Conclusion

An Open Letter

Pasts

The 2014 European Film Awards might have thought they were paying obeisance to an adorable grandmother when handing a lifetime achievement award to Agnès Varda. But Varda gleaned the opportunity to raging feminist purpose, stating:

What I have noticed is that it is very sweet to receive this award but when I see the nominees here, I feel there are not enough women. I think more women should be included. I know a lot of very good female directors and women editors and I would like them be more represented and helped by the European film academy.1

Her speech echoes the 2012 open letter demanding more female presence penned by the feminist collective La Barbe to Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes Film Festival.

So far it’s had little material result bar Jane Campion’s appointment as jury president in 2014, a lack that emphasises its truth. It ended: ‘Women, mind your spools of thread! And men, as the Lumière Brothers did before you, mind your film reels! And let the Cannes film festival competition forever be a man’s world!’² What’s open about this letter is not just its public address – published in Le Monde and the Guardian – but its exposure of that which heteropatriarchy keeps hidden, the persistence of insidious misogyny cloaked in claims of aesthetics or commerce.

Lexi Alexander broke the silence surrounding the operations of Hollywood cinema by going public about her industry experiences via her blog and Women and Hollywood, offering evidence for her statement that:

Gender discrimination in Hollywood goes far beyond women simply not getting the gig. It is reflected in movie budgets, P&A budgets, the size of distribution deals (if a female director’s movie is lucky enough to score one), official and unofficial internship or mentorship opportunities, union eligibility, etc. Women in Hollywood have no male allies.3

Editor Melissa Silverstein introduces Alexander’s post with a note that: ‘This is a woman director standing up for herself and other women directors. She does this at great peril’. Alexander’s courage in coming forward, Silverstein’s support, the huge supportive response to her post, the negative experiences she describes, and the lack of any concrete change so far, all speak to the current media landscape in which sexism and feminist responses thereto are both hyper-visible. The open letter continues to open our eyes.

‘Women Reply’: Varda’s cinema has been an open letter since at least this short essay film of 1975. A collective portrait of women as a political, rather than biological, category, ‘Women Reply’ speaks both to and from women, starting a conversation rather than making a statement. While conversations about tests, stats and quotas persist, I want to close Political Animals by arguing that such measures are finally like Virginia Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own’, no more than a place from which to begin doing the work. As Isabel Coixet says, ‘we need action. I think all these statistics are good to have, but I think it’s [a] very dead end’. Asked about statistics at a press conference, she demanded that financiers take action to end the circular discussion.⁴

But even this argument for the free market is limited. Lake Bell’s In a World (2013) offers a perfect example: when Carol (Lake Bell) finally wins the contract to record the voiceover for The Amazon Games trailer, her moment of triumph (over her father, no less, heir apparent to the voiceover crown) is soured by a conversation in the ladies’ room. The film’s producer Katherine Huling, knowingly played by feminist media institute founder Geena Davis, tells Carol that her casting wasn’t meritocratic, but opportunistic, with a cynical eye on the film’s young, female audience. It’s a bittersweet reflection on the industry; the film ends with a productive tension between knowing Bell is succeeding behind the camera, and seeing Carol drop out of the voiceover industry. In a World says that we need to do more than take the studio’s crumbs. We have to speak out, assertively, in our own voices.

It may sound counterintuitive, but for me the conclusion has to be where I say ‘over to you’, an opening for the next wave. The strategies that I note here for enlarging the production, exhibition and preservation of feminist film are those that are similarly open. There’s the open approach and invitation to participate of queer femme film curators Club des Femmes (CdF), who programme shorts, mini-festivals, weekenders and workshops in London. And there’s the openness to a new way of making film of Hope Dickson Leach’s community group Raising Films (RF). Inspired by films such as Dagurréotypes and 52 Tuesdays, both made around caring for young children, RF reflects on a practice all too rarely accessible or visible.5 Dickson Leach writes of pre-production for her film The Levelling:

Last year I found myself jealous and frustrated by not being able to leap into this movement of no-budget filmmakers because having a family meant I couldn’t just sleep on someone’s sofa for six months and not worry about rent. But after sleepless nights I realised that microbudget cinema might be the thing that allows me to work with the family commitments I have.⁶

As she explores, RF is not just an issue that affects straight ciswomen, although historically they have been more affected by it; due to women’s cultural association with caring, it remains ‘gender-poignant’. But it could, and should, be a site where filmmaking, as in Wanuri Kahiu’s vision in chapter three, actually contributes to a ‘humane society of sorts’.

