A New Feature Film Directed by Joan Braderman Produced by Crescent Diamond OVERVIEW ry in the first person because, in 1975, when we started meeting, I was one of 21 women who THE HERETICS is a feature-length experimental founded it. We did worldwide outreach through documentary film about the Women’s Art Move- the developing channels of the Women’s Move- ment of the 70’s in the USA, specifically, at the ment, commissioning new art and writing by center of the art world at that time, New York women from Chile to Australia. City. We began production in August of 2006 and expect to finish shooting by the end of June One of the three youngest women in the earliest 2007. The finish date is projected for June incarnation of the HERESIES collective, I remem- 2008. ber the tremendous admiration I had for these accomplished women who gathered every week The Women’s Movement is one of the largest in each others’ lofts and apartments. While the political movement in US history. Why then, founding collective oversaw the journal’s mis- are there still so few strong independent films sion and sustained it financially, a series of rela- about the many specific ways it worked? Why tively autonomous collectives of women created are there so few movies of what the world felt every aspect of each individual themed issue. As like to feminists when the Movement was going a result, hundreds of women were part of the strong? In order to represent both that history HERESIES project. We all learned how to do lay- and that charged emotional experience, we out, paste-ups and mechanicals, assembling the are making a film that will focus on one group magazines on the floors and walls of members’ in one segment of the larger living spaces. We were writers, artists, editors, movement. That group graphic designers, fundraisers and distributors is The Heresies Collec- with each group produc- tive which published ing a unique issue HERESIES: A of HERESIES from Feminist Pub- soup to nuts. lication on Art and Politics from 1977- 1992. I can tell that sto- A New Feature Film Directed by Joan Braderman Produced by Crescent Diamond The original “collective mission statement,” pub- A.I.R., Soho Twenty, Artists’ Space and Franklin lished at the start of every issue from #1 in Janu- Furnace. Funding and distribution groups such as ary 1977 through #26 in 1992, read, “ We will not Women Make Movies and the Video Data Bank made advertise a new set of genius-products just because film and video by women available worldwide and they are made by women...We hope that HERESIES countless women’s film and video festivals bring will stimulate dialogue...and generate new creative this work to communities internationally. energies among women. It will be a place where diversity can be articulated. We are committed And now, as we work on the film, The Feminist Art to the broadening of the definition and function of Project is sponsoring a two-year series of events art.” Our new film, THE HERETICS, carries those and the Brooklyn Museum is opening a new femi- goals into the future. nist art wing. By the same token, when my Mother was working at the Women’s Museum in Washington HERESIES set out to change the chronic invisibility several years ago, she was waiting at the bus stop of women artists in the established art world and one day when a man started ranting at her. “Why to get many more women involved in creating the do you need a separate museum when the Mellon scene and resources for an artistic universe of our and the Hirshhorn down the street are filled with own. We were exploring ways to focus attention work by women?” “Name one,” my Mother offered and interest in the brilliant and original work that coyly. “Joan Miro,” he said, with certainty. So -- women artists had been doing forever - but in the there is still a distance to travel. midst of the Second Wave of the Women’s Move- ment, were starting to produce in far greater quan- Sally Webster, one Heresies member said recently, tity and variety. In forms as various as art-making “It is as if that period has been erased from memo- itself, much of their work spoke to the experience ry, perhaps by backlash against us. Remember Soho of being female in a male-dominated world. The at that time, with meetings everywhere that there Women’s Art Movement, after all, opened the are now fancy stores? I guess we were all delu- doors of museums, sional but it was not a fantasy.” Another member galleries, cinemas of the Heresies Collective, Elizabeth Weatherford, and all manner of said to our camera, “I didn’t join Heresies or the other venues to Women’s Movement because of some abstract idea most of the contem- about ‘gender.’ I came of age in the Civil Rights porary women artists Movement and fighting a war we bitterly opposed. whose names you I was a woman and I was interested in the self, in have heard. how to live and to be.” We had regular edito- rial meetings that came to feel like There are some lasting a community. We had post-is- legacies of this time, such sue public meetings at the as the National Museum women-run A.I.R. gallery, of Women in the Arts and the Women’s Coffee Shop, the selection of individ- the Labyrus Bookstore and ual American women to other places which have represent the U.S.A. in now vanished, making such prestigious inter- our world of that period national exhibitions seem dream-like. as the Venice Bien- nale. ‘Alternative’ But as suddenly as spaces established in it began, HERESIES this period became and its period lasting institutions: ended. The era galleries such as had changed, Background Image: “The Death of the Patriarchy/Heresies”, Mary Beth Edelson, 1976. A New Feature Film Directed by Joan Braderman Produced by Crescent Diamond and the distinctly different art world that HERESIES them down all over the world from Venice, Italy and had helped to conjure into being no longer had the Carboneras, Spain to New Mexico and primarily, New same urgent need for it. Individual members were York. ready for other missions. The last issue was pub- Emma Amos - Painter, Weaver, Professor lished 14 years ago. Lucy Lippard – Writer, Organizer Elizabeth Hess – Writer, Editor THE HERETICS - THE WOMEN TODAY May Stevens – Visual Artist Joan Snyder - Painter Thirty years after it all began, we will revisit the Michelle Stuart – Visual Artist women. We will interview them in their studios and Pat Steir - Painter a wide range of other sites as they work, write, Ida Applebroog – Visual Artist create and install new works. Some of them have Miriam Schapiro - Painter not seen one another in 25 years; almost all of Sabra Moore – Visual Artist them have rich and productive lives as artists, writ- Mary Beth Edelson – Visual Artist, ers, professors, curators, etc. HERESIES existed in Community Organizer a pre-Internet universe, so we needed to find my Joyce Kozloff – Visual Artist old companeras in this time of the worldwide web. Elizabeth Weatherford – Curator, Anthropologist, The first passionate e-mail, a call for a re-think- Museum of the American Indians ing of our work together and claiming it for the Harmony Hammond – Visual Artist film historical record got astonishingly enthusiastic Mary Miss – Sculptor, Environmental and responses. “Count me in. Reads like a great and Public Artist once again necessary project,” wrote painter Pat Arlene Ladden - Literary Historian Steir. Mary Miss, sculptor and environmental art- Marty Pottenger – Performance Artist ist, wrote, “Joan, when I read your letter, I could Su Friedrich - Filmmaker just hear your voice at our meetings so many years Janet Froelich, Creative Director, New York ago.” “Bravo, let’s go,” wrote painter Michelle Times Magazines Stuart. “What a letter. Have already printed and Susana Torre - Architect filed it for posterity,” wrote, Joyce Kozloff, painter, Patsy Beckert – Editor, Teacher installation artist and activist, “I am doing a huge, Carrie Rickey – Film Critic, scary, dramatic installation in a ware- Philadelphia Inquirer house on a canal in Venice in Nina Yankowitz– Visual Artist September. Why don’t Sally Webster, Art His- you come and shoot torian it?” We were off Joan Braderman and running. – Film and Vid- And now we eomaker are track- ing A New Feature Film Directed by Joan Braderman Produced by Crescent Diamond STYLE AND FORMAT- “RADICAL COLLAGE” You will hear a woman interviewed on camera talk In THE HERETICS, we will follow larger themes about a man telling her she is too pretty to be through several main strands. The best way to ac- taken seriously as an artist and we will create a complish our goal of creating a collective voice is to visual metaphor for this idea. The cuts will not go multiply our cinematic tropes, to use several differ- directly from the interviews to the other material ent “modes of address,” to work in fiction and non- as if the succeeding shots are illustrating points in fiction, to use a wide variety of kinds of footage. the verbal discussions. The edit connections will This multiplication of formal strategies will mirror often be formal ones – where the eye is led from the way that the movement attempted to multiply shot to shot by a metaphor like a color, a kind of the voices that are represented in public forms. camera movement, a street or other place that is We will intercut the interviews with other kinds of mentioned or a gesture or movement in the frame.