Lynn Hershman Leeson’s documentary!Women Art Revolutionpremieres this weekend, November 18-20, at the Walker Art Center. (An installation based on material collected for the film is also on display at the University of Minnesota’s Katherine E. Nash Gallery until December 3.) Over the next week, three area female artists, all members of the local arts organization mnartists.org, will be contributing…

I always find anything on other Indigenous cultures extremely interesting. The issues surrounding what a lot of us consider to be invasion or as in this short film, whitewashing, can be intense. As always there is the premise that the indigenous population needs to be saved from their dirty, heathen ways. How can we be sure that these are the true words of the people viewed in the film? Just as there…

I really feel that the message was effectively translated by having the director, Bette Gordon, talk about it before and after. It seems to be a feminist film to display the internal power women have if they want to utilize it rather than a politically feminist film. The fact that this is film is not politically motivating makes for a more inspiring narrative. In two separate sessions of listening…

Jeanne Dielmanis a film about everyday life, yet as Hegel said, “the familiar is not necessarily the known.” Delphine Seyrig’s performance in the title role, Chantal Akerman’s script and direction, and Babette Mangolte’s cinematography recapitulate real time for the audience of the film, but the familiarity of this time never gives us clear knowledge of the psychology of the main character. I think…

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…