In the film Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, Trinh T. Minh-na explores the issues Vietnamese women experienced during the political era in Vietnam, which corrupted the country. The film focused on the interviews of these women and the oppression they experienced which put them into silence. This film is a non-traditional documentary, with Trinh developing her own genre in this film. During the beginning…

Bette Gordon’s Variety is a film that addresses the censorship of pornography with respect to women. It’s a movie that opens the door for a genre that attempts to explore women’s sexuality. Gordon was a pioneer for this and is very well known. I enjoyed this picture more than Daisies because for one there was more dialogue.  The characters in the film felt real and productive. I fell in love with…

In conjunction with the film series And Yet She Moves: Reviewing Feminist Cinema, the Walker Art Center will be screening Lynn Hershman Leeson’s documentary !Women Art Revolution from November 18-20. More than 40 years in the making, edited together from hundreds of hours of interview footage with artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Judy Chicago, Miranda July, Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, Cindy Sherman, and…

In his book The Czechoslovak New Wave, Peter Hames asserts that to understand Czechoslovak cinema, one must understand the “Czechoslovak experience.” I bring up this point to emphasize a problem that was brought up several times at Friday night’s screening of Daisies: Can we understand Daisies without understanding the film’s historical and political context? What I mean by this question is whether…

How do you talk about a film that is strictly grounded in theory, psychoanalysis, and a critique of both of these?  Perhaps you don’t—perhaps you make a film about it instead.  We can sit and talk, and endlessly discuss Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory, but that is much less interesting and perhaps even less helpful than making a film that attempts to deploy the new language and new structures that…

From November 4 to November 20, the Walker Art Center and the University of Minnesota will be presenting And Yet She Moves: Reviewing Feminist Cinema, a film series showcasing the diverse international cinema of the “second wave” of the feminist movement. Spanning three decades and more than five countries (including Czechoslovakia, Cuba, England, and the U.S.), these films exhibit a complex, groundbreaking…

From ’60s Czech “girls gone bad” to a meticulous depiction of a Belgian mother’s domestic routine, the series “And Yet She Moves: Reviewing Feminist Cinema” highlights the complex contours of the so-called “secondwave” of the women’s movement. Walker film curator Sheryl Mousley and University of Minnesota English professor Paula Rabinowitz organized these 15 films in light of a broader resurgence of…

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s film !Women Art Revolution (!W.A.R.)(which will be playing at the Walker in November in conjunction with our upcoming film series And Yet She Moves: Reviewing Feminist Cinema) has been nominated for the prestigious 2011 Freedom To Create Prize. The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in Cape Town, South Africa, on November 19. Other nominated artists include Ai Wei Wei…

Tonight the Walker Art Center will be screening the documentary Benda Bilili! for free, as part of its Target Free Thursday Nights series. This remarkable movie showcases an even more remarkable band: Staff Benda Bilili (loosely translated as “look beyond appearances”), a Congolese group comprised of four disabled musicians afflicted with polio since birth, as well as a rhythm section that features…