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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
The Experimental Women: An Introduction
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Introduction
2020-03-01
2021-09-01
2020-03-11
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Cinéma & Cie
Giulia Simi
2020/03/01
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The Experimental Women: An Introduction
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16166/14468
20
The Experimental Women: An Introduction
Sarah Keller, Elena Marcheschi and Giulia Simi




   Experimental cinema, video art, and new media art have always been fields
in which the presence of women has proven significant. It took Feminist Film
Theory1 to make us clearly understand that experimental audio-visual practices
represent a privileged space for female action where, in the absence of the
economic constraints and censorship typical of the cinema industry, greater
freedom for research and production has been allowed. It is in fact in the porous
area where independent and experimental cinema encounter art practices that
women have managed to move the boundaries of (self-)representation and build
an active laboratory to experiment and explore their subjectivities. We can’t also
forget that, between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, many
of the female presences linked to electronic art began, with great vigour, to carry
out their creative activity in parallel with the demands promoted by the second
wave of feminism. Nonetheless, feminist momentum and perspective, both in a
creative and theoretical sense, are just some of the threads that, over the years,
help us to read and interpret an experimental female audiovisual production that
has been growing, becoming enriched and diversified thanks to the evolution of
technologies and the hybridization of the intermedia process.
   Over the past several decades, scholars have addressed the history of women
working in experimental cinema and video in a similarly rich variety of ways.
What seems most consistent about the output of both critical and creative work
by women in experimental film and video is the same thing that makes it difficult
to characterize as a whole. That is, it tends toward particularity, diversity, and
multiplicity, with the work of a single filmmaker in this realm often plumbing
the depths of her own specific experience, expertise, and ambitions. While the
same might be said of any filmmaker/artist, for reasons not entirely transparent,


1
  See Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16.3 (1975), 6–18; Teresa De
Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t. Feminism Semiotics Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1984); Kaja Silverman,
The Acoustic Mirror. The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Theories and Representation
and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-
Feminine. Film, Feminism, Pshychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993); Veronica Pravadelli,
‘Feminist/Gender Studies e storia del cinema’, in We want cinema. Sguardi di donne nel cinema
italiano, ed. by Laura Buffoni (Venezia: Marsilio, 2018).

                                                     Cinéma & Cie, vol. XX, no. 34, Spring 2020
                        Sarah Keller, Elena Marcheschi and Giulia Simi


this individuation is neither made of quite the same stuff as the cult of the
genius artist/auteur, nor conversely is it cause to conclude that there are no
common threads or trends across women’s film and video work at all. Of the
former, scholars have identified in feminist artists the strategy of ‘[refuting] the
EuroWestern ideal of the individual artist, expressed not least in the idea of the
cinematic auteur’, as So Mayer puts it, which allows an unsettling of usual social
and artistic hierarchies.2 And of the latter, several writers locate constellations
of interests across experimental work, such as artists who are linked in their pet
themes, types of genre-bending, or stylistic tendencies, for instance in the loose
groupings provided by Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wright Wexman’s collection of
writing about female experimental filmmakers or in Mathilde Roman’s studies.3
Amid the usual ways of configuring trends for media studies, women pose a
special case, and a kaleidoscopic view of their work rather than an auteurist or
movement-oriented programme is more honest to the nature of that work.
    One of the ambitions of this special issue was to provide a more legible map
of this work with a wider international scope, the better to track both creative
and scholarly work and to link avant-garde films with contemporary video-based
practices. We aimed to trace — and to fill in the areas we traced with details —
with a view to understanding women’s experimental audio-visual production
framed in historical and theoretical terms. By virtue of the nature of the works
under consideration, that aim has been elusive, both in the multiplicity of work
that we might call ‘experimental’ and in the approaches to that work. Indeed,
the dyad of creative work and theory about it for women’s experimental media
tends to focus on a panoply of forms or genres, types of imagery, notions about
subjectivity, undercurrents of theories in political and popular culture, and
constructions of gender and sexuality. Our call cast a wide net, in some ways
increasing the challenge from the beginning to create a unified, universal version
of a history of experimental women’s work. As part of the process, however,
we came to appreciate that maybe we do not need a whole new map, exactly,
so much as a new set of eyes for understanding how to read the maps that are
already there. Like the creative work we seek to locate, it has been harder to read
these maps because they don’t look or act quite like the ones we are used to.
Often figures or films we might study are (and this is not a bad thing) treated like
individual stars, for instance in Robin Blaetz’s essential collection of essays on
women’s experimental cinema, even while with a slight adjustment of our lens,
it is possible to see these stars constitute a grouping like, let’s say, the Pleiades.4


