The Bryn Mawr Center for Visual Culture announces
"Feminist/Visual/Culture: A Celebration in Honor of the 30th Anniversary of Women Make Movies."
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Ruth Ozeki, and Nandini Sikand to visit Bryn Mawr as Part of the Celebration
On April 4-6, 2002, The
Bryn Mawr Center for Visual Culture will present a celebration in honor of the
30th anniversary of the media arts organization, Women Make Movies. For three
decades Women Make Movies (WMM) has been at the center point of feminist visual
culture. Facilitating the production, promotion, and exhibition of independent
films and videotapes by and about women, it is best known for its role as the
distributor of over 500 critically important films on women, feminism,
multicultural/ multiethnic identity, sexuality, ageing, gender politics, arts
and much more. With a special emphasis on supporting work by women of color,
this non-profit organization has helped introduce, archive, and define many of
the images and issues in international discussions of gender, ethnicity, and
difference.
The Fourth Dimension extends these themes, but in
markedly new ways. It is the first of her films shot in digital video and her
first focusing on Japan. Sandra Hebron of the London Film Festival says the film
"is a meditation on the nature of time, investigated through two kinds of
ritual: those of daily life and culture in Japan, and those of the new
technology of digital image making. A sensual flow of images presents Japanese
festivals and celebrations, religious rites, theatrical performances, as well as
the small gestures of ordinary life. Repetition, regularity and movement are key
to this reflective work....her video essay asks us to consider whether the act
of seeing itself is more important than what is being seen." Widely recognized
as a major theorist on film, gender, music, and culture, her books include
Cinema Interval (1999) Drawn from African Dwellings (1996) ,
Framer Framed (1992) , When the Moon Waxes Red. Representation, Gender
& Cultural Politics (1991) , and Out There: Marginalisation in
Contemporary Culture (1990) (co-editor with Cornel West, Russell Ferguson,
Martha Gever). The Bryn Mawr Bookstore will have a display of her works, as well as those of other Celebration authors.
The recipient of several
awards and grants (including the AFI National Independent Filmmaker Maya Deren
Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation,the American Film Institute,
and the California Arts Council), Trinh's films have shown widely around the
world. Her film Naked Spaces received the Blue Ribbon Award for Best
Experimental Feature at the American International Film Festival and the Golden
Athena Award for Best Feature Documentary at the Athens International Film
Festival in 1986; it toured nationally and internationally with the 1987
Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Surname Viet Given Name
Nam has received the Merit Award from the Bombay International Film
Festival, the Film as Art Award from the Society for the Encouragement of
Contemporary Art (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and the Blue Ribbon Award
at the American Film and Video Festival. Shoot for the Contents won the Jury's
Best Cinematography Award at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival and the Best
Feature Documentary Award at the Athens International Film Festival, and toured
internationally with the 1993 Biennale of the Whitney Museum.
Women Make Movies:
Archives and New Work
The Celebration on the Bryn Mawr campus will
feature the screening of 20 Women Make Movies films. While the emphasis will be
on new film and video, there will also be a retrospective of films from the
early years of the organization. The selection of films is now set, with
the following themes and topics: Women Make Movies and
the History of Feminist Visual Culture, The Girls project and Growing Up Globally,
Memory and Culture, Feminist Autobiography and History, WMM and its Response to Hate,
and The Double Bind: Mothers and Daughters. The (almost final)
schedule should be consulted frequently for changes and additions.
Sikand's films include The Bhangra Wrap (1995, distributed by NAATA) and Don't Fence Me In (1998). This second movie tells the story of the filmmaker's mother, Krishna Sikand, by interweaving photographs, thirty-year-old home movies shot by the filmmaker's father, and recent location footage against the broader backdrop of India's political and social history. Don't Fence Me In In was inspired by a letter her mother wrote when Sikand decided to marry. "It was a 'rite of passage' letter, the kind that only a mother can write to a daughter." Although Sikand feels that the genre of "personal films" tends towards a kind of self-consciousness that can then lapse into self-indulgence, she wanted to make the movie anyway. "It didn't start out as being a film about my mother, but more of a film that focused on a universal experience, of ties that bind, relationships, the complexity of mother-daughter relationships especially, distance, longing and the use of memory to construct who we are and how we define ourselves."
