Media praxis within ethnographic film restructures many of anthropology’s founding positions. The naming of unequal relations of power, difference, and knowledge production between the anthropologist (author) and the Third World or indigenous native (subject) is both subject and method of this tradition. Writes Jean Rouch, “every time a film is made there is cultural disruption.” [...]
When second-wave feminists came to film in the 1970s as part of their struggle against patriarchy, a tension developed within the community, evidencing a split (not establishing connections) between theory and practice. Competing feminist theories of looking and speaking were at the heart of this split. For those on the “side” of practice over [...]
“Third World Majority (TWM) is a new media training and production resource center run by a collective of young women of color and our allies dedicated to developing new media practices that affect global justice and social change through grassroots political organizing”
The socially oriented filmmaker is thus the almighty voice-giver (here, in a vocalizing context that is all-male), whose position of authority in the production of meaning continues to go unchallenged, skillfully masked as it is by its righteous mission. 84
Thus, a subject who points to him or herself as subject-in-process, a work that displays its own formal properties or its own constitution as a work, is bound to upset one’s sense of identity–the familiar distinction between the Same and the Other since the latter is not longer kept in a recognizable relation of dependence, [...]
Chants Of Lotus (Upi Avianto, Nia Di Nata, Fatimah Rony, Lasja F. Susatyo, Indonesia, 2007)
Screening Dates
31 OCT 2008/16:30/Paragon Cineplex 14
1 NOV 2008/20:20/Paragon Cineplex 14
the obsessive consumption of images of a racialized Other known as the Primitive is usefully labeled fascinating cannibalism. By “fascinating cannibalism” i mean to draw attention to the mixture of fascination and horror that the “ethnographic” occasion: the cannibalism” is not that of the people who are labeled Savages, but that of the consumers of [...]
Overall, there is a growing acceptance of feminist film as an area of study rather than as a sphere of action. And this may pull feminist work away from its early political commitment, encompassing a wide social setting; away from issues of life that go beyond form; away from the combatative into the merely representational.” [...]
The chronology also shows the initial cross-fertilization between the women’s movement and cinema, which took place in the area of practice rather than in written criticism. 271
“The reliance on form as the ultimate gauge of a film’s worth sets up an inevtiable hierarchy that places reconstructive films at the top of a pyramid, leaving corrective realist approaches among the baser elements.”
Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal socity has structured film form.” 35
Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male others, bound by a symbolic order on which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through lingusitc command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer, nt maker, of meaning. 35
The first blow against the monolithic accumulation of traditional film conveftions (already undertaken by radical filmmakers) is to free the look of the camera and its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment. Thre is not doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege of [...]
The relationship of commitment between filmmaker and film subject, and between these two and the audience, provides a little-discussed dimension to the ideas of how women are “represented” in documentaries. 254
I don’t know if attention to film codes is sufficient to discover whether a given film approaches its protaganists and its audience as subjects or objects. 255
About Women Make Movies
Established in 1972 to address the under representation and misrepresentation of women in the media industry, Women Make Movies is a multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women. The organization provides services to both users and [...]
‘Feminist’ is a name which may have only a marginal relation to the film text, describing more persuasively the context of social and political activity from which the work sprang.
B. Ruby Rich
In The Name of Feminist Film Criticism 268
“The effect of not naming is censorship, whether caused by the imperialism of the patriarchal language or the underdevelopment of a feminist language. We need to begin analyzing our own films, but first it is necessary to learn to speak in our own name. The recent history of feminist film criticism indicates the urgency of [...]
Corto de Agnès Varda en torno a la cuestión “¿Qué es ser mujer?”
Cine-tract de Agnès Varda sur la question “qu’est ce qu’être femme?”
the finale Bollywood number from Pratibha Parmar’s 2006 feature film Nina’s Heavenly Delights choreographed by Piers Gielgud.
What we have been seeing in recent years is the development of a new politics of difference which states that we are not interested in defining ourselves in relation to someone else, nor are we simply articulating out cultural and secual differences. …We are creating a sense of ourselves and out place within different and [...]
In direct dialogue with the post-structuralist, deconstructive work preceding it, black independent filmmaking and criticism added an anti-essentialist politics of race, nation, and ethnicity to these earlier traditions that had typically sought far and wide for an “other” located outside the Anglo-European context. “One issue at stake,” write Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, “is the [...]
“Aware that ‘there is a Third World in every First World and vice versa’ (Trinh T. Minh-ha), the diaspora perspective has the potential to expose and illuminate the sheer heterogeneity of the diverse social forces always repressed by the monologisim of dominant discourses–discourses of domination.” Mercer