaches to women's cinema history. Early in her filmmaking career, in films including the experimental documentary Tue recht und scheue niemand (Do right and fear nobody, 1975) and the semi-autobiographical Hungerjahre (Years of Hunger, 1979), Brückner used newsreel inserts, still photographs, voice-over, and found sound to "suggest the complexity of a whole period": in Tue recht, five decades of one woman's mid-twentieth-century petit bourgeois existence; in Hungerjahre, the 1950s as viewed from the perspective of a bulimic adolescent. Brückner's juxtapositions of archive image and sound with memory fragments and fictional narrative revealed female subjectivities in a state of emergence, developing as "the result of a long cultural process" that is "constituted by … history. " 3 Analogously, the history of women's filmmaking-of the moments, then, in which women become the active subjects of cinematic perception as well as social actors in film production and circulation-demands an approach that registers traces of feminine subjectivity and agency as the products of specific conditions of historical emergence: conditions that may at one moment facilitate women's filmmaking and at others suppress female participation in the film industry or cinematic practice. Examples from early film history should serve to illustrate the point. Three women who would later move into production and directing-Henny Porten, Asta Nielsen (see Chapter 5), and Leontine Sagan-began careers in acting at a historical moment in which film performance and stardom belonged to, indeed were significantly shaping an early twentieth-century culture of public visibility for women. In Emilie Altenloh's pioneering sociological study of early cinema audiences, Asta Nielsen in particular figures not merely as an audience magnet for a cross-class community of female fans. 4 Feminist historians including Miriam Hansen, Heide Schlüpmann, and Andrea Haller have also shown how the mass presence of women in the film audience may be understood as part of a broader early twentieth-century challenge to the "dominant organization of public experience" around masculine norms. 5 That challenge was rooted in socio-historical developments including the expansion of women's education, the advance of 31 FEMINISM AND WOMEN'S CINEMA

Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, 2013

In the summer of 1984 I interned at Women Make Movies, working closely with Debra Zimmerman, the organization's relatively new director and then sole employee. When I returned in 1988 to work in distribution, the organization had moved to Soho and taken on significantly more films and staff. I eventually joined the board in 2001 and currently serve as chair. As a teacher and scholar, I owe much of my perspective on feminist film to what I have learned from the staff, board members, filmmakers, consultants, funders, programmers, and nonprofit film professionals with whom I have come into contact through WMM-no one more than Zimmerman. An intense presence with a seductive voice and an infectious laugh, she taught me how to hail a New York City cab, read a budget, see more festival films in one day than would seem humanly possible, and turn a passionate commitment to women and film into a vocation. This is a distillation of our conversations in late summer 2012, as Zimmerman juggled real-estate issues, negotiations with a

Feminist film theorists continue to question the minimized image of women on the screen. They do so by analyzing the relationship between films, the ideological and dominating position of men, the audience's perception, and women's reactions. Although feminism now operates within the postmodernist era, highlighting the plurality of culture in general and arts in particular, feminist film theory continues to adhere to its Marxist and psychoanalytic roots. In practice, however, today feminist filmmakers choose the avant-garde method of filmmaking. Nevertheless, both the ideological background and the avant-garde alternative are limited in reaching women consuming films, and thus fail to adequately challenge the negative representations of women worldwide.

Doing Gender in Media Art and Culture, 2019

Future Feminist Archive Catalogue. Contemporary Art and Feminism. 40th Anniversary of International Women's Year 2015 Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University. Editor : Jacqueline Millner, 2015

The Australian feature film renaissance and the emergence of a new ‘women’s cinema’ occurred at the same time, but the story of feminist filmmaking in Australia is less well known, and in danger of being forgotten. The mainstream film renaissance of the 1970s was concerned with nationalistic artistic longings and the desire to compete with European art films at Cannes, and Hollywood at the box office. But the emergence of a new ‘women’s cinema’ came from other more complex desires. Women had been more or less excluded from active participation in the new film movements of the 1960s and were often subject and object of the gaze, rather than active participants. In the 1970s Women’s Liberation gave voice to their discontent. But as women struggled to gain access to film-making through training courses for women, there was another struggle on the level of ‘meaning-production’ and this led to the development of a feminist critique of the language of cinema itself.

