Welcome to MAI Issue 3

Dearest MAI readers,

The first half of 2019 for the feminist community has been one marked by irreparable loss. With this special issue of the journal, which centres on notions of women’s authorship, we honour the work, spirit and passion of three extraordinary visionaries of feminist cinema: Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, and Agnès Varda. We also mark the untimely passing of Dr Katharina Lindner who was, and remains, such a vital and integral part of our feminist scholarly community. With their passing, the light has grown dimmer but their work, their activism, their tenacity in the face of difficulty must, and will, remain our example. This issue of MAI is dedicated, with immense love, gratitude and respect, to all of them.

Many of the articles and interviews in this dossier are the result of an ongoing collaboration between feminist scholars – a project that was initiated with the double volume monograph edited by Dr Boel Ulfsdotter and Dr Anna Backman Rogers on female authorship and documentary practices (both Edinburgh University Press, 2018). At the Visible Evidence conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2017, many of us finally had the chance to meet in person and form further collaborations for this special issue of MAI. We are so very excited to see this collaboration reach another stage of fruition. The impetus for addressing authorship from a feminist perspective comes from a long-standing desire to reclaim auteur theory from its patriarchal roots and to examine resolutely what happens when women, from a variety of backgrounds, take up a camera and express their agency.

We hope that there will be much to inspire our readers in this volume. We are so grateful to the women who have shared their perspectives and experiences with us in making this issue of MAI.

Finally, as always, we want to mark the outstanding contribution of our Creative Response editorial team lead by Dr Amy McCauley. Creative Response has become a cardinal feature of MAI’s interrogation of visual culture from a feminist perspective and, once again, Amy has delivered gifts to our door.

Please now dig into MAI 3, Dear Readers!

 

In solidarity,

Anna Backman Rogers, Anna Misiak, Boel Ulfsdotter & Amy McCauley.

 

Towards a Queer Feminist Vernacular: Dr Katharina Lindner’s Film Bodies

by & So Mayer with Davina Quinlivan

In Memoriam

We honour the feminist queer work and the lasting legacy of Dr Katharina Lindner, who passed away in early 2019.

1

Barbara Hammer (1939–2019)

by

In Memoriam

Ingrid Ryberg reflects on the rich, political life and legacy of filmmaker Barbara Hammer.

2

Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019)

by

In Memoriam

Bryony White offers a meditation on the uncompromising career and visionary work of multimedia artist, Carolee Schneemann.

3

Agnès Varda (1928-2019)

by

In Memoriam

Lauren Elkin reflects on the passing of Agnès Varda and what her art and politics can teach us.

4

In Conversation with Aparna Sharma: Feminist and Decolonial Documentary Practices in NorthEast India

by & Boel Ulfsdotter

Interview

Filmmaker and scholar, Aparna Sharma reflects on her creative documentary practice in Northeast India in terms of both feminism and decolonisation.

5

A New Language of Dissent: The Poetics of ‘Film’ as Verb in Women’s Auto-Ethnography

by

Critical Reflection

For decades, women practising subjective nonfiction filmmaking have worked to develop a language that speaks to their individual perspective while also inviting and including differing perspectives from other women.

6

In Conversation with Julia Peirone

by & Boel Ulfsdotter

Interview

Photographer Julia Peirone talks about the importance of girlhood in her work, the relationship between subject and photographer and her influences.

7

Maternal Memory Narratives and the Moving Documentary Image

by

Critical Reflection

Female documentary filmmakers who seek to re-tell their mothers’ stories create opportunities to re-negotiate and re-invest in the lost, interrupted or ‘slipping away’ maternal relation.

8

In Conversation with Lynn Shelton

by

Interview

Join Neil Fox who meets American film & TV director, Lynn Shelton to talk for hours about her work. With much enthusiasm, Lynn shares with MAI not only her professional experiences and but also personal views on her successful career.

9

Nahid Persson Sarvestani: Female Auteur

by

Critical Reflection

Following on from her two edited volumes on female authorship and documentary practices (co-edited with Anna Backman Rogers), Boel Ulfsdotter reads Nahid Persson Sarvestani’s work as a form of feminist agency.

10

In Conversation with Karyn Kusama

by

Interview

In 2018, Noel Nuccioni approached Karyn Kusama, American film & TV director to talk about horror films and today’s society, as well as about women and the director’s creative strategies.

