ABSTRACT
Some time in the early 1970s, a Women’s Film Festival in Sydney tried to screen Nelly Kaplan’s film La Fiancee du pirate (A Very Curious Girl, 1969). It was not a great success. One reel turned out to be unsubtitled and, if I remember rightly, the reels were screened out of order. At the time, this seemed like an omen against the use in feminist cinema of large narrative structures - then in question, in theory, as being somehow intrinsically ‘male’. As images of a women’s truth, eloquent in any order, the festival documentaries and expressive experimental shorts proved more resistant to accidents of context than Kaplan’s tightly organized fiction.
