In Defence of the Crazy Cat Lady: Carolee Schneemann’s Feline Muses
I came across Carolee Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses earlier this year during an insomniac’s trawl through YouTube, ten years after the…
Essays
Intimate Contact: Images of Suffering in the Work of Carolee Schneemann
“I live for the nude rabble rousing of Carolee Schneemann”.1 These words, written in a recent Facebook post by Lena…
The Precarious Politics of Yorgos Lanthimos’s ‘The Favourite’
In The Monstrous Feminine, Barbara Creed outlines the horror we associate with images of the interior made exterior. Drawing on…
Which of Hundreds of Selves?: Josephine Decker’s Coming-of-Age Trilogy
Josephine Decker’s world is full of secrets. There is something powerful about her ability to craft characters – mostly women…
“A Habit of not Talking about the Past” in Eritrean Italy: Documenting a Diaspora
Asmarina (2015), by Alan Maglio and Medhin Paolos, explores the multiplicity of Eritrean migratory experiences and tells the many stories…
In Search of a ‘Feminist Sensibility’: Two Shorts By Deborah Stratman and Lynne Sachs
Vever (for Barbara) dir. Deborah Stratman, 2019 Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor dir. Lynne Sachs, 2018. When the Bay Area lesbian…
‘Can You Ever Forgive Me’: An Ode To Queer Failure
In 2015, Todd Haynes’s Carol explored some of the complexities surrounding lesbian experience in ‘50s New York. The film, beautifully…
Screening Female Desire: Bette Gordon’s ‘Variety’ 35 Years On
‘Once in a fiction workshop my professor critiqued a scene because “women wouldn’t ask about a hookup’s performance in bed”…
Failing to Act, Acting to Fail: The Films of Margarethe von Trotta
“How is it that some people decide the fate of others?” asks Rosa Luxemburg in the opening of Margarethe von…
Finding Your Rage: On Club des Femmes’ ‘Revolt, She Said’ Programme
In 2018, feminism is everywhere and nowhere at once. Women, we are told, can now be CEOs, and entrepreneurs and…
Notes on Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Roma’
The first plane in Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma sails across a snatch of sky mirrored in soapy water; the next, in…
‘Intra-active’ desire in Joachim Trier’s ‘Thelma’
There’s something within you. If you truly desire something with your mind and body, there’s something within you that can…
Wandering across Frames: Moyra Davey and the Feminist Essay Film
In ‘Walking with Nandita’, an essay for documenta 14 composed of photographs and fragments of text, Canadian artist Moyra Davey…
Of Marceline Loridan-Ivens
In 2003 I saw a film that absolutely knocked me out with its incomparable visual beauty, its exploration of traumatic…
Navigating the liquid cinema of Argentina’s ‘Las Calles’ by María Aparicio and ‘El Futuro Perfecto’ by Nele Wohlatz
When film critic Roger Alan Koza asked María Aparicio, a young filmmaker from Córdoba, Argentina, about the experience of shooting…
Ordinary Devotion: The Seduction of Normalcy in Chantal Akerman’s ‘No Home Movie’
Chantal Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie, opens with an image of a tree in the Israeli desert, being buffeted…
Expansive Territories: Remembering Kathleen Collins
Kathleen Conwell Collins Prettyman was born in Jersey City in 1942, and died in New York in 1988 at the…
Why ‘Lady Macbeth’ is the Intersectional Feminist Film You Didn’t Know You Needed
We’re often a little too happy to classify as ‘feminist’ anything that presents lead female characters confronting gendered oppression, but…
“My View Not Their View”: The Rewriting of Andrea Dunbar’s Story
In May of last year, I attended the 30th anniversary screening of Alan Clarke’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987)…
Suddenly, a Woman Spectator: An Interview with Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey (b. 1941) is best known for the groundbreaking essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1973, published 1975) in…
From Object to Subject? Léonor Serraille’s ‘Jeune Femme’ and Agnès Varda’s ‘Vagabond’
The ‘free’ woman walking the city has become something of a popular myth, particularly in recent works of biblio-memoir, or…