As I’ve worked to shape Political Animals to reflect the work done by the films it discusses, I’ve had to be open, out there and engaged, not least as a member of both CdF and RF. I’m grateful for the opportunities to see filmmaking and exhibition from the inside, in all its challenges. Film criticism can seem hermetic and hermitic compared to the collaborative and discursive work of curation – but, for me, the charge of my critical practice is in connection. That might be with filmmakers for interviews or audiences at panel discussions, or debating issues in film and feminism with my colleagues, particularly my co-curators Selina Robertson, Alex Thiele, Sarah Wood and Campbell X, my co-editors Corinn Columpar and Elena Oroz, and my editors Frances Morgan at Sound on Film and Ania Ostrowska at The F-Word.

What I’ve discovered is that feminist film is an ‘open letter’: not only in the sense of Varda’s ‘Women Reply’ but as a mode of practice. Onscreen and off, it’s communitist, inclusive and concerned with address (who is speaking, who is listening). It’s at once chaotically futurological and passionately historical, offering utopian visions that draw its audience into action. That R-A-G-E I spelled out in the introduction has become a rage for and towards, located in the oppression we may have experienced individually and collectively because of our race/religion, age/ability, gender and sexuality and/or economic class. It becomes – as Belle says in Belle – our source of intellectual and personal freedom.

That’s not to say that every feminist film or film event is Platonically intersectional by any means. As Marta Owczarek reports, a discussion at the 2012 London Feminist Film Festival following a screening of Lesbiana was disrupted when a panellist, Julia Long, asked non-cisfemale audience members to leave the screen.7 Long’s request, not cleared with the organizers, generated discomfort and anger at the event and immediate debate online, pointing to an actively engaged community, one for whom transparency and inclusion remains crucial. It also makes visible that the event itself was open and so was the audience: a packed house of all genders brought together by an interest in the documentation of alternative social histories.

Post-Occupy, there is a hunger for evidence that another way is possible – and feminist cinema is addressing it. There is an activist cinema that ranges from features such as Maria Sadowska’s whistle-blowing drama Dzien kobiet (Women’s Day, 2012), in which one working mother takes on capitalist corruption, to Mona Eldaief and Jehane Noujaim’s Rafea: Solar Mama (2012), an extraordinary documentary about the impact of an NGO education programme, the Barefoot College, for one Bedouin woman and her community. Leena Manimekalai’s incendiary Rape Nation (2014), a dramatized response to the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh, offers an informed and impassioned on-the-ground perspective, in contrast to Leslee Udwin’s prominent campaigning documentary Daughters of India (2015), which has been called out for its ‘white saviour’ complex.⁸ Women’s Day, Rafea and Rape Nation all highlight the flourishing of feminist cinemas engaged with local specificities that speak to a global audience.

Political, they are also proudly personal, maintaining the core belief of second-wave feminism, but focusing it confidently outward, as in Chai Jing’s lecture-style documentary Under the Dome: Investigating China’s Smog (2015). Chai is an experienced reporter who has covered climate change issues, but – unlike Al Gore in the film that’s clearly her model, An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006) – she has proclaimed an immediate personal connection, after discovering her baby was carrying a benign tumour linked to smog pollution.⁹

Elena Oroz and I were proud to foreground the slogan ‘The personal is political/Lo personal es politico’ as the title of our feminist documentary programme and anthology at Punto de Vista in 2011. Celebrating feminist genealogies in action, we paired Alina Marazzi’s animated history of Italian feminism, related through women’s diaries from postwar to post-punk, Vogliamo anche le rose (We Want Roses Too, 2007) and Cecilia Barriga’s protest vérité ‘Granada 30 años despues’ (‘Granada 30 Years On’, 2010). These two recent films document and democratize the joyous labour of feminist organizing from the personal through the political and back again, opening the possibility to anyone watching that they could take up the banner.