Don't' Fence Me In, which was awarded a grant from the Jerome Foundation, was screened at the Tribeca Film Center in New York City in 1998 and the Chingari Film Festival at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1999. The film won an award for the Best Super 8mm film at Philafilm, The Philadelphia International Film Festival in 1999. Sikand recently finished work on Amazonia, a short experimental film that looks at the myth of Amazonian women who are said to have cut off their right breast to become better archers. Sikand says, "This collaboration with my sister, a breast cancer survivor, is an exploration of our lives as urban warriors."
Ozeki pushes the boundaries between documentary and fiction, a tension that she sustains throughout her work as both a filmmaker and a novelist. Ozeki says, "Documentary is as highly subjective and constructed as fiction, only the makers' motivation is different, and the viewers get duped into thinking that what they are seeing is true. So I figured it was better to come clean, and to disrupt the seamlessness of the pretense in order to let a reader or viewer into the messy complexity of the narrative or representational process. It seemed more honorable, somehow."
She adds, "I blame this perspective on being bi-racial. Being 'half' is a metaphor that for me has come to mean a fracturing or complication of realty-nothing is simple, unequivocal or absolute, voices are always split, truths are relative and layered, and narratives are endlessly reflexive."
A graduate of Smith College, where she received a degree in English Literature and Asian Studies, Ozeki has worked as an art director on low-budget horror films, such as Robot Holocaust and Mutant Hunt. She has also worked coordinating and directing "documentary style" programs for Japanese television. Halving the Bones, her second film, aired at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the 1996 Asian American Film Festival in San Francisco, and the 1996 Sundance Film Festival, in addition to other venues. The film has also been shown on PBS.
Ozeki's novel, My Year of Meats, tells the story of Jane Takagi-Little, a Japanese-American woman working in the Japanese television industry. Her "year of meats," entails directing a television show sponsored by the American beef industry, which is aimed at selling meat to Japanese housewives. The book is a sometimes hilarious, occasionally tragic tale of the way in which reality, documentary, truth, and fiction intertwine across national and international borders. My Year of Meats won the Imus American Book Award, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim book Prize and the Special Jury Prize of the 1999 World Cookbook Awards. Ozeki has written a screen play based on the novel and is currently working on her second book, All Over Creation. She says, "it's about potatoes," but elaborates by calling it a prodigal daughter story about a woman who comes back to Idaho to visit her dying father. "The thematic underpinnings deal with our ethical relationship to birth and death and our attempts to control nature."
Many Women Make Movies Board Board and staff members will attend, including Executive Director Debra Zimmerman (pictured with the 20th anniversary poster),Patricia White, and Tania Blanich.
Area faculty members, filmmakers,
Bryn Mawr students, and WMM Board and staff members, will help introduce and
lead discussion of the films.
A number of films from the
Women Make Movies project, "A Response to Hate," will be screened. Earlier this
year, because of their concern "with the violence against Arab-Americans and
Muslims, as well as the alarming trend toward racial profiling," Women Make
Movies offered free screenings to scores of organizations of over 20 of their
films on the Middle East, Islam, and racial intolerance. Developed within two
weeks of the events of September 11th, in the belief that it is "vital to share
educational resources that teach tolerance and an appreciation for cultural
diversity," it is one of many such Women Make Movies educational projects which
engage vital current concerns.
Discussions, Panels,
Women Make Movies Board Members Resources and
Website In time this website will
include "reflections" and testimonials about Women Make Movies by filmmakers and
film scholars;
reading lists;
discussion points;
links to essays, bibliographies, syllabi and sites on WMM and
Feminist/Visual/Culture more generally;
student projects from Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr on WMM films; and
images from WMM films and the early years of the organization.
Participation/Cosponsorship/Class
Projects
Faculty, staff, students, and community members interested in
participating, using films/panels for classes/programming, cosponsoring, or
simply receiving more information should contact Joseph Boles, Visiting Fellow,
Center for Visual Culture as soon as possible: 610-526-7954, or us the "Contact
Us" link below. The Celebration is hosted by the Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr and cosponsored with Feminist and Gender Studies of Bryn Mawr/Haverford and the Bryn Mawr English Department. The full list of sponsors and friends contains the names of the many people who have made this project possible. Finally " We are honored that the
Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr has decided to hold this event in honor
of Women Make Movies' 30th Anniversary. Trinh T. Minh-ha's new work, The
Fourth Dimension, is a brilliant undertaking which exemplifies the Women
Make Movies collection".