11

‘Oh! You Pretty Things’: Imagination, Emotion, and the Feminine Sublime in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999)

by

Critical Reflection

Based on the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film The Virgin Suicides offers a provocative examination of sublimity, specifically in its relation to gendered notions of performativity and emotion.

12

Argentinian Women in the Fight for Abortion: A Photographic Diary

by

Creative Practice

In Argentina, a woman is killed every 30 hours. It matters neither what her age is nor her social class. Luisa Magdalena documents Argentinian women’s struggle in a series of striking photographs.

13

Bringing Brophy Back: In Conversation with Kate Levey

by & Anna Backman Rogers

Interview

Kate Levey reflects on the extraordinary life and legacy of her mother, the writer and activist, Brigid Brophy.

14

Daisy P. on the Cliff: Seeing Through Different Eyes

by

Critical Reflection

Daisy Patton has been a compulsive collector of discarded family photographs since 2014, a daring colourist whose expressive overpaintings magnify photography and transgress media boundaries to portray becoming.

15

I Myself Am a Haunting: In Conversation with Ellen Rogers

by

Interview

Photographer Ellen Rogers talks to Sabina Stent about her cultural influences and artistic practice in relation to literature, landscape and feminism.

16

Gender, Genre, and Class Politics in Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970)

by

Critical Reflection

Fjoralba Miraka re-reads Barbara Loden’s Wanda as a representation of class politics that works to reclaim the road movie genre from the romanticised notion of the lone hero on the road and replaces it with the motif of a woman on the run.

17

En armé av älskande: A Film by Ingrid Ryberg

by & Ingrid Ryberg

Interview

Ingrid Ryberg’s film En armé av älskande is a documentary about queer filmmaking as a crucial part of the gay liberation movement in Sweden in the 1970s.

18

The Flying Uterus: From Abjection to Divinity in The Book of Birdie (2016)

by

Critical Reflection

‘It’s difficult not to fall in love with danger unless it makes us squirm. What if you would drink the water from the red river, then? What if the Jordan was, in fact, red?’

19

Preserved Sector

by

Creative Practice

Iranian artist Marjan Khorram Golkaran showcases a series of works that centre on our fraught relationship to the environment.

20

Mary’s holding Jesus, not like a god but like a baby, like I would hold my baby, and they are covered in gold light

by

Creative Response

In a powerful response to David Jones’ Madonna and Child in a Landscape,  Amy Acre reimagines Mary as one who ‘doesn’t feel holy / stuffing pigskin in bloody knickers’. 

21

Maya means illusion: a grimoire of three films by Maya Deren

by

Creative Response

In poetry, which mirrors Maya Deren’s methods as a filmmaker, Elinor Cleghorn responds to her films in three hypnotic language rituals.

22

Some Men Like Dead Girls Best

by

Creative Response

Samantha Walton responds to depictions of Saint Lucywho ‘holds her eyes on a plate / or sometimes at the ends of two twisting green shoots’ in psychedelic poetry. 

23

And Once Again ‘A Young Girl’

by

Creative Response

In this absorbing lyric essay, Nell Osborne considers Charlotte Salomon’s representations of her ‘unhappy love’ in Life or Theatre? using a pithy fragmentary style.

24

Malleus Maleficarum

by

Creative Response

‘Devil temptress, egg thief, child thief, hag’. In this electrifying three-part poem Louise Buchler examines the figure of the ‘witch’ from multiple perspectives

25

Ways of Seeing Porn: A Queer-Lesbian Imaginary

by

Creative Response

In a searing triptych of polyvocal poems, Lara G. explores the question of whether (and how) queer-lesbian pornography can propose counter-imaginaries to the desiring hetero-male gaze.

26

Gender: The Unspeakable Visible

by

Film

The Gender & Performance Studies Group (GECE) from the University of Aveiro explore the performance of gendered bodies in a memorable and poetic documentary.

27

‘Perhaps we could have loved each other’: Re-visioning Women in La bohème

by

Video Essay

In response to Sally Potter’s energising critique of La bohème in Thriller (1979), McNeill’s video essay explores feminist possibilities of re-visioning culture from the past.

28

Revenge of a Cool Girl

by

Video Essay

In her video essay, Piotrowska considers the possibility of imagining a different future, asking how female authorship can translate women’s anger to give expression of a female voice.

29

Or Not

by

Video Essay

Using lines from Judith Mayne, Kazemimanesh’s film offers a meditation on traditional narratives and their re-appropriation of the role of women.

30

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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