As I’ve shown throughout, the work of love that is feminist cinema cares for the past, the present and the future, and above all for their interconnection, for each time’s need for the other. The feminist struggle has been proceeding, differentially across the globe, for generations if not centuries. I’m not totally committed to the definition of ‘waves’ (particularly because they’re largely limited to Anglophone feminism), but it’s a useful metaphor because, among other things, it points to the troughs, the backlash moments when the work of a previous generation is forgotten, erased, banned, or simply not cared for by dominant culture. Hence Clarissa Jacob is crowd-funding a documentary on Women & Film, the first feminist film magazine.10 She argues that, ‘in the midst of the current, apparent fourth wave, this legacy becomes especially important as feminists once again begin to scrutinize the cinema and ask questions about women’s place on and off the screen’.¹¹

Curation, at root, means taking care (from Latin cūra, care): we need to take care of the incredible film culture recorded here (and all the films, filmmakers, film critics, film theorists and film festivals I can’t fit into the inelastic bonds of the codex form). It’s amazing how fast it can disappear. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held the first celebration of the work of the Women’s Film Preservation Fund in 2015, pairing popular films such as Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985) with forgotten films preserved by the fund such as Will (1981), directed by Jessie Maple, the first African American woman member of the New York branch of IATSE, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts.¹²

In summer 2014, CdF and the University of Kent hosted the first ever feminist film Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the ICA in London. Eighteen participants created 26 articles on filmmakers, films and film collectives that were absent from the site, with subjects including Michelle Parkerson (herself the author of many crucial documentaries of African American womanist and lesbian culture), Campbell X and even the classic experimental film Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977), only released by the BFI on DVD in 2013.¹³ Wikipedia is a crucial site for intervention, as it dominates the circulation of information online. Like all such dominant sites, it is also frustratingly constructed (albeit unconsciously, like Cannes) to exclude feminist content.¹⁴

As I learned working on Sally Potter’s digital archive SP-ARK, new media offer an incredible resource for digitizing, cataloguing, posting, sharing and contextualizing all kinds of archival material that may otherwise be unseen, and for democratizing access to industry and institutional information.15 At the same time, as Astra Taylor notes in The People’s Platform, to:

understand why the most idealistic predictions about how the Internet would transform cultural production and distribution… have not come to pass, we need to look critically at the current state of our media system… and recognize the forces that are shaping the development and implementation of technology – economic forces in particular.¹⁶

They are the same forces that have persistently narrowed the cinematic frame. Taylor’s vision of ‘strategies and policies for an age of abundance’ alludes to the claim I made in the introduction: that, when it comes to non-dominant cultural production of all kinds, we need to change the narrative framework from scarcity to plenty.¹⁷ New modes of exhibition and circulation are necessary not just as revenue streams (although, as Taylor argues, filmmakers such as Laura Poitras can hardly work for free), but for representational justice, so that the next generation has to hand the materials for which we have had to search in order to make our work.¹⁸

While the internet may be a vexed question, as far as taking care is concerned feminist filmmaking is deeply committed to digital possibility. Lynn Hershman Leeson, ever a technological innovator, has used both film and the web for the major project that is !Women Art Revolution (2010), a documentary that overspills the frame through its online components.¹⁹ Maria Binder has created something similar, yet sui generis, with her documentary project Trans X Istanbul (2014), which combines a personal essay (by the filmmaker, who identifies as cisfemale) about a community of trans* women in Istanbul with a growing online anthology of films made by the documentary subjects and their community.²⁰ Films themselves act as archives: documentarians such as Sini Anderson (The Punk Singer), Sam Feder (Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger), Shola Lynch (Free Angela), Grace Lee (American Revolutionary) and Pratibha Parmar (Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, 2013) are recording feminist icons’ lives in action, as Nancy Kates (Regarding Susan Sontag) and Dagmar Schultz (Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years 1984–1992, 2012) have done through archival materials for the recently departed.