2
  Sophie Mayer, ‘To::For::By::About::With::From::Towards Solid Women: On (Not) Being Addressed
by Tracey Moffatt’s Moodeitj Yorgas’, in Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory,
Practice, and Aesthetics, ed. by Boel Ulfsdotter and Anna Backman Rogers (Edinburgh University
Press, 2018), p. 164.
3
   Women and Experimental Filmmaking, ed. by Virginia Wright Wexman and Jean Petrolle
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Mathilde Roman, Art Vidéo et mise en scène de soi,
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008).
4
  Robin Blaetz, Women’s Experimental Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

8
                         The Experimental Women: An Introduction


If we aim to navigate what is more like the night sky than what is immediately
visible by the light of day, the darker, less intelligible contours of an eclectic set
of practices may better be viewed from certain angles and at the right time in
order for them to come together, surprisingly, into constellations of all manner
into figures of mythical proportions. In any case, Trinh T. Minh-ha, among
others, rightly cautions against the universalizing impulse of art for feminist art,
arguing that adopting a hegemonic artistic language in a bid for being taken
more seriously, women gain a kind of universality but lose their individual voices
and real power as artists.5 To make an art that is readily legibile as art might
well simply mean that it hews in some way to a norm to which feminist and
experimental artists ought not force their unique views to conform.
   Part of the work of scholars dealing with experimental work must be to show
the connections — the lines between the stars that make the figures clear. We
take seriously the need for reconstituting the history of the avant-garde cinema
to include and give greater attention to more women, many of whom have been
outshone by brighter but not more important lights; at the same time, we also need
to highlight the contexts in which these women’s work has emerged. As a recent
essay by Jennifer Peterson on Barbara Hammer’s film Jane Brakhage (1974) has
shown, the forgotten or undertheorized histories of women’s work, both artistic
and otherwise, make them ripe for revisitation: Peterson tidily brings the two
sides of a single familial coin into dual relief to show how experimental work by
women might be taken out of the shadow cast by the giants — in this case Jane’s
husband and, in a certain sense, collaborator, Stan Brakhage — of experimental
cinema.6 Comfort with the idea of variety is paramount even to identifying this
kind of work; variety is also characteristic of the mode through which women’s
subjectivity has found a cinematic means of expression. Experimental women
like Barbara Hammer — but also Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Agnès Varda, or
Minh-ha to name only a very few examples — frequently work in ways that look
very different both from each other and even from their own existing bodies
of work. The experimental quality even of the search for an appropriate form
among these artists qualifies them as experimentalists in the best (and most
expansive) sense of the word.
   Studying women’s experimental cinema over its history has been complicated
by but also enhanced by its borderless, timeless qualities. It doesn’t belong in one
specific national context; nor does it belong to one single time period. While its
many contexts (where/when it was made, who made it, under what conditions)
are essential for better understanding it, to study (or, certainly, to create) such
work also requires an expansive mode of thinking out of time. So although, of
course, creative and critical/theoretical work from the 1970s has been crucial to


5
  Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 27.
6
  Jennifer Peterson, ‘Barbara Hammer’s Jane Brakhage: Feminism, Nature, and 1970s Experimental
Film’, Feminist Media Histories, 6.2 (2020), 67–94.

