ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces students to women’s relationship with the avant-garde and experimental film form, and foregrounds the question of what makes experimental work feminist. It introduces some of the reasons why experimental modes of filmmaking have been more conducive to telling non-dominant stories or sharing experiences marginalized within mainstream culture. After exploring major threads within experimental filmmaking, including expressive and structural traditions and the diary film, we explore several key strategies in feminist experimental filmmaking. These include appropriating and recontextualizing images, rewriting male texts, telling culturally or politically marginalized stories and exploring identities, and, finally, creating histories where official records do not exist.
Chapter 6 objectives:Provide an introduction to feminist and queer experimental film and media art
Understand the ways that feminist filmmakers have used film, video, and media to expressive and political ends
Understand the reasons why women’s experimental work has often been excluded from dominant histories and the ways in which it destabilizes the dominant categories used to discuss experimental film
See the links between hybrid identities and experimental forms
Examine how feminist experimental work challenges cinematic norms and identity norms, and has been deployed historically to comment on varying historical contexts from non-dominant perspectives
Outline major feminist strategies that connect various feminist experimental works
