Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (review)

Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks is a collection of seventeen essays on fifteen individual women filmmakers by and large associated with the New York art scene since the 1950s. There is also an introduction by the editor, Robin Blaetz, and a final essay by Scott McDonald on pedagogical issues associated with the material in question.

The contributors include many well-known film scholars, such as Maureen Turim and William Wees, whom one would expect to see in such a collection. Some of the contributors also know their subjects personally; for instance, Robert Haller's chapter focuses on filmmaker Amy Greenfield, who is his spouse. While some of the subjects, such as Yvonne Rainer and Barbara Hammer, continue to make films, many others have moved on to other art forms and a few have died.

Blaetz, though, is interested in recovering the "avant-garde and experimental film (terms that I am using interchangeably here)" work that comes from "the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when there was a window of opportunity for the assimilation of the rich field of women's experimental cinema into the wider arena of cinema studies" (1). The women in Blaetz's anthology have tended to work on non-narrative pieces, often of short duration, and often engaged in intense debates with other art forms about the very nature of art. Because of who these women were, what they were doing, and when and where they were doing it, learning about them and their work means also learning about their male counterparts and their work. Reading Women's Experimental Cinema involves learning generally about structuralism and minimalism as aesthetic movements across the arts—especially dance and painting—of the time, along with variations on and successors to these movements. As stated, "The ultimate goal of this book is to insert the work of these less known filmmakers into film history, widely conceived to include, for example, the American avant-garde, minimalism, or ethnography, and also to enrich the definition of feminism in the cinema" (5).

A few black-and-white illustrations are scattered helpfully throughout the book, but these are not widely known films. The authors, however, do a good job of indicating the environment in which these films were produced and, often, in which they have been screened. There are many wonderful stories about the screening experiences, from both the audience and the filmmaker's point of view.

For example, from M. M. Serra and Kathryn Ramey's chapter on Carolee Schneeman, we learn that Schneeman's film Fuses (1964–1967) had one of its first public screenings "at Cannes, in a sidebar called 'Radical Films of 1969'" (109–10). A response in part to films made by Stan Brakhage about birth and intercourse, Fuses' sexually explicit nature and the technical difficulties of printing Schneeman's physically dense film posed problems for its public exhibition.

Schneeman recalls standing in the back of the theater with Susan Sontag. At the end of the screening of Fuses, there was a great agitation in the front of the theater with men jumping up and down, howling, and slashing the seats with razors and knives. The police had to be called. Sontag surmised that male audience members responded so vociferously because the film did not fulfill their pornographic expectations with its visual fractures and its egalitarian representation of genitals and of orgasm.

(113)

In another chapter, Ara Osterweil's discussion of Barbara Rubin and her films shows how Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, along with Rubin, illegally projected one of Rubin's films at the Third International Experimental Film Exposition in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium on New Year's Eve 1963: "As a riot erupted, Rubin shouted encouragement to the audience while hurling curses at the police. Unrestrained by the probability that she could be prosecuted for showing the film . . ., Rubin attempted to project the film on the face of the Belgian Minister of Culture" (142...