Trigger

J.A.: The wave model also often essentialises what was happening at a certain moment, and everything within that wave then becomes homogenised.

E.B.: Exactly. For instance, ‘second-wave feminism’ in the US (with its gravity point the 1970s) becomes a white, middle-class, perhaps essentialist moment, when in fact, if you do any reading at all, you realise that this is a complete mischaracterisation of what was happening in feminism in that country at that time. We wanted to tell feminist film history in a feminist way. We needed to not only think about our object but also about our method. This is in part my interest in Claudia von Alemann’s Blind Spot / Le Voyage à Lyon (1981), a film about a woman who decides to research nineteenth-century feminist Flora Tristan in non-traditional ways. We broke our own rule of focusing on nonfiction to include this fiction film, but we felt it was important to foreground that alongside its fictional narrative, it also proposes an essayistic discourse on feminist historiography. The line between fiction and nonfiction is fluid, in any case.

J.A.: I think that the essentialisation of the wave moments also forecloses historical material from interrupting the present: previous moments of feminist thought are then interpreted as insignificant, as if they cannot bring us something today.

E.B.: Exactly. The wave recedes and then presumably is replaced by a different wave, which brings with it a different set of discourses or emphases. It is a narrative of discontinuity. We really wanted to move away from the idea that feminism dies at particular moments and instead insist that there is a long continuity of production and activism.

J.A.: You reference Lis Rhodes’s withdrawal from the Film as Film exhibition in the Hayward Gallery in London in 1979. The exhibition No Master Territories is in a way in dialogue with her critique of a type of linear film history that forgets women, as well as with the gesture of a tokenist invitation and her refusal to then insert the research on women in a historical framework that does not support it. In her 1979 text ‘Whose History?’, she first describes linear history and then proposes an alternative to it:

It is as though a line could be drawn between past and present and pieces of a person’s life and work pegged on it; no exceptions, no change – theory looks nice – the similarity of item to item reassuring – shirt to shirt – shoulder to shoulder – a inflexible chain, each part in place. The pattern is defined. Cut the line and chronology falls in a crumpled heap. I prefer a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head.^{Lis Rhodes, ‘Whose History?’, Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910–1975 (London: Arts Council England, 1979), 119–120. Republished in Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, eds., Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2022), 117–123.}

We also know that the critique of the erasure of women from patriarchal history by many white feminists in the 1970s was accompanied by another kind of forgetting: the erasure of (racial, class, cultural, geographical, sexual) difference between women. You said once that ‘feminism is not innocent’, and I like that a lot. What is your position towards the legacy of the long 1970s? What kind of intergenerational conversations should we be having?

E.B.: We had the feeling that intergenerational dialogues were not happening enough, or to put it differently, that there was amnesia in the contemporary moment around the fact that many debates we are having today have happened before. For example, this idea of the ‘female gaze’ that circulates today rehashes the debate on a ‘feminine aesthetic’ that occurred in the 1970s, but this is seldom acknowledged. The claim that certain filmic techniques are somehow inherently biologically feminine is always bound up in a spurious logic of prescription and essentialisation. The current discussion has not learned the lessons of a whole earlier set of debates. It is as if some of those reference points have not been successfully transmitted through time. But as Chandra Talpade Mohanty notes, rewriting and remembering the feminist past has long been an important part of feminism. Lis Rhodes’s work on the Film as Film exhibition is a great example of this, but not the only one: many women’s film festivals in the 1970s were very engaged in intergenerational historical projects, in attempts to go back and look for women’s presence within the history of cinema. It was happening in film programming at that time much more than it was happening in feminist film scholarship, which was often concerned with a theoretical critique of Hollywood. We were interested in picking up on this idea of curatorial work as revisionist historiography.

J.A.: The way in which the feminist material of the past still speaks so much to us now is also completely frustrating: it confronts us with the fact that maybe not that much has actually changed, and the same issues persist. For example, I studied art history ten years ago, and still a mostly patriarchal canon was taught to me, something that was criticised already fifty years ago, and even before then. We encounter again and again the same erasures.

E.B.: It is very depressing. Even though we’re familiar with all the philosophical critiques of historical progress, I think we still want to believe that real gains have been made, and certain problems have been solved, and so on. In fact, inequality and oppression persist. The optimism of neoliberal feminism is part of the problem. It gauges improvement by there being more female CEOs or more women making Hollywood films. But perhaps it’s more important to think about what hasn’t changed and what still needs to be done.

J.A.: Redescription also immediately implies a different temporality than linear progress: a repetition instead of a step on the ladder, perhaps. It begs a larger question about difference and solidarity. Your approach to the research for No Master Territories made me think of Édouard Glissant, the Martiniquan thinker and author of Poetics of Relation (1993), who writes about relationality and how we can conceive of points of contact without a harmful universalist framework. You’ve also emphasised the fluidity of the term ‘woman’. Could you elaborate on your thoughts on an inclusive definition of feminism?

E.B.: We were not at all interested in prescribing what a woman is, but rather in exploding the category. In our curatorial statement, we quoted Lola Olufemi, who states that ‘woman’ is ‘a strategic coalition, an umbrella under which we gather in order to make political demands’.^{Olufemi, Lola. Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), 65.} She hypothesises that ‘in a liberated future, it might not exist at all.’ In my view, this would be a very welcome thing – but we’re not there yet. What we can do is try to expand and twist the images and definitions of ‘woman’ that dominate our culture. To this end, we were interested in foregrounding the heterogeneity and eclecticism of feminist film practice, by showing a wide breadth of the positions, aesthetics, subjectivities, and stories that can be grouped under that umbrella. Paper Tiger Television’s Sisterhood™ shows how the idea of sisterhood has become a trademark, a hollowed-out thing. We see that the emancipation of an elite few rests on the ongoing oppression of the many, as sneaker brands make advertisements filled with images of female empowerment but produce their products overseas, using a mostly female and poorly paid workforce. Historically, in the 1970s, there was sometimes an essentialist assumption that all women share something simply by virtue of being born women. This is a big problem; it can lead to all kinds of marginalisation and exclusion. The question becomes: how do you create unity without reproducing the violence of homogenisation? Solidarity is a way of thinking about that. It has to be constructed across difference. As a gesture towards the importance of this attitude, we chose to exhibit Joyce Wieland’s Solidarity (1973) on a large screen at the centre of the space. It’s a process, something that has to be built and fought for.