The list is dominated by US filmmakers and icons, which speaks to a continuing cultural hegemony, but also to four decades of persistent, generous taking-care by distributor and funder Women Make Movies in building an appetitive audience for feminist film.21 Feder’s documentary about Bornstein offers a metatextual parallel between writer and trans* activist Kate Bornstein’s development of her passionate audience through performances, reading tours and Twitter, and the film’s journey through the LGBTQIA festival circuit.

Fig. 27: Kate Bornstein with My Gender Workbook, Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger

The necessity of intertwining counter-strategies for production, distribution, exhibition, promotion and curation for non-dominant cinemas goes back to the very beginning of feminist film. Maya Deren was not only a pioneer in her film language, but in her tireless work to reach (and indeed, invent) audiences. Theresa Geller writes that, although other historians have seen Deren’s screen work and her promotional work as separate: ‘Cutting across Deren’s innovations as a filmmaker and an activist… is a coherent “chamber” aesthetic formed as a critical response to the sexual division of public and private space’.²²

The ‘chamber’ is an exact parallel for Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own’; Deren shot and edited films in her Greenwich Village apartment, and even exhibited them there. But she also developed a touring circuit of US college campuses, wrote about her own and others’ films for publications from mimeographed newsletters to Esquire, and founded the first US funding foundation for film, supporting the work of Shirley Clarke among others. In her time, Deren’s work was an open letter arguing for a counter-cinema; immediately after her death in 1961, it was lost as the male-dominated counter-cinema that she had nurtured took shape.

With the coming of second-wave feminism in the 1970s, her work was sought out as a rare example of a precursor female filmmaker. Deren described her creative practice as:

like a crack letting the light of another world gleam through. I kept saying to myself, ‘the walls of this room are solid except right here. That leads to something. There’s a door leading to something. I’ve got to get it open because through there I can go through to someplace instead of leaving by the way I came in’.23

It was exactly a ‘light of another world’ that Deren shone for Barbara Hammer when she studied film in the 1970s, as ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’ was the only film by a woman on her course.²⁴ Four decades later, Hammer repaid the honour with ‘Maya Deren’s Sink’ (2011), an experimental exploration of Deren’s living spaces in LA and New York – and, moreover, an invocation of the filmmaker’s living presence. While Deren has also been the subject of the monumental Legend of Maya Deren print anthology and Martina Kudlacek’s documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2002), Hammer’s personal essay – an open letter from and to Deren’s physical addresses – demonstrates how, from kitchen table to kitchen sink, feminist film takes care of itself and its community.²⁵

Presents

From the vantage of the mid-1990s, looking back on the first 20 years of feminist film culture, B. Ruby Rich hoped for the moment ‘when the cinematic/­videographic telling of history catches up finally with my moment of living it and arrives on the doorstep of feminist film. Perhaps then we will be able to claim and honor [sic] some of the women… mentioned here’.²⁶ That moment has arrived, as Feder’s film with Bornstein shows (and she is very much an active participant in its construction) – and yet.

The documentaries I’ve mentioned still struggle for funding and exhibition. Parmar, a globally-celebrated filmmaker for her three decades of documentary-making about queer women of colour, had to fundraise on Indiegogo to complete a documentary on one of the most significant living US writers, and Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth never received theatrical distribution.²⁷ I’m fairly sure that Steven Spielberg had an easier time funding his adaptation of The Color Purple (1985). With that independence, however, Parmar was able to reshape the bio-doc subtly, interweaving a portrayal of the artist-activist with a portrait of Walker as gardener, living the truth and beauty of her writing through her interconnected nurturing of the land and community.