                                                                                            9
                         Sarah Keller, Elena Marcheschi and Giulia Simi


the serious and sanctioned study of women artists in that this moment intersects
with the establishment of university programs in women and gender studies
as well as film studies, making that fact the center of understanding it may be
most useful simply for understanding certain biases of history. The intersection
of institutional programs with creative work has historically biased the ways
experimental women have been understood, categorized, or positioned — both
within the academy and beyond it. As Laura Mulvey — whose essay ‘Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ from 1975 is still going strong and has spurred
untold numbers of amateur and professional reflections on the nature of women
working in and on films — has reminded us, perhaps the radical work of feminists
became absorbed into the academy in a way that was ‘rather too abrupt’.7 Indeed,
feminist film theory and women’s experimental film practice have not always been
amenable to each other, though their close position to each other in academic
circles might give another impression. Thinking about the temporality of the
emergence of ideas on feminism and film, Mulvey notes: ‘it is more rewarding
to think about time, and a period that has now become history, as a confusion
of temporalities than as a linear succession in which decades and eras follow
each other in chronological order’.8 Keeping in mind that connections might be
rendered in a more poetic sense through allusion, rhythm, or an emphasis on
sensation rather than in terms of causality, chronology, or principles of continuity
— such that we might say, in a vertical vs. a horizontal way9 — might keep us
closer to the spirit of experimental work.
   Similarly, audio-visual experimental practices have been a privileged site for
bringing women’s agency and other concerns from the province of women’s
experience/s to light, as the domains of experimental media practice have
frequently offered far greater liberty compared to the economic exigencies of
the cinema industry. In this sense, women’s experimental works have acted as
a laboratory for new forms of women subjectivities. By drawing contours of
these new subjectivities, all of which are expressions of what the Italian feminist
theoretician and activist Carla Lonzi called the ‘Unexpected Subject’,10 we
observe that these works are a privileged field for learning a new vocabulary


7
   Laura Mulvey, ‘Introduction: 1970s Feminist Film Theory and the Obsolescent Object’, in
Feminisms: Diversity, Difference, and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, ed. by Laura
Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), p. 17.
8
  Ivi, p. 18.
9
   Maya Deren compared a ‘horizontal’ (causal, chronological, narrative) mode with a ‘vertical’
mode, the latter of which, rather than progressing forward in linear, narrative, chronological or
causal terms delved into the heights and depths of any given moment, investigating it poetically, as
‘an approach to experience’ adopting and expressing a ‘different point of view’ (pp. 173–74). Here
and elsewhere, she considered these terms as a way of describing her own experimental film art (as
vertical rather than horizontal). See ‘Poetry and the Film: A Symposium with Maya Deren, Arthur
Miller, Dylan Thomas, Parker Tyler. Chairman, Willard Maas. Organized by Amos Vogel’, in Film
Culture Reader, ed. by P. Adam Sitney (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), pp. 171–86.
10
   The term is coined by Lonzi in her essay Sputiamo su Hegel [Let’s spit on Hegel] (Milano: Scritti
di Rivolta Femminile, 1970).

10
                       The Experimental Women: An Introduction


of audiovisual experience, involving both the artists and the spectators as new
active subjects of moving image construction. This clearly emerges by reading
the essays collected in this issue, which appear as a veritable constellation of
meanings and symbols with consistent references.
   The inquiry of the body as a new language is present in all of the artists
analyzed: the body is the centre of a new haptic, synesthetic experience which
challenges the priority of sight and becomes an instrument to know, think,
and express the world. This is true from the very beginning of women film
experimentations, as Rebecca Sheehan points out: her essay on Maya Deren,
Marie Menken, and Sara Arledge focuses on the forms of the somatic camera
and the tactile gaze as a means to build a new dynamic relationship between
the body in movement, the machine, and the world. In the same wake, Shana
MacDonald’s inquiry about the performing body of Carolee Schneemann and
Yvonne Rainer demonstrates how both artists challenged, through the proximity
of a relationship between artists and spectators, the artist’s authority and the
related modernist concept of authorship. The body becomes the very measure
of the world in the analysis of Oksana Chefranova on Ana Mendieta and Ana
Vaz, where a circular and layered concept of time intertwines with a landscape
perceived as a space of traces, connections, memories. Memories are likewise
at the centre of Ivelise Perniola’s and John Powers’ essays: the former explores
Marguerite Duras’ cinema as an act of iconoclasm, where the gaze is rooted in
memories grounded in loss, grief, and absence; the latter rediscovers the still little
known figure of Caroline Avery and her aesthetics of emotional memories and
artisanal practices. Anita Trivelli investigates the contemporary scene of Italian
documentary filmmakers by pointing out their revolutionary and transgressive
flânerie, which brings them to explore with their bodies territories traditionally
denied to women and to redefine them as spaces of relationship and exchange
between the individual and the community. Community as a network of bodies
and their stories is also at the centre of Polina Golovátina-Mora’s, Ana María
López Carmona’s and Bridget Sheridan’s investigation. They analyze the South
American indigenous communities and the concept of warmipura, meaning
‘among women’, demonstrating a weave of practices based on a circular
transmission of knowledge where the body is still at the centre of an intimate
relationship with landscape and nature.
   Across these multiple modes of expression of a subjectivity outside the norm,
experimental women’s film practice and scholarship looks to other horizons for
meaning, to which this issue seeks to draw a beginning.




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