Abstract
This chapter explores the diversity in 1970s women’s experimental filmmaking, considering how women engaged either explicitly with feminist discourses or followed their own directives to make experimental films, unconfined by historical precedents or legacies that might restrain their male counterparts. Films were informed by feminism, developments in the arts, formal experimentation and by film theories related to Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and structuralism. Wider political and theoretical frameworks related to feminism and women’s filmmaking are discussed at the outset to contextualise the complex spheres of influence. This will be followed by discussions prevalent in the 1970s, deliberating whether a feminine aesthetic existed, as these provide some particularly interesting frameworks for consideration. Thereafter, a range of experimental films will be discussed, focusing on the domestic, the gendered film text, the aesthetics of ephemerality and how history, language and ideology were used to question women’s historically inscribed roles.
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Notes
Imelda Whelehan, Modern Feminist Thought: From the Second Wave to ‘Post-Feminism’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 11.
Silvia Bovenschein, ‘Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?’ in New German Critique, No. 10, Winter 1977, pp. 111–137
Lesley Stern, ‘Feminism and Cinema-Exchanges’, Screen, Vol. 20, Winter 1979/1980, pp. 89–105
Annie Oakley, Sociology of Housework (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1974).
Jayne Parker, ‘Free Show’, theFrame, Jayne Parker DVD (London: BFI, 2005).
Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema S: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (California: University of California Press, 1998), p. 398.
Patricia Mellencamp, Indiscretions: Avant-garde Film, Video and Feminism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 152.
Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know (London: Continuum, 2000), p. 201.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972); p. 47.
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© 2015 Patti Gaal-Holmes
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Gaal-Holmes, P. (2015). Women and Film. In: A History of 1970s Experimental Film. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137369383_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137369383_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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