[The Daily] Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories

Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories opens today at the Metrograph and runs through February 11. “Programmer Nellie Killian’s selections, which span more than three decades and a wide range of documentary styles, include fascinating titles by directors with a palpable personal stake in their subjects,” writes Johanna Fateman for 4Columns. “These filmmakers excavate family histories and individual traumas; amplify calls for justice; and defy conventional cinematic representations of women’s bodies, labor, and relationships. But it’s the blazing early works here, which are so closely aligned, in both subject matter and formal strategy, with the heady days of feminism’s second-wave, that seem essential viewing now—as startling documents from an era of momentous, hard-won gains, and as bold precursors to the weaponized candor moving mountains today.”

Some time back, Killian roomed with Jenny Slate (Obvious Child) at college and Interview’s got them talking about the program. “Three or four years ago there was a restoration of Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction [1979], which is the movie that’s opening the series,” Killian tells Slate. “And then this fall, reading all these accounts of women talking about trauma, especially those articles in the New Yorker—just one after another—it was horrifying to read. I remembered when I saw Soft Fiction and thought these women telling these really intimate stories on camera—for other women to feel they’re not alone in experiences that they have—is such an incredible gesture.”

“There are no feminist manifestos or statements of anger or resilience in Strand’s film to link it to the current #MeToo movement, yet there can be no doubt that her film is a part of feminist media histories, one that doesn’t shy from probing emotional anguish,” writes Ela Bittencourt, previewing the series at Hyperallergic. “Strand’s approach, which she called ‘ethnographies of women,’ emphasizes the experiential, showing voice and memory as inseparable from the body, and the body as a sensual bearer of truth.”

Introducing his interview with Killian, Stephen Saito notes that, while she’s “put together a rare opportunity to see a big-screen presentation of shorts from Agnès Varda (Réponse De Femmes: Notre Corps, Notre Sexe [1975]), Chantal Akerman (Dis-Moi [1980]), Lourdes Portillo (Conversations with Intellectuals About Selena [1999]) and Barbara Hammer (Audience [1981]), rarer still is the chance to see films such as Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite [1978] and Julia Reichert and Jim Klein’s Growing Up Female [1971] given a platform that can elevate distinctly personal testimonies about seemingly ordinary lives and personal travails to the realm of the profound. The series doesn’t only celebrate the diversity of female experience but of expression, veering from invigorating experimentalism to the transfixing intimacy of simply sitting across from someone with a camera, allowing the voices of the films’ subjects to come through loud and clear.”

This week opened with a pointer to Richard Brody’s preview of the series in the New Yorker, wherein he writes about Dis-Moi, Geri Ashur’s Janie’s Janie (1971), and Claire Simon’s Mimi (2003). Then: “The movie industry’s failure of women, in the substance of films and in work practices, is the subject of the revelatory 1976 documentary Sois Belle et Tais-Toi (Be Beautiful and Shut Up), directed by Delphine Seyrig, one of the great modern French actresses (and the star of Akerman’s 1975 masterwork, Jeanne Dielman). Seyrig interviews twenty-three actresses—including Jane Fonda, Viva, and Maria Schneider—about their work experiences. Her incisive questions, and the free-flowing dialogue that results, yield vital observations regarding one prime idea: the cinema, run by men, produces movies that embody male fantasies.”

One last related note for now. Experimental Cinema alerts us to the publication—just yesterday—of Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies. The image at the top of this entry is from Audience, which Light Industry presented in 2013.

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