Both production and exhibition are costly; as I noted looking at the statistics in chapter one, feminist film gets stopped wherever the buck stops. As Hammer writes in her memoir:

a film rests in a can until it’s screened but a book can be opened at any time by anyone in any country. It doesn’t require a darkened room, a special location or equipment. I thought a book could be a portal to my films. Perhaps my films, a life’s work, could reach a new audience through the words and stories of my life.²⁸

But Hammer! is more than a memoir; it’s also a work of feminist film theory and history. And Hammer is not alone in asserting her auteureship in book form to reach audiences that cannot reach the films. Chantal Akerman, Abigail Child, Michelle Citron, Julie Dash, Virginie Despentes, Cheryl Dunye, Marguerite Duras, Kim Longinotto, Sally Potter, Yvonne Rainer, Martha Rosler, Hito Steyerl, Trinh T. Minh-Ha and Agnès Varda have all published books that collect and blend critical and autobiographical writing, at once asserting their presence as filmmakers, and the interconnection of art, thought and life.²⁹

Again the list is predominantly North American, and largely white, albeit with a strong lesbian presence. These are filmmakers who, like Deren, have built a precarious connection to academic film studies as well as general audiences, through teaching and campus exhibition. They are also predominantly post-modernists whose cinematic work is concerned exactly with the question of documenting the self as a feminist practice. As Corinn Columpar notes with reference to The Tango Lesson (Sally Potter, 1997), this means that their films often risk being called narcissistic where a male filmmaker would be saluted as an auterial genius, because they foreground women’s lives and often destabilize claims to both authorship and self.³⁰ The auteure is a feminist filmmaker for whom narrating (from) the self is an open letter, a call to others not through sameness but for conversation and continuance.

In her study of women’s life writing, philosopher Adriana Cavarero argues that socialization creates a difference in male and female self-documentation: for her, a female memoirist ‘is a narrator, not an author’.³¹ Cavarero compares the position of the feminist self-narrator to Scheherazade, whose stories within stories keep the storyteller and all the women she knows alive. Self-documentarians such as Mai Masri (Beirut Diaries: Truth, Lies and Videos, 2006) and Sonali Gulati (I Am, 2011) have renewed second-wave Anglophone feminist cinema’s commitment to foregrounding female lives, in their non EuroWestern contexts. Rather than asserting originality or individuality in closed texts sealed with an authorial signature, Masri’s and Gulati’s films resound with community building, moving through the self towards conversation and engagement. Cavarero adds that ‘there is an ethic of the gift in the pleasure of the narrator… [who] gives to the protagonists of his/her story their own stork’: that is, becomes the agent of delivery or witness.32

Potter’s Naked Cinema: Working with Actors emerges exactly from this ethics of the gift, democratizing one of the most mystified and mystificatory aspects of the filmmaker’s craft – and, given that it’s about relating to others, of being human. It’s a book about building a community, albeit a temporary one, through taking care and being open. The book itself is a community, comprising interviews with many of Potter’s actors – from Julie Christie (The Gold Diggers, 1982) to Elle Fanning and Christina Hendricks (Ginger and Rosa) – whom she allows, as in her films, to take centre stage. Potter’s strategies, on- and offscreen, always ‘highlight the very gestural, ephemeral, and unfinished aspects of communication in self-reflexive [cinematic] meditations on authorship’ that, for Cecilia Sayad, enable such work to ‘compete with the traditional attributes of control, authority, and permanence expected from “legitimate” artists’.³³

By removing the pedestal from beneath the auteure, Naked Cinema resonates with Potter’s radically democratizing films and invites us to engage in new readings thereof. Feminist film culture’s circulation in print is crucial and we need to value it – like Deren’s exhibition strategies – as central and contiguous, rather than supplementary, to the work of filmmaking. At the same time, it’s critical to want all of these writer-filmmakers to keep producing and circulating films. Alexandra Hidalgo is developing a unique video book project that is at once a documentary of and a textbook for ethical feminist filmmaking, and also an argument for hands-on audiovisual work as a critical practice.³⁴ Hammer’s current practice combines critical autobiography in ‘A Horse is Not a Metaphor’ (2009) (which, like Rainer’s feature MURDER and murder [1996] is a rare unsentimental consideration of breast cancer) and critical feminist art histories such as Lover Other: The Story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore (2006). Non-binary Surrealist artist Cahun has also been the subject of an experimental documentary, Magic Mirror (2013), by British filmmaker Sarah Pucill.

