To celebrate the US launch of their first print edition, Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal are hosting an afternoon of film screenings and talks on the 21st of April in collaboration with the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University. The event will take place at the Renee Chaim and Gross Foundation at 526 LaGuardia Pl.
The events are free and open to the public. Facebook event here.
12.30 – REPRODUCING AUTONOMY: MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS ON FILM + PANEL DISCUSSION
Portrait of Ga (Margaret Tait, 1952)
Measures of Distance (Mona Hatoum, 1988)
The Body Beautiful (Ngozi Onwurah, 1990)
Katatsumori (Naomi Kawase, 1994)
Sacha and Mum (Gillian Wearing, 1996)
‘Reproducing autonomy’ will present an international and decades-spanning range of experimental, documentary and narrative fiction short films around mothers and daughters, addressing issues of state responsibility, adoption, race and single motherhood. The screening will be followed by a discussion with the following artists and writers whose work takes the maternal as its subject:
LEAH DEVUN is an artist and historian and associate professor at Rutgers University, where she teaches women’s and gender history. She is the author of the award-winnning book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time (Columbia University Press) and co-editor of Trans*historicities (with Zeb Tortorici). Her work has received coverage in publications such as Artforum, Huffington Post, People Magazine, Hyperallergic, Art Papers. Her recent photo series ‘In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ “explores medical technologies that assist women with breastfeeding and point to how women experience societal demands to give birth, breastfeed, and care for children in a sort of effortless, heroic way that creates a serious burden for those who don’t measure up to that ideal”.
QIANA MESTRICH is a photographer, writer, digital marketer and mother living and working in Brooklyn, NY. In 2007, Mestrich founded the blog Dodge & Burn: Decolonizing Photography History. She is also co-editor of the book How We Do Both: Art and Motherhood (Secretary Press), a diverse collection of honest responses from contemporary artists who have walked—and are still walking—the tenuous tightrope of motherhood and making art.
AMY FUSSELMAN is the author of four books of nonfiction: The Pharmacist’s Mate, 8, Savage Park and—forthcoming in July—Idiophone, which is described as “a strikingly original meditation on risk-taking and provocation in art and a unabashedly honest, funny, and intimate consideration of art-making in the context of motherhood, and motherhood in the context of addiction”. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Believer, ARTnews, and other places.
2.30PM – SPECIAL PREVIEW SCREENING: ANDREA LUKA ZIMMERMAN’S ERASE AND FORGET (2017) + Q&A W/ FILMMAKER
Another Gaze is proud to present the first US screening of Erase and Forget.
‘Erase and Forget reflects the kind of ideological instability that has contributed to the US’s surreal political moment.’ Frieze
‘Like a Lynchian nightmare of right-wing America’ – Tim Coleman, Total Film
Charting ‘the deep bonds between Hollywood’s fictionalised conflicts and America’s hidden wars’, Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s Erase and Forget is a new investigative documentary which charts the extraordinary life and times of Bo Gritz, one of America’s highest decorated veterans and the ‘inspiration’ for Rambo and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz.
Using never before seen archive footage of covert US operations, and interviews filmed over a ten year period, Erase and Forget provides a complex perspective of an individual and a country in crisis.
The film is a compelling inquiry into the nature of human conscience which raises urgent questions about US militarism and gun control, and embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions.
ANDREA LUKA ZIMMERMAN is an artist, cultural activist and filmmaker. Andrea grew up in Germany on a large council estate in and left school at 16 and after moving to London in 1991, studied at Central St. Martins for a PhD. Andrea’s practice focuses on the intersection of public and private memory, in particular in relation to structural and political violence.
5PM – PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES: THREE DECADES OF WOMEN RECLAIM THE CITY
‘Psychogeographies’ examines the ways in which four women filmmakers (Claudia Weill, Bette Gordon, Leslie Harris, Elisabeth Subrin) have set their female protagonists against the background of New York, and how the films, taken together, can help chart a changing landscape. Using Girlfriends, Variety, Just Another Girl on the IRT and A Woman, A Part, we will discuss female independence, gentrification, precarity, racial segregation, street harassment and how women alone might navigate the city.
CLAUDIA WEILL is a film, television, and theatre director. In 1978, she directed Girlfriends .about a young woman learning to deal with living alone, after her roommate decides to get married and leave. She has guest taught directing for film, television and theatre at Columbia, Harvard, NYU, Julliard and taught Film Directing in the MFA program at Cal Arts. She is currently writing a book about the art and craft of directing.
BETTE GORDON is a filmmaker and a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts who has been making movies since the mid 1970s. Her debut feature, 1983’s Variety, remains a hallmark of American independent cinema and established many of the themes that would show up again later in Gordon’s work.
LESLIE HARRIS is the writer and director of Just Another Girl on the IRT (1992). With it, her first film, she became one of few African-American women film directors to have her film released nationally. The film won the special jury prize for a first-time film maker at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s about a highschool junior, Chantel, who is an A-student, with a gift of gab and strong attitude.
ELISABETH SUBRIN is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, screenwriter, and visual artist. She is known for her interdisciplinary practice in the contemporary art and independent film worlds. She is a professor in Temple University’s Department of Film and Media Arts. Her feature length narrative film A Woman, a Part (2017) is about a successful-yet-exhausted actress who absconds from her television role and returns to reinvent herself in NYC, confronting the past and the people she left behind in the process.
Copies of the journal as well as other materials by the speakers and filmmakers will be on sale.
Credits: Sasha Davis, Sukhdev Sandhu, Miriam Gross, Melissa Rachleff Burtt, Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation