Encountering Bodies: VALIE EXPORT’s Cinematic Experiments
Analysing VALIE EXPORT’s ...Remote…Remote… (1973), Filser ponders on the deeper meaning of the disturbing, visceral on-screen body images.
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Welcome to MAI 11: Representing Women's Realities
Dearest MAI Readers,
This focus feature edition of MAI, devoted to representations of women’s realities, has been a long time in the making. We are now delighted to finally offer this provocative, engaging, and political dossier. These articles cover a range of aesthetic principles and strategies which women artists, activists and filmmakers have used to present their realities to a world that all too often—structurally, culturally, socially, and politically—denies them access to representation and to voice.
The concerns of representing and narrating our global realities and mediating our diverse identities have always been feminist issues. Still, with the insurgence of new technologies, the potentially vile effects of artificial intelligence on women, minorities and disenfranchised communities, and the seeming injunction on young women especially to represent themselves online, the questions raised and addressed in this collection of articles are of increasingly pressing importance for feminist politics.
Using different forms, from poems through interviews, reports, and reviews to more traditional research papers and studying the representations of reality in docs, the avant-garde and fiction, our insightful, talented MAI authors discuss the relationship between the feminist creator and the spectator as they produce and read visual stories grounded in experience.
Here at MAI, we have been swamped this year. This journal now has focus issues planned until late 2026. The press imprint, which we launched last year in partnership with the wonderful Punctum Books, will release its first batch of monographs next year. We remain incredibly grateful for the support and interest of our global readership. We are always delighted to hear when an article we have published has made its way onto a university syllabus or has been referenced in further scholarship. It feels as though this little, slightly idealistic intervention we made into academia, scholarly publishing and research dissemination is beginning to bear fruit—something which keeps us buoyed despite the unstable and rapacious global political landscape.
With unwavering feminist hope & warmest wishes,
Anna Misiak, Houman Sadri & Anna Backman Rogers
( Falmouth, UK & Gothenburg, Sweden)
On Being a Filmmaker Mother: ‘Home Movie/Proper Film’
Browsing her home movie archives, Callaghan makes a short about a mother trying to be a filmmaker and a filmmaker trying to be a mother.
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‘A Cinematic Witch’: An Interview with Nina Menkes
Menkes discusses how she persevered against blatantly sexist hiring practices in the film industry, and how that led to Brainwashed (2022).
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Emotion, Identity & the Dissenting Gaze: Documenting the Self in Early Motherhood
Reflecting on her own filmmaking practice, Reed Hillman weights the challenges against the benefits of autoethnographic feminist work.
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Cinematic Journeys of the Self: The Alcohol Years & Stories We Tell
Introducing ‘the cinema of we’ in her analysis of two female documentaries, Putman attempts to redefine ‘first person film’ as she links it to autoethnography.
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Site & Sound, Wall & Window: The Material Milieu as Emotional Enclave in Documenteur (1981)
Looking at Documenteur, Hanstein examines Varda’s site-specific filmmaking, which maps Venice, CA as a terrain made of memories and emotions.
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Sacred Cinema: An Interview with Luna Marán
Reflecting on her documentary work, Marán speaks about capturing intimacy and emancipation through localised filmmaking practice.
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On Discomfort & Empathy in Rosalind Nashashibi’s Electrical Gaza (2015)
Reading Electrical Gaza, Norouzi frames the viewers’ empathic engagement as a redemptive act and considers an appraisal of discomfort as ethical labour.
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How to Sidestep Phallic Imperatives According to Lucrecia Martel
In her online meeting with Germán Rua, the Argentine filmmaker proved that her aesthetic project bears a strong discursive stance.
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Feminism as Celebration: Photography & Abortion Activism in Argentina
Using Azoulay’s and Agamben’s conceptualisations, Teichert frames celebration as a form of feminist activism.
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The Address from Beyond the Grave: The Female Spectral Voice
Mortimer explores films in which female voices speak from beyond the grave to ponder how they undermine hegemonic paradigms.
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Petite Maman (2021) as a Contemporary Manifesto for a Transcendent Union
McKay demonstrates how the gaze in Petite Maman’s bears an ability to queer the very nature of patriarchal and capitalist rhetorics.
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Francesca Bertini: Silent Diva, Spectator & her Female Spectators
By drawing on excerpts from Bertini’s memoir published in 1969, Mitchell examines the Italian silent cinema diva Francesca Bertini as a spectator and performer for her female spectators.
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Dissecting the Gaze in Selected British Asian Films
Following a feminist pedagogy, Ramsay worked with her students to capture their critical responses to representations in British Asian Films.
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Movie Maths: An Interview with Debs Paterson
Years ago, Jem Mackay met Paterson whilst working on a film. Here they reunite to discuss her career as a female filmmaker.
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Barbara Loden’s Recovered Voice: From Wanda’s Mutism to ‘Pensiveness’
A reflection on how the discourses around Wanda (1970) contributed to the erasure of the film from the cinema’s grand history.
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Zones of Conflict: Feminist Activism & Women’s Filmmaking in Transformative Times
Assessing the 2023 Berlinale, the text examines the on- and off-screen visibility of women from global zones of conflict and crisis.
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Blisters: A Poem
Years after leaving the authoritarian regime in Iran, in ‘Blisters’ Vasefi offers a poetic reflection on state violence.
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The Female Christ Goes to Market
Backman Rogers offers a humorous reflection on ‘The Expulsion from the Temple/Female Christ’, the 1969 happening at the Danish Stock Exchange.
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#MeToo Tells Us that Legal Systems Have Failed Women
In her extended book review, Maguire highlights the feminist significance of Robinson & Yoshida’s research and reflection on the legal systems.
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Reading Racisme et Jeu Vidéo by Mehdi Derfoufi
Sweet offers a detailed feminist commentary on Derfoufi’s book that aims at unveiling persistent racism in video gaming cultures.
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WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey