At Hand: The Tactics Of Feminist Media Practiceby Holly Willis
Avant-garde film and video is, by many accounts, long dead, having succumbed to the encroachment of both popular culture, and I suspect, the reputedly cranky, messy, and wholly inappropriate work of feminists. Many adherents of an earlier avant-garde still bemoan the passing of the good old days, and yet, as the prevalence of so many excellent short films and videos easily shows, not only do film and video artists continue to produce work -- despite devastating funding cuts and shrinking distribution opportunities -- but they deftly retool the tradition's tropes and challenges to contemporary, and particular needs, and like the most interesting earlier feminist avant-garde works, refract their social and ideological marginalization within the works themselves.
In order to discuss one particular corner of what we could designate as contemporary feminist media practice, I'd like to make use of Michel de Certeau's discussion of strategies and tactics in "The Practice of Everyday Life." In his essay, "'Making Do': Uses and Tactics," de Certeau discusses a strategy as the movement of a relatively stable ideological apparatus. He writes, "I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects or research, etc.) can be managed."
De Certeau counters the strategy with the tactic, which is a method of responding to a particular ideological space or place that requires refunctioning the tools and materials at hand so as to refuse their proper function in order to make them personally useful. Tactics are tactical, meaning that they take advantage of opportunities and respond immediately. They require mobility and speed, and smaller goals. De Certeau likens tactics to poaching, and claims their emblematic qualities are guile and trickery. He writes, "Through procedures that Freud makes explicit with reference to wit, a tactic boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order suddenly to produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place and to strike the hearer." And finally, de Certeau notes that "a tactic is an art of the weak."
Taking the notion of the tactic as just one feminist impulse in film and video, I'd like to discuss three particular kinds of tactics and three particular short projects:
1) First, the use of technology at hand. Whether it's the Pixel Vision video camera or stolen editing time on an old flatbed, the tools employed by many feminist makers are on the low end of an increasingly higher high end; in the spirit of the tactic, however, contemporary makers have refused to see the lack of access to 35mm filmstock, AVID workstations, and funding as an insurmountable roadblock, and many employ the most rudimentary technology in astounding ways.
2) Second, the use of appropriation and revision. One of the most prevalent feminist impulses in film and video is the appropriation or reappropriation of an image, a text, or even a history, and a rewriting and re-vision of that material. This appropriation may come in the use of found footage, the rewriting of an existent text, or the theft of elements of popular culture, but in many cases, the revision sparks a double vision as the recontextualization references a prior source as well as a repositioning.
3) Third, the use of text itself. Whether it's Su Friedrich's questions to her mother etched into the emulsion in "The Ties That Bind" or the typed narrative fragments that punctuate many of Yvonne Rainer's films, text is yet another prevalent attribute in feminist work and one which may be tactical in the sense that it often announces the limitations of the project itself, whether in terms of the narrative's ability (or inability) to tell a story, or in the refusal to let the images even pretend to have a viable subsistence on their own.
I. Low Tech
Among the diverse films and videos that one might characterize as experimental are many projects which are defiantly and obstinately "bad." Made on low-end equipment with very little money, these projects celebrate the qualities on the negative side of a bipolar schema used to rank the quality, and by extension, the value, of a film by purposefully refusing to strive toward a certain aesthetic standard. Instead of achieving a kind of "fullness" or saturation in terms of a mainstream notion of production value, there is a striving for the opposite, for either a kind of depletion and emptying out of these values or for a proliferation or intensification of these values in such a way that they are ultimately undermined. Some of the projects that I am referring to include Cecilia Dougherty's "A Coal Miner's Granddaughter" (1991) and "Joe-Joe" (1993, made with Leslie Singer), two Pixel Vision projects which manage to wring from the most low-tech equipment and means of production incredibly brilliant and insightful critiques of any number of notions, including the family, identity, and art itself. Still others might include work by Greta Snider and Julie Murray, both of whom use found footage and Super 8 film stock to again bridge the narrow chasm delineating the ridiculous and the sublime.
In more rudimentary terms, with each of these projects the makers confront their position on the margins of an industrial practice by graphically illustrating the effects of this position, and highlighting a completely divergent mode of production as well. Cecilia Dougherty's "A Coal Miner's Granddaughter," for example, is the first feature project made on Pixel Vision, and its grainy, hand-held aesthetic refuses to turn the story of social and cultural exclusion and domestic melodrama into an aesthetically pleasing experience. Instead, the tape fully embodies the alienation of its protagonist, Jane, a young lesbian with a bad attitude, an even worse family, and little hope for the future.
Another interesting project in this vein is Peggy Ahwesh and Margie Strosser's Pixel Vision tape "Strange Weather" (1993), an astounding 50-minute video study/parody of performance -- playing with our desire to know about illicit activity, as well as our willingness to hear a story -- any story -- the tape chronicles a few days in the household of several young crack heads.
The tape opens on the black fronds of a palm tree waving across a gray sky. The image, as is typical of Pixel Vision, is framed in black, and the high contrast picture, caught in a sea of grain, is achingly beautiful. Another shot moves in closer to the leaves, catching wisps of black lines -- organic and orderly -- against the sky. (Ahwesh and Strosser's stance here is certainly ironic: given the worst equipment, they produce images that are exquisite.) Meanwhile, wind lashes the camera's microphone reminding us of the project's low-tech source. After keying the video's location and letting a radio announce an imminent storm, the camera moves inside and introduces three of the housemates. The camera continues to move, swaying back and forth and around, nervously catching the addicts as they tap and twitch impatiently.
After an amusing scene in the bathroom, the tape moves on to Penny, who begins to tell a story. "So I was in Crack Town one night and I was walking down the street and I had my pocketbook on me and I didn't have any money on me or anything but these guys saw my pocketbook and they jumped me," she begins. Told with a teenager's dialect, a luxurious narcissism, and all the emphasis dramas of sex and drugs can muster, the girl's story is one of several that punctuate the tape. Each one stops the forward flow of the chronicle proper, and while the image registers only the young woman while she speaks, the lure of a story creates an intense desire to hear and know more; thus despite the poverty of the picture, the desire to hear the girl's story acts as a powerful driving force.
These