The entire Celebration is
free and open to the public. Call 610-526-7954 for more information.
Trinh T. Minh-ha
and Area Premiere of The Fourth Dimension
Dr. Trinh T. Minh-ha,
Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Women's Studies and Rhetoric at the
University of California, Berkeley, will present the area premiere of her film
The Fourth Dimension on April 4th, the first evening of the Celebration.
Trinh Minh-ha's internationally acclaimed films, such as Shoot for the
Contents and Surname Viet Given Name Nam , are elegant and poetic
reflections on cultural location, gender identity, representational politics,
and cinematic "truth."
In Woman, Native,
Other. Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism , Trinh T.Minh-ha states that
"Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain, and mend,
categories always leak" and her books and films, indeed, intentionally defy easy
classification. Defined at times as postmodern, postcolonial, and, much more
problematically, "authentic insider," T. Minh-ha's work almost always engages
the politics of identity, ethnographic "reality", inclusion/exclusion, and
aesthetic gesture: "Subjectivity cannot therefore be reduced to the mere
expression of the self. The identity question and the personal/political
relationship is a way of rewriting culture," ("A Minute Too Long," When the
Moon Waxes Red). The Fourth Dimension , directly engages this
relationship in its examination of " traveller's subjective time, the sacred
time of ritual, mechanical time, film time….[I]n this film-essay, [she]immerses
herself in contemporary Japan, in which are crystallised tensions between
tradition and modernity, past and present and those arising from the fusion of
western and eastern cultures" [Locarno Film Festival].
"Filmmakers
Ruth L. Ozeki and
Nandini Sikand to attend the Celebration"(by Kim Peters)
Nandini Sikand
Nandini Sikand is a freelance television producer and filmmaker who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center in Cultural Anthropology. Not only is she affiliated with WMM as a filmmaker, she has been a member of the organization's board since 1997. In a recent interview, I asked Sikand why she feels WMM does important work. She replied by posing a question about the visibility of women's media. The accessibility of technology has generated a wealth of new material, but Sikand asks, how much of this work is actually seen? She feels that WMM's role as a distributor of women's film and video is crucial because, "in order to effect change, work needs to be shown and discussed. That's the role that WMM plays and has played for the past 30 years."
Ruth Ozeki
Like Don't Fence Me In, Ruth Ozeki's Halving the Bones explores the mother-daughter relationship, and gives special emphasis to the way in which memory constitutes personal identity. The film "documents" Ozeki's quest to return her grandmother's bones to her mother. Along the way she leads the viewer through an autobiographical/biographical labyrinth with what can only be described as a few surprising twists and turns.
A screening curated by Bryn
Mawr students will close out the Celebration. We will post their final selection of films soon.
There will be two panel discussions in
which Women Make Movies staff members, filmmakers, executive board members, and
faculty address, in part, the history and evolution of Women Make Movies as an
organization and its role in feminism, visual culture, and film history.
WMM Executive Director Debra Zimmerman;
Patricia White, Swarthmore faculty and WMM Board member;
Vanessa Domico, WMM Director of Distribution and Marketing;
Ruth Ozeki, WMM Board Member and Filmmaker;
Nandani Sikand WMM Board Member and Filmmaker;
Rebbeca Williams,WMM Board Member and Filmmaker; and Joseph Boles, Visiting Scholar, Center for Visual Culture, are slated to speak.
Discussions will include the role of feminist documentary cinema in the new
century; gender and new film technologies; new understandings of audience; the
role of WMM documentaries in the college curriculum; and filmic explorations of
gender, ethnicity, class, and culture. Look for future press releases with
biographies on Zimmerman, White, and other Women Make Movies staff and board
members.
The celebration will also include a number of library "approvals"
sessions, wherein local librarians, faculty members, student groups, and others
can preview Women Make Movies titles for possible adoption. Acquisition and
media librarians, as well as other interested parties, should contact Arleen
Zimmerle, Bryn Mawr, at 610-526-5277. The preliminary listing of films which
will be on approval the three weeks prior the Celebration are on this
website, as is a listing of the films already part of the Trico
holdings.
Debra
Zimmerman, Executive Director of Women Make Movies states: