Feminism and Documentary
http://www.britannica.com/women/modernamerica14.html
Throughout the history of documentary film--as throughout the history
of culture in general--women have had
depressingly scant representation.
If women filmmakers were a rarity in Hollywood,
they were even more so in realm of documentary film.
--Francis Flaherty ...a kind of muse and editiorial sounding
board for Bob
--Esther Shub - a contemporary of Vertov...Fall of the Romanov
Dynasty (1927)
More representation behind the scenes than in front: Women
behind the scenes:
--Grierson's wife served as editor
--Helen van Dongen - Joris Ivens' editor
In the 1960s and 70's this was to change to some extent.
The same decades that saw the rise of African American civil rights
movements and other social and sexual liberation movements
also saw the rise of the Women's Movement and
militant feminist politics.
A lot of stuff was moving and shaking at once during these years for
women
In 1963 Betty Friedan published her groundbreaking book,
The Feminine Mystique--a huge best-seller at the time
that debunked the myths that women, particularly
housewives, were totally fulfilled by marriage and motherhood,
In October of 63, President Kennedy's
Commission on the status of Women released its final report entitled
American Women.
`
Although the report was fairly conservative in its
recommendations, it did describe many of the problems
confronting women, including
a desperate need for child care and the fact that "one of
the most pervasive limitations is the social climate in
which women choose what they prepare themselves to
do."
In June 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed after over 500
hours of debate in the House and Senate.
The Act prohibits discrimination in a broad array of private and
public contexts.
***Most Significantly for women,
Title VII of the act, prohibits employment
discrimination based on race, sex, color,
religion and national origin.
Title VII also created the
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
to oversee enforcement of the Act and safeguard against
discriminatory employment practices.
This period is often called the second wave of feminism to distinguish
it from the pro-suffrage movement of the early 20th Century
It was one in which women began to formally and informally organize.
Informally, women--particularly college educated women--began to
meet in discussion groups
--often called "consciousness raising groups."
These informal get togethers took place-in dorm rooms, in
private homes, in community halls.
They provided safe haven places for women to discuss topics
that were historically taboo or discouraged:
issues of sexuality,
health, and
psychological well-being…
The mid-to-late 60's also saw the development of more formally
organized structures aimed at legislating equality for women in
civic and public life
The most notable of those political and social lobbies were
centered around the National Organization for Women (NOW)
founded in 1966 by activist Betty Friedan and others.
During this time also there were also more radical, tho less formal,
movements for societal change -- A movement that came to be
generically known as "women's liberation"
Some, although not all of the movers and shakers in this
movement came from earlier leftist politics and civil rights
activism.
This more radical stream concentrated on changing
personal,
social,
and cultural life
and challenged the male-dominated power structure in a
number of public and political spheres
The groups and organizations in this loose-knit array of movements
and organizations marching under the banner of Women's Lib
tended to focus on issues that had not been previously considered
political, such as housework, beauty, reproductive rights, violence,
and sexuality.
In the past weeks, we've seen numerous examples of the
documentary film traditions of political and social activism.
Given this tradition,
and given the fact that mainstream commercial cinema and other
media continued to
--both exclude women filmmakers
--and to present uniformly stereotypical and objectified images
of women on the screen,
it's not surprising that the documentary form was embraced by the
women's movement as a political and cultural tool.
Julia Lesage makes the case that much of the feminist documentary
filmmaking of the 60's and 70s came out of women's involvement
(and frequent dissatisfaction) with film as part of New Left anti-war
and civil rights politics.
These were decades in which many women turned to filmmaking in
order to expressly contribute to the women's movement:
--a way of raising consciousness, politicizing audiences, and reinterpreting women's history.
Like the New Left Newsreel coops we saw awhile ago, the decade
saw the rise of
women's filmmaking cooperatives and filmmaking
distribution networks
aimed at getting the works of women documentary
makers out into the public.
The films to come out of early feminist movements--or films made by
60s and 70s filmmakers with feminist leanings--run a fairly wide
gamut, they included
 films exploring women's health and sexuality,
 films dealing with female socialization,
 first-person narratives that touched directly and indirectly on
the process and frustrations of growing up female.
 reinterpretations of women's history
Viewed from the perspective of thirty years, many of these early films
seem charmingly obvious, self-conscious, naïve…
BUT!
I think it's tremendously important to understand how radical many of
these representations were at the time
These films were made at a time when
the very act of women talking about their bodies and
lives was subversive.
The 60s and 70s were also a period when feminist film criticism was
just beginning…
The history of classic Hollywood's representations of
gender, and
the impact of these representations on culture came
under intense scrutiny.
At the same time, feminist film critics also began questioning the
effectiveness of traditional documentary forms and strategies as a
means of representing feminist issues and agendas and of countering
Hollywood's oppressive images of women.
Some feminist critics were particularly critical of cinema verite's noninterventionist approach to filming "reality." as it applied to women's
issues.
In an important 1973 essay in the journal Women & film,
critic Claire Johnston said:
"Clearly, if we accept that cinema involves the production
of signs, the idea of non-intervention is pure
mystification…Women's cinema cannot afford such
idealism; the "truth" of our oppression cannot be
"captured" on celluloid with the "innocence" of the
camera: it has to be constructed/manufactured. New
meanings have to be created by disrupting the fabric of
the male bourgeoise cinema within the text of the film."
"The danger of developing a cinema of non-intervention is
that it promotes a passive subjectivity at the expense of
analysis. Any revolutionary strategy must challenge the
depiction of reality; it is not enough to discuss the oppression of
women within the text of the film…the language of the cinema
and the depiction of reality must also be interrogated.
One of the most potent uses to which activist doc filmmakers in the
70s and 80s put their craft was as a way
of reinterpreting or reclaiming history.
The telling of history, filmed or otherwise, has often been the province
of mainstream culture--what Nichols calls history from the top down.
In many instances, certain histories have not been told at all.
Michel Citron in her article about Daughter Rite (which we'll watch
next class) quotes Francois Lionnet in writing about woman's
autobiographical novels as saying that women are
"consumed by need to find their past, to trace lineages that will
empower them to live in the present, to rediscover histories
occluded by HISTORY."
In the 70s and the decades after, this was to change substantially, as
filmmakers from ethnic, sexual, and gender minorities began wielding
cameras to provide their own evidence and testimony-This type of film rhetoric frequently fell into the category that
Nichols calls Judicial or Historical: it deals with the question of
"WHAT REALLY HAPPENED" -- putting the past into the
witness box to tell the story of what happened, while we the
viewers attend, noting the point of view or line of argument of
the historian, as we arrive at a judgment."
Two of the most powerful examples both 1987
--William Grieves landmark TV series Eyes of the Prize: First
notable retelling of struggle for African American Civil rights
--Connie Fields' "Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter" one of
the first feminist film treatments of women's role in the US labor
force.
--LC National Film registry
Fields was a member of Boston Newsreel Films
Suddenly the U.S. entry into World War II created an
unprecedented demand for new workers. Notions of what was
proper work for women changed overnight. Thousands of
posters and billboards appeared calling on women to "Do the
Job He Left Behind." Rosie the Riveter was born - the symbol of
working women during World War II.
18 million women are enlisted in war industries
When the war was over, Rosie wanted to stay. But neither the
structure of the American economy nor the dominant view of
women's place in society sustained such hopes.
Attending a Rosie the Riveter Reunion in 1974, Connie Fields
decided to document their story. After interviewing 700 Rosies,
Fields filmed Wanita Allen, Gladys Belcher, Lyn Childs,
Margaret Wright and Lola Weixal describing their efforts to gain
acceptance on work sites as women and Blacks.