Historical contexts and contributions of women pioneers in film: How women were part of the creation of the cinematographic language and narrative, 2021

In the film production industry women are underrepresented in almost all production areas around the globe. Numbers show that female directors are similarly marginalized in Europe (films directed by women reached 19% in 2017 1) and in the United states (14% of the directors that worked in the 500 top movies of 2019 were women 2). This shortage of women in audiovisual production occurs not only in large industries, but also in the most emerging ones, remote places like Chile have numbers as low as only 5.7% of women directed films between 2011-2016 3. The marginalization of women in creative production spaces is not a new and it has had social consequences that affect the perception of women in their societies, perpetuating stereotypes and restricting the creative diversity that would be undeniably beneficial to the film and audiovisual industry worldwide. From this statement, I ask the following questions: Why do women occupy such a limited space in industries such as film? What would be the impact on society if more female voices were made known and recognized in the same way as their male counterparts? If we review the history of cinema, women have been part of its evolution from the very beginning. Unfortunately, there is not much information about their participation in general, but especially after the first two decades of its existence. It is as if they were never written into history, but they were there. Prejudices, responsibilities, social and cultural pressures could be attributed to this absence in books and classrooms. It was probably a process of segregation that relegated them to the limited and caring space in which they remain majority to this day (this happened not only in the cinema, but in many other male dominated work environments ).

Smaill, Belinda. “Cinema Against the Age: Feminism and Contemporary Documentary.” Screening the Past 34 (2012), 2012

The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2016

The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication. Karen Ross (Editor-in-Chief), Ingrid Bachmann, Valentina Cardo, Sujata Moorti, and Marco Scarcelli (Associate Editors), 2020

Alice Guy Blaché (1873-1968), a pioneer in narrative cinema, is one of many examples of women directors who have been ignored in most works about cinema's history. Although women have been part of the cinema industry since its origins, they have experienced inequality from the outset, and this is still the case today. Smith, Pieper, and Choueiti (2017) have demonstrated that across the 1,000 top-grossing North American films of the previous decade, there were only 35 female directors working on any of them. In addition, women directed 29 of the 800 most popular movies. A gender imbalance also exists in terms of budgets, genres and awards received by women. Kathryn Bigelow is a unique figure in Hollywood, as she is the only woman to win an Oscar for best director (in The Hurt Locker, 2008) (Dowd, 2015). She also received a large budget for K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) as did Patty Jenkins when she directed Wonder Woman (2017), a $100 million action film and a genre which rarely sees women in senior directing roles. Women working (or hoping to work) in other roles such as production design and as producer face similar problems of discrimination (Arranz, 2010). Although there have been many women telling interesting stories through the language of cinema, they have remained largely invisible in terms of being known by the audience. If inequality in leading roles is a problem for the film industry generally, the experiences of women cinematographers are even more discouraging. Cinematography or direction of photography is a subject that is closely related to the art and technique of cinema (Cortés-Selva, 2018). The content conveyed through the expressiveness of camera movement and composition, lighting and color is vital for understanding the ways in which visual messages work through moving images. Together, they tell stories that underpin an ideology, an ethic, and aesthetic vision of the world (Cortés-Selva & Carmona-Martínez, 2016). Since the skills required are technical as well as artistic, men have traditionally dominated the field of cinematography. For example, Follows and Kreager (2016) studied every feature film shot in the United Kingdom between 2005 and 2014, to determine the salience of a director's sex in relation to genre, budget, audience reaction, critical reviews, and box office performance. They also looked at the sex of other members of the creative teams working on those films including writers, producers, first assistant directors, and directors of photography. In total, they sampled 2,000 films and, for cinematography, they found that women comprised 5% of the camera and lighting teams. But despite the field of cinematography being dominated by men, an increasing number of women are now fighting to be part of it, not least because of pioneers such

2020

Experimental cinema, as well as experimental video practices, have always been art forms widely explored by women. Yet, while the field of cinema studies has devoted research — although only recently — to women involved in narrative and commercial films, as directors, actresses, screenwriters and in other roles of cinema industry, the history of women’s experimental audio-visual production is still little explored and would benefit from being retraced and framed in a wider historical and theoretical perspective. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie is therefore aimed at tracing women’s experimental practices at the intersection of cinema and the arts by intertwining a theoretical and historical approach through the analysis of cases studies from the mid-century up to the present time.

Feminist Media Histories, 2016