Hammer, Potter and Rainer – as well as Mania Akbari, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Věra Chytilová, Yoko Ono, Lis Rhodes and Joyce Wieland – have all been the subject of retrospectives in London in the last decade, primarily at the British Film Institute (who also hosted Elinor Cleghorn’s Maya Deren film programme). The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (now BFI Flare) has, additionally, held retrospectives for Dorothy Arzner, Su Friedrich, Ulrike Ottinger, Tejal Shah and Monika Treut. With Tate Modern, the ICA and LUX, the BFI has been part of fostering attention to experimental and artist filmmakers, areas in which women tend to feature more prominently than in mainstream feature filmmaking.

Films by Clarke, Deren, Pucill, Hammer, Wieland and Margaret Tait are also slowly becoming available on DVD, testament to the work of dedicated scholars such as Sarah Neely (on Tait) and the renewed interest their scholarship has ­generated – but also to decades of neglect.35 It took Tait until she was 74 to secure the funds to make her first feature, Blue Black Permanent (1992), a semi-autobiographical auteure-ist study of a female poet, and it’s taken another 23 years for it to become available on DVD. Project Shirley, from Milestone Films, had to raise release funds on Kickstarter for Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), a film ranked joint thirty-­seventh in Sight & Sound’s 2014 poll of the best documentaries of all time.³⁶

Here is where the argument for feminist filmmaking as curation comes full circle. Whereas in the art world it has become a form of authorship that dominates rather than invites, feminist curation can be, as Cavarero suggests, narration, returning agency to the artists being curated. That’s increasingly important for the kind of films that will never be on Netflix and need a ‘people’s platform’. Feminist and LGBTQIA film festivals have proliferated in London in recent years, with the emergence of Birds Eye View (2002–2014), the London Feminist Film Festival (2012–), Underwire (2010–), FRINGE! (2011–), Wotever DIY Film Festival (2011–), the London Transgender Film Festival (2008–) and the London Sex Worker Film Festival (2011–), as well as curators CdF, Jemma Desai’s I am Dora, Joanna Hogg’s and Adam Roberts’ À Nos Amours (opening with an Akerman retrospective), Corrina Antrobus’ Bechdel Test Fest and Kate Hardie’s A Woman’s Work.

Hardie summed up the impetus for feminist curating in this cultural moment:

The main objective was to get people thinking seriously and regularly about the awful statistics for women working in film whilst also being entertained by their diverse work, past and present… Hopefully one day we won’t need specialist events about women and cinema but whilst we do: the more the merrier!³⁷

Outside London, Holly Tarquini of the Bath Film Festival is pioneering the F-rating for films that are female-helmed or have female leads; the Brighton Festival 2015, curated by Ali Smith, showcased Varda’s films and installation work; and, in Glasgow, the Film Theatre teamed up with the Women’s Library for a women in science fiction programme in 2014, while in 2015 the CCA played host to the first GLITCH festival, showing films by and about queer, trans* and intersex people of colour, and Scottish Queer International Film Festival (SQIFF) is coming.

In the USA, events such as the Bluestocking Film Series and the Athena Film Festival highlight the continuing need to promote women’s cinema outside the conventional festival network, as does Barbara Ann O’Leary’s global Directed by Women fortnight.38 Both Toronto and London felt moved to celebrate their inclusiveness in 2014, having reached a truly equitable 1:4 ratio of films by female- and male-identified filmmakers. As Clare Stewart, Head of Festivals for the BFI, told me when I interviewed her in 2014,

it’s incredibly exciting to see that as a burgeoning area… but there’s still work to do; we’re not at parity: none of our galas are directed by women. But festivals are much more likely to be a home for women filmmakers than the marketplace, and we want to do more to welcome them.³⁹

Stewart has been true to her word: Suffragette opened the 2015 festival, the first female-helmed gala since In the Cut in 2003. A healthy film ecology would include parity at headline festivals, and also a diversity of local, specific, communitarian festivals fostering emerging filmmakers, short films and experimental multimedia practices. In the 1980s and 1990s, women’s film festivals in the US became incorporated into the headline festivals, which was seen as a sign of progress; but mainstreaming changed both audiences and programming. It shouldn’t be a case of either/or: if Political Animals demonstrates anything, it’s that there’s more than enough powerful, original, engaging films to go around, both contemporary and historical.

