Feminist Flix – Women Make Movies

Led by Prof Penny Florence, with Sally Anderson and Lizzie Thynne

(via Zoom – link will be emailed out following booking – £20 booking fee covers entry to all four sessions)

Discover just how much women makers of film and video have contributed to (probably) the most popular art form ever! In the first three workshops, Penny sketches the territory from the very beginning, including mainstream, Indie & arthouse. In the final session, Lizzie and Sally will join the conversation and discuss some of your questions.

The sessions will take an informative, thematic and very loosely chronological look at women’s expertise and invention in moving images as art, as politics and as entertainment, with time for your questions too.

Penny, Sally & Lizzie are all both makers and theorists, with experience of teaching in Universities as well as in feminist contexts. A handout will be distributed before each event, with suggestions of clips to watch in advance, or in retrospect if you wish. Content is partly subject to change at this stage but will include:

Workshop 1 (1st July): The Story According to Women. Did we invent narrative film?
The film often cited as the first is by an American man: The Great Train Robbery (1903). This is seven years after Frenchwoman, Alice Guy-Blaché, made La fée aux choux (1896). With clips from Guy-Blaché and Germaine Dulac. Fast forward, and we also look at the significance of women editors in creating film narrative up to the present.

Workshop 2 (8th July): The Avant-Garde – Experimental Form and Content
The relation between film and fine art. Maya Deren takes centre stage, with her Surrealist and documentary films of the 1940s. Fast forward to look at installation, including Finland’s Eija-Liisa Ahtila.

Workshop 3 (15th July): Feminist Classics
An unruly look at the rebellious 1970s & 80s with the exuberantly political Born in Flames (Lizzie Borden, 1983) as a starting-point. But it could so easily have been Chantal Ackerman, Marlene Gorris, Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, Sally Potter, Jane Campion, Agnès Varda … so many!! With a nod to the Workshop movement in British Independent Film & LFMC.

Workshop 4 (22nd July): Panel Event – Post 90s up to Today
The session will begin with the Panellists introducing themselves and commenting on how they see the current situation in relation to that of the past. Then we’ll touch on Feminist film theory of the 80s and today. From here it will be an open discussion, including following up on some of the questions raised by participants.

About Penny Florence
‘Film is never far from my interdisciplinary practice, since it is the form that can incorporate almost every other art. I have been an independent filmmaker, artist, writer, digital poet and academic, written several books and more articles and papers that I care to remember. My last three academic jobs were in Falmouth, London and the USA, and I’m now Professor Emerita at The Slade School of Fine Art. (My latest book, available online here, is ‘Thinking the Sculpture Garden’, and it I mention it because Tremenheere, Cornwall, near The Hypatia Trust, is at its core.)’