Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video

Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video

Language: English

Pages: 360

ISBN: 081663372X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Alexandra Juhasz asked twenty-one women to tell their stories -- women whose names make up a who is (and who will be) who of independent and experimental film and video. What emerged in the resulting conversations is a compelling (and previously underdocumented) history of feminism and feminist film and video, from its origins in the fifties and sixties to its apex in the seventies, to today.

Women of Vision is a companion piece to Juhasz's 1998 documentary of the same name. The book presents the complete interviews, allowing readers to hear directly the voices of these articulate, passionate women in an interactive remembering of feminist media history. Juhasz's introduction provides a historical, theoretical, and aesthetic context for the interviews.

These subjects have all shaped late twentieth-century film and video in fundamental ways, either as artists, producers, distributors, critics, or scholars, and they all believe that media are the most powerful tools for effecting change. Yet they are a very diverse group, with widely varying personal and professional backgrounds. By presenting their interviews together, Juhasz shows the differences among those involved in feminist media, but also the connections among them, and the way in which the field has been enriched by their sharing of knowledge and power. In the end, Juhasz not only records these women's careers, she broadens our understanding of feminism and shows how feminist history and documentary are made.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Women of Vision VISIBLE EVIDENCE Edited by Michael Renov, Faye Ginsburg, and Jane Gaines Public confidence in the "real" is everywhere in decline. The Visible Evidence series offers a forum for the in-depth consideration of the representation of the real, with books that engage issues bearing upon questions of cultural and historical representation, and that forward the work of challenging prevailing notions of the "documentary tradition" and of nonfiction culture more generally. Volume 9

media-savvy, sound-bite version of who we are and what we want. Instead, we have allowed the mainstream media to do this for us and thus to reduce feminists to that simplistic, dour image that most resembles their fears. Projects like this one attempt to respond. But as long as feminism remains so unattractive in a society increasingly motivated by slick surfaces, my reach will be small, especially given that I make few concessions in my style or content to make my words more marketable. So

novel, Lisa Maria Hogeland gives the two, competing understandings of consciousnessraising (CR) the names "hard, theory-building CR" and "soft, self-esteembuilding CR."711 believe that the two forms of CR can be productively interrelated. In her memoir of her history in academic feminism, Hull recounts a personal movement from self-esteem to theory, from soft to hard CR. She remembers how personal empowerment was the first step toward her politicized, professorial career: "We had to chant 'Black

(more to follow), what I learned while doing this project also became a powerful force maintaining my commitment to this particular conceptual structure. Through the interviews, I discovered the immense importance of the '70s for feminists. I learned that a definition of feminist self and other depends on when a woman hit up against the driving force of this era: was she already an adult and an artist? Was she in college? Did she learn about it from her mother? During the research meetings, I

returned from their studies in Paris and brought back one criteria for "good feminist film," my work became declasse. Seemingly, it identified a biological woman on screen as if all femininity occurred in biology rather than in culture. This nature/culture issue is older than feminist film theory. Feminist critics swung very far to the right in terms of antiessentialism in the '70s. In the late '80s, when postmodern deconstruction became de rigeur and people were studying questions of authorship

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