And there will be more. Interventions such as La Barbe’s open letter, Stacy L. Smith’s MDSC statistical reports and Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar win have led to the major studios investing in gender-specific talent campuses and training programmes, whose effectiveness may be compromised by working inside a system that needs to be changed. Davis’ Bentonville Film Festival initiative for 2015 may be focused on cinematic diversity, but it’s co-funded by Walmart, subject to the largest class action gender discrimination lawsuit in US history.⁴⁰ As Tina Gharavi provocatively named her response to what she called yet another ‘meaningless, toothless diversity scheme’: Thanks But We’re Good.⁴¹

Grassroots initiatives such as the Chicken and Egg Films documentary funding programme; the Director List, a news site for female-helmed films; the Bitch Pack, a screenwriting website promoting intersectional cinema (all US); Australian women’s plans for ‘dinosaur-frightening’, in the words of Marian Evans; and Germany’s Pro Quote Regie, a group of filmmakers advocating for gender quotas in state funding similar to Anna Serner’s 50/50 success story in Sweden, are more compelling.42 Similarly, the re-emergence of feminist film collectives is a welcome development. They may come from a very different political place to the Third Cinema-inspired Cine de Mujer collectives of the 1970s, but groups such as Danis Goulet’s Embargo Collective, New York’s Film Fatales and Ingrid Veninger’s Femmes Lab (funded on the spot, as Veninger announced it, by Melissa Leo) represent both plenitude and solidarity, as well as giving the lie to the heteropatriarchal fostering of competition amongst women.⁴³

Through her aptly-named production company pUNK Films, Veninger has produced a number of inspiring low-budget features, including i am a good person/i am a bad person (2011), in which she plays a filmmaker touring a film around festivals accompanied by her daughter – shot as Veninger toured her film Modra (2010) to European festivals. As Allan Tong remarks, ‘I don’t even think John Cassavetes took personal filmmaking this far’.⁴⁴ Like 52 Tuesdays, i am a good person is a remarkable example of family-friendly filmmaking that shows its working as a film about parenthood, and the productive tensions between life and art.

Like Deren, Veninger is a filmmaker-as-curator, extending her creative practice to fostering other talents and visions. That extension beyond the self is as necessary to feminist politics as the documentation and exploration of the self; they travel in tandem. Selina Robertson, co-founder of CdF with Sarah Wood, writes of the group’s curatorial practice:

We consciously look outside our own experiences, to champion the old, the classic or the under-appreciated, the misunderstood, the sidelined, the flawed, the edges. We want to promote new processes of thought, ones that come from outside a white heteronormative viewpoint. We like outsider films because we are outsider curators too. We are not interested in the mainstream. We want elsewhere. Changing. The future.⁴⁵

Futures

Lucy Bolton concludes her book about thinking women on film with a wish for female-identified characters ‘with histories, memories and – crucially – futures’.⁴⁶ In that relation of history, memory and future is a rejection of the tired model of ‘progress’. As the Gay Straight Alliance’s Make it Better project (2010–2012) for LGBTQIA teens argues, the narrative that ‘it gets better’ is doubly problematic, suggesting that suffering in the present will magically win pleasure in the future – and all without effort or systemic change.47 The films I’ve discussed here believe in making it better: in healing the present and past as aspects of taking care, and in working towards a better future – even if (and maybe because) it has to be imaginary. As Ali Smith writes in Artful, ‘the notion of offer involves hope, a certain flexibility around acceptance or rejection, and the likelihood of both… we only much more rarely think about the generosity implicit in response to what’s offered, in acceptance’.⁴⁸ Like the characters they create and document – whether Elsa in Frozen, Lucy in Wendy and Lucy, Laila in Margarita, With a Straw, or Walker in Beauty in Truth – feminist film filmmaker/curators work with open hands, both giving and receiving.

