This book offers intersectional, intergenerational, and international perspectives on nonfiction film- and videomaking by and about women, examining practices that range from activist documentaries to avant-garde experiments. Concentrating primarily on the period between the 1970s and 1990s, the contributions revisit major figures, contexts, and debates across a polycentric, global geography. They explore how the moving image has been a crucial terrain of feminist struggle—a way of not only picturing the world but remaking it.
The contributors consider key decolonial filmmakers, including Trinh T. Minh-ha and Sarah Maldoror; explore collectively produced films with ties to women’s liberation movements in different countries; and investigate the cinematic expressions of tensions and alliances between feminism and anti-imperialist struggles. They grapple with the need for a broader more inclusive definition of the term “feminism”; meditate on the figure of the grandmother; reflect on realist aesthetics; and ask what a feminist film historiography might look like.
The book, generously illustrated with film stills and other images, many in color, offers ten original texts, two conversations, and eight short essays composed in response to historical texts written by filmmakers. The historical texts, half of which are published in English for the first time, appear alongside the essays. (Verlagstext)
Contents
Johanna Mytkowska/ Bernd Scherer
Preface
Erika Balsom/ Hila Peleg
Introduction: No Master Territories
Teresa Castro
The Many Feminist Histories of Documentary
Trinh T. Minh-ha
Outside In Inside Out (1986/88)
Pooja Rangan
Listening Like a Documentary
Isabel Segui
Between Nearness and Incommensurability:
Andean Women's Documentaries in the 1980s
Lis Rhodes
Whose History? (1979)
Lakshmi Padmanabhan
Cut the Line
Julia Lesage/ Shilyh Warren
"It was there all along": An Intergenerational Dialogue about Feminism, Realism, and Documentary
Haneda Sumiko
Until Village Women's Classroom Was Made (2012)
Haneda Sumiko
My View of The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (1995)
Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano
Discovering the Meaning of Haneda's "Japanese Women":
Village Women's Classroom and The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms
Helena Amiradzibi
"Being women is not such a trrible tragedy as it seems" (2007/11)
Monika Talarczyk
Helena Amiradzibi: From Tbilisi to Warsaw via Moscow
Giovanna Zapperi
The Means of Autonomy: Women's Documentary and Experimental
Film in 1970s Italy
Claudia von Alemann
mole, dandelion, and blowball (1976)
Madeleine bernstorff
Imagination/Labor: Claudia von Alemann
Elisabeth Ramirez-Soto
"Why didn't you write to me?": On Friendship, Exile, and transnational Collaboration
Rasha Salti
Beirut: A City of women
Forugh Farrokhzad
The Wind Will Take Us (1964)
Sara Saljoughi
The Eyes of the Unknown: Forugh Farrokhzad and Iranian Cinema
Yasmina Price
Sarah Maldoror: To Feel We Are Here
Devika Girish
Covert Operations: Public-Making and Unmaking in
Deepa dhanraj's Something Like a War
Ayanna Dozier
Ecstatic Forms, Erotic Bodies
Shai Heredia/ Juliet Jaques/ Sarah Keller/ Beatrice Loayza
First Person Feminine: A Discussion
Chick Strand
Woman as Ethnographic Film Maker (1974)
Counter Encounters ( Laura Huertas Millán/ Onyeka Igwe/ Rachael Rakes)
Women, Sisters, Others: On Chick Strand's" Woman as Ethnographic Film Maker"
Françoise Maupin
"I have my ideas about reality": An Interview with Safi Faye (1975)
Janaina Oliveira
Safi Faye and a Singular Vision of Cinema
Françoise Vergès
Entrangled Temporalities, Cinema and Anti-Colonial Feminist Education
Elena Gorfinkel
Cinema of the Grandmother
Contributors