Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: Contexts and Practices (Paperback)

What is the significance of gendered identification in relation to artists' moving image? How do women artists grapple with the interlinked narratives of gender discrimination and gender identity in their work? In this groundbreaking book, a diverse range of leading scholars, activists, archivists and artists explore the histories, practices and concerns of women making film and video across the world, from the pioneering German animator Lotte Reiniger, to the influential African American filmmaker Julie Dash and the provocative Scottish contemporary artist Rachel Maclean.

Opening with a foreword from the film theorist Laura Mulvey and a poem by the artist film-maker Lis Rhodes, Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image traces the legacies of early feminist interventions into the moving image and the ways in which these have been re-configured in the very different context of today. Reflecting and building upon the practices of recuperation that continue to play a vital role in feminist art practice and scholarship, essays discuss topics such as how multiculturalism is linked to experimental and activist film history, the function and nature of the essay film, feminist curatorial practices and much more.

This book transports the reader across diverse cultural contexts and geographical contours, addressing complex narratives of subjectivity, representation and labour, while juxtaposing cultures of film, video and visual arts practice often held apart. As the editor, Lucy Reynolds, argues: it is at the point where art, moving image and feminist discourse converge that a rich and dynamic intersection of dialogue and exchange opens up, bringing to attention practices which might fall outside their separate spheres, and offering fresh perspectives and insights on those already established in its histories and canons.

Table of Contents:

List of Figures
List of Contributors
Foreword - Laura Mulvey
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Raising Voices - Lucy Reynolds
Introduction: Certain Measures - Lis Rhodes

Part One: Acknowledgements
In Conversation: MORE: Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz with Irene Revell
1. Elinor Cleghorn - In a tiny realm of her own: Lotte Reiniger's light work
2. Catherine Grant - Returning to Riddles
3. So Mayer – 'Being a together woman is a bitch': 'An African American woman's film' genealogy of Julie Dash's Four Women (1975)
4. Lucia Aspesi - Film Esperienza. The work of Marinella Pirelli
5. Rachel Garfield - Prescient intersectionality: Women, moving image and identity politics in 1980s Britain

Part Two: Engagements and Negotiations
In Conversation: Maria Palacios Cruz interviews Basma Alsharif
6. Maud Jacquin -'Overexposed, like an X-ray': The politics of corporeal vulnerability in Sandra Lahire's experimental cinema
7. Erika Balsom – 'Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s': Penelope Spheeris's I Don't Know
8. May Adadol Ingawanji - Aesthetics of potentiality: Nguyen Trinh Thi's Essay films
9. Sarah Neely, Sarah Smith - The art of maximal ventriloquy: Femininity as labour in the films of Rachel MacLean

Part Three: Situations and Receptions
In Conversation: Club des Femmes, Helena Reckitt: An Interview on International Women's Day 2017
10. Cate Elwes - Strategies of exposure and concealment in moving image art by women; a cross-generational account
11. Maeve Connolly - Choreographing women's work: Multitaskers, smartphone users and virtuoso performers
12. Maria Walsh - Female solidarity as uncommodified value: Lucy Beech's Cannibals and Rehana Zaman's Some Women, Other Women and all the Bittermen
13. Melissa Gronlund – Can we still talk about women artists?