The future of feminist cinema lies in your hands. One of the great truths told by non-dominant art is that it’s the audience who have the power. If there’s any expertise at all in how I’ve researched and written Political Animals, it’s the expertise of the viewer, particularly a viewer who doesn’t often see the films she cares about covered in the media. A growing sense of complicity in this structuring absence led to my own open letter to Sight & Sound in 2014, with 80 female-identified signatories, calling on the magazine to include more feminist voices covering feminist work.⁴⁹ You – we – need to know what films are on release and being made, because we are the first, foremost and final curators.

In an open letter calling out lack of media support for her film Beyond the Lights (2014), Gina Prince-Bythewood animates the social, cultural and political argument that Taylor sums up in the phrase ‘the people’s platform’:

I want us to look up on screen and see a black woman fighting to find her voice, find her authentic self and be brave enough to live an authentic life. I want us to look up on screen and be inspired to want more for ourselves, to want to love, and to love ourselves.⁵⁰

The film went straight to DVD in the UK, despite its Brixton beginnings, due to the continuing prejudice against black films identified by Simran Hans; the Bechdel Test Fest’s screening at the Ritzy in Brixton sold out, evidence of an audience that distributors ignore and feminist curating can tap into.⁵¹

Our choice of what ticket to buy or link to click on (re)shapes the media, not simply as an economic tick that flickers on an executive’s spreadsheet, but because it changes us, psychically and affectively, and thus changes our community. Choosing a feminist film can be an act of love, for the film and for ourselves. The films we see enter our imaginations, our intimate and political fantasies; they shape our interactions, our conversations, possibly even our revolutions. They become part of our story: they are the storks that deliver us, and we can be the storks that deliver them.

Fig. 28: Crystal, with the star on her helmet, joins the Gnarlies youth team for her first jam, In the Turn

If feminist film is an open letter because it’s addressed to a possible future, it’s also open because, in order to bring that future into being, it has to go beyond the merely invitational. ‘They were just… so… welcoming’, says Crystal to her mother at the end of Erica Tremblay’s In the Turn, after her first skate with roller derby youth team the Gnarlies. There is a dazed wonder in her voice at the very possibility of being welcomed after her experience of transphobia at school. The Gnarlies and the Vagine Regime (which includes filmmaker Tremblay, who skates – and fundraises – as Go Go Gidget) don’t just issue Crystal an invitation: they insist on her presence by raising funds for her flight. Gnarlies’ coach Killo Kitty insists that Crystal set aside her nerves and get skating in the mixed-age, mixed-ability, ethnically diverse pack.

Roller derby is far from the parodic model of fluffy pseudo-feminist homogeneity and ‘equality’: instead, it celebrates difference, determination and playing hard. It offers multiple subject positions that make it a powerful analogy for being part of the feminist film community: on the rink, there are lead jammers and ‘the pack’, but also referees shaping the game and queerleaders giving it spirit, as well as the encircling fans, all contributing to the alternative derby world. Jamming is the art of finding gaps in the opposing team’s pack so that you can move ahead and score points, and jammer is a mobile role transferred from player to player. It relies on both individual skill and intense teamwork, and it’s a great metaphor for feminist film as it weaves and curves exhilaratingly through the available gaps in dominant culture.

I argued, in chapter two, that animals on screen are important because they represent ‘bare life’, the raw basics of embodiment and vulnerability. They also represent a joyful embodiment that is often denied to the bodies of the 99 per cent, a promise that we can be muscles and nerves and movement through the world, towards it and part of it. Representational justice is about not standing still but – as Ava DuVernay’s Selma shows historically and reflects for the present – marching, dancing, wheeling, falling and getting up again, keeping the message moving because of, not despite, the forces arrayed against us. At the end of Frozen, Elsa pulls Anna onto the ice to skate, ending the film with spirals of movement rather than the traditional closed-in kiss. Provisional and precarious as ice, this final dance suggests that feminist film’s work is not done, it is doing. Feminist cinema is, in Asta’s words about Anna, ‘always trying’, always on the move, always active, always activist, always open – and always inviting us to join in. Girls to the front: let’s go.