FILM STUDIES/WOMEN’S STUDIES BLAETZ, Women’s Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant- ROBIN BLAETZ, garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the 1950s and many of whom editor editor are still working today. In each essay in this collection, a leading film scholar considers a single filmmaker, supplying biographical information, analyzing various influences on her Experimental Cinema Women’s work, examining the development of her corpus, and interpreting a significant number of individual films. The essays rescue the work of critically neglected but influential women filmmakers for teaching, further study, and, hopefully, restoration and preservation. Just as importantly, they enrich the understanding of feminism in cinema and expand the ter- rain of film history, particularly the history of the American avant-garde. The essays highlight the diversity in these filmmakers’ forms and methods, covering topics such as how Marie Menken used film as a way to rethink the transition from ab- stract expressionism to Pop Art in the 1950s and 1960s, how Barbara Rubin both objecti- fied the body and investigated the filmic apparatus that enabled that objectification in her film Christmas on Earth (1963), and how Cheryl Dunye uses film to explore her own identity as a black lesbian artist. At the same time, the essays reveal commonalities, in- cluding a tendency toward documentary rather than fiction and a commitment to nonhi- erarchical, collaborative production practices. The volume’s final essay focuses explicitly on teaching women’s experimental films, addressing logistical concerns (how to acquire the films and secure proper viewing spaces) and extending the range of the book by sug- gesting alternative films for classroom use. “Women’s Experimental Cinema is an invaluable resource for students and devotees of experimental cinema and feminist film, fields defined by remarkable films and a dearth of critical attention. It brings to light the social and political roots and cultural impact of women’s experimental film, and the specific female, feminine, and feminist practices of Women’s Experimental Cinema an exceptional group of women artists.”—ALEXANDR A JUHASZ , editor of Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video “This definitive volume on U.S. women’s experimental cinema fills a significant and long- lamented gap within film studies, and in feminist film studies in particular. Together, these essays offer us a richly nuanced picture not only of women’s experimental film but of avant-garde filmmaking in general from the 1940s to the present.”—SHARON WILLIS, DUKE author of High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film critical frameworks ROBIN BLAETZ is Associate Professor and Chair of the Film Studies Program at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture. DUKE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS Box 90660, Durham, NC 27708-0660 www.dukeupress.edu cover: From Peggy Ahwesh’s The Color of Love, 1994. Courtesy of Peggy Ahwesh. Women’s Experimental Cinema b ROBIN BLAETZ, editor Women’s Experimental Cinema critical frameworks Duke University Press Durham & London 2007 ∫ 2007 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Warnock Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Noël Carroll’s article ‘‘Moving and Moving: Minimalism to Lives of Performers’’ originally appeared in Millennium Film Journal 35–36 (2000). Reprinted with permission. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the American Association of University Women, which provided funds toward the production of this book. b For Meredith and Gordon, Augusta and Miranda, and in memory of Jay Leyda Contents b ix Acknowledgments 1 ROBIN BLAETZ ∏ Introduction: Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks 20 MELISSA RAGONA ∏ Swing and Sway: Marie Menken’s Filmic Events 45 PAUL ARTHUR ∏ Different/Same/Both/Neither: The Polycentric Cinema of Joyce Wieland 67 CHRIS HOLMLUND ∏ Excavating Visual Fields, Layering Auditory Frames: Signature, Translation, Resonance, and Gunvor Nelson’s Films 89 NOËL CARROLL ∏ Moving and Moving: From Minimalism to Lives of Performers 103 M. M. SERRA AND KATHRYN RAMEY ∏ Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann 127 ARA OSTERWEIL ∏ ‘‘Absently Enchanted’’: The Apocryphal, Ecstatic Cinema of Barbara Rubin 152 ROBERT A. HALLER ∏ Amy Greenfield: Film, Dynamic Movement, and Transformation 167 CHUCK KLEINHANS ∏ Barbara Hammer: Lyrics and History 188 MARIA PRAMAGGIORE ∏ Chick Strand’s Experimental Ethnography 211 ROBIN BLAETZ ∏ Amnesis Time: The Films of Marjorie Keller 239 MARY ANN DOANE ∏ In the Ruins of the Image: The Work of Leslie Thornton 263 MAUREEN TURIM ∏ Sounds, Intervals, and Startling Images in the Films of Abigail Child 290 WILLIAM C. WEES ∏ Peggy’s Playhouse: Contesting the Modernist Paradigm 312 JANET CUTLER ∏ Su Friedrich: Breaking the Rules 339 KATHLEEN MCHUGH ∏ The Experimental ‘‘Dunyementary’’: A