Feelings are Facts

On Saturday, I went to P.S. 1 for their Women in Experimental Film event. Films by Carollee Schneeman, Barabara Hammer, Marie Menken, Marjorie Keller, Peggy Ahwesh, Barabara Rubin, and Abigail Child were screened and afterwards there was a panel discussion featuring some of the filmmakers and contributers to the recently released Women's Experimental Cinema.

Most of the featured filmmakers rose out of the overlapping and interlocking American avant-garde of the 60's, the Warhol/Factory scene, the conceptual art movement, and the feminist movement. Some of the films were not my bag, but it was amazing to be able to see more Barbara Hammer and to be exposed for the first time to Marjorie Keller. Because a lot of the stuff that was shown was grounded in 60's experimentalism there was a lot of vagina iconography–Christmas on Earth, a film by Barbara Rubin, the first happening film, involved orgies between painted people set to a soundtrack of the Rolling Stones and Dylan with a close-up of a a labia super-imposed over every shot. While I think the use of this kind of iconography was probably really important for its time, I'm not really sure it transcends its moment. Robin Blaetz, the editor of Women's Experimental Cinema stated in her introduction to the panel that she didn't want to present female filmmakers in the book as engaging in one monolithic practice with a a unified aesthetic, and indeed there was much variety in the kinds of films that were shown. However, if there is an aesthetic that can be called "feminist and avant-garde" in cinema it wouldn't be so much in the aesthetic of the films, but in a certain way of using the camera to examine the world, exemplified to me by Barbara Hammer's and Marjorie Keller's films, an experimentalism grounded in emotional honesty.

I've been totally bowled over by Barabara Hammer films twice now, but because her films are distributed through the Film-maker's Cooperative and mainly screened at film festivals it's hard to catch her work. I saw Resisting Paradise at the New Paltz Feminist Film Festival some years ago, her experimental documentary about Cassis, the French seaside town where many Impressionist painters made their work and where many German later intellectuals took refuge during World War II. The film also chronicles the struggles of French Resistance members. One of the central narratives of Resisting Paradise is that of Walter Benjamin's passage across the Pyrenees from France into Spain, his attempt at escaping the Gestapo and his subsequent suicide. Hammer interviews Lisa Fittko, the woman who lead the ill Benjamin across the mountains and who helped many other Germans to safety. The film stunningly weaves together the lives of many people who fate brought to Cassis with photographs, found footage, contemporary documentary footage, and a technique which involves washes of water color over-layed onto the film. Hammer presents the history of Cassis in an impressionistic manner, through color and stories and music; her mode of story-telling is by nature meandering and ruminatory rather than presenting the totalizing sweep of history. I suspect much of Resisting Paradise was made using an optical printer (a machine whose inner workings I am not entirely familiar with but I do know that it magically turns still photographs into moving image images). Sanctus, screened on Saturday, is a film made using entirely found footage of human and animal x-rays and an optical printer: a body turns in an x-ray machine and you can see that it's a woman when white the outlines of breasts can be seen hanging around the ribcage, a skeleton drinks water and it quickly slides down the esophagus, a skeleton applies lipstick while looking in a compact mirror. The film is all about the color and music and editing; Sanctus is much more of a self-consciously experimental, non-narrative film than the documentary I'd previously seen, but seeing it foregrounded for me how much of a master of color and sound Hammer is.

Marjorie Keller's Herein is an experimental documentary about Keller's on the Lower East Side life after SDS (a group which eventually evolved into the Weather Underground), a loose philosophical editing together of footage she shot in her LES tenement: interviews with her neighbors telling stories about the neighborhood, the day to day movements of the drug addicts and prostitutes who move outside her building, and her own thoughts on what she was reading and what she was interested in at the time (Emma Goldman's autobiography). Herein is very much an essay film and emerges as a powerful document of Keller's own life (she died young at 43).