Women and Film

Abstract

This chapter explores the diversity in 1970s women’s experimental filmmaking, considering how women engaged either explicitly with feminist discourses or followed their own directives to make experimental films, unconfined by historical precedents or legacies that might restrain their male counterparts. Films were informed by feminism, developments in the arts, formal experimentation and by film theories related to Marxism, psychoanalysis, semiotics and structuralism. Wider political and theoretical frameworks related to feminism and women’s filmmaking are discussed at the outset to contextualise the complex spheres of influence. This will be followed by discussions prevalent in the 1970s, deliberating whether a feminine aesthetic existed, as these provide some particularly interesting frameworks for consideration. Thereafter, a range of experimental films will be discussed, focusing on the domestic, the gendered film text, the aesthetics of ephemerality and how history, language and ideology were used to question women’s historically inscribed roles.