Cinematic Signature Effect 360 SCOTT MACDONALD ∏ Women’s Experimental Cinema: Some Pedagogical Challenges 383 Appendix: Film Distribution 385 Bibliography 401 Contributors 405 Index viii ∏ CONTENTS Acknowledgments b Although writers have provided individual thanks, certain names and institutions arise repeatedly and deserve special mention, including: An- thology Film Archives, Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Canyon Cinema, Mil- lennium Film Journal, P. Adams Sitney, Scott MacDonald, M. M. Serra, and Robert Haller. This project benefited from the generosity of the American Association of University Women in the form of a Summer Research Grant and from a number of Faculty Research Grants from Mount Holyoke College. I am grateful to all the writers who have been part of this project for their enthusiasm and commitment and for their substantial and passionate work. I want also to express my gratitude to my colleagues at Mount Holyoke College, particularly Elizabeth Young, Tom Wartenberg, Paul Staiti, Ajay Sinha, and Jenny Perlin, and to a number of others, including Cosmas Demetriou, Chris Holmlund, Kath- leen McHugh, Adrienne McLean, James Meyer, Gordon Spencer-Blaetz, Ann Steuernagel, Patty White, Ken Wissoker, and two most helpful anonymous readers. ROBIN BLAETZ Introduction: Women’s Experimental Cinema Critical Frameworks b Experimental cinema has always been an art form in which women have excelled. As far back as 1942, when Maya Deren made the groundbreak- ing Meshes of an Afternoon with two people and a 16mm camera, count- less women working in small-scale film and video have been creating a deep and wide-ranging body of film. Little of this work has entered into the many general histories that have been written about the cinema, but this is the fate of most avant-garde and experimental film (terms that I am using interchangeably here). Indeed, the dominance of narrative film- making and feature-length film has shaped criticism and scholarly work as much as it has production. While there are many experimental films that deserve increased attention, this anthology seeks to redress the ab- sence of fifteen women artists through a series of critical essays that offer contextualized readings of their work. In order to understand the reasons for recovering this work in par- ticular, one must go back to the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when there was a window of opportunity for the assimila- tion of the rich field of women’s experimental cinema into the wider arena of cinema studies. For this brief moment, scholars paid attention to both avant-garde film and the films that women were producing in ever- greater numbers in relation to feminism and increased opportunities for women in general. What happened during this period to obscure the presence of the women who had been working for the two previous decades and frustrate those artists seeking to further their careers in the years to follow? In order to get a sense of this historical moment and the causes of the lost opportunity, this introduction begins by focusing on several film festivals held during this period. Certain male experimental filmmakers have received a narrow but steady stream of attention, with P. Adams Sitney’s influential Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde of 1974 firmly establishing a small group of artists in the history of the medium. Sitney’s book, which was begun in 1969, was written during an extraordinarily rich time in the annals of the American avant-garde. The 1960s was a decade of growing interest in experimental film, particularly through the forum of the five International Experimental Film Competitions held in Belgium.∞ The festival was known for discovering new artists rather than furthering the careers of those who had established themselves by showing their work in previous years. However, the experimental film festival was no differ- ent than any other in that it remained a largely male preserve, which launched the careers of few women.≤ Although in the final competition in 1975 there were just twelve films out of seventy-four by women, no women on the initial jury, and one female judge out of five, women managed to win four of the ten prizes.≥ By the time the festival had run its course, many of the once struggling male avant-garde artists who had achieved a degree of fame in Belgium had found jobs teaching production in film studies programs in colleges and universities in the United States and no longer needed either the attention or the prize money.∂ Although a few women filmmakers had done well in the festivals, they received neither the critical consideration nor the jobs that accompanied it, and the field of avant-garde cinema was institutionalized as a thoroughly masculine one called the American avant-garde. While scholarship about experimental film dealt largely with the newly evolved canon throughout the 1980s, Sitney had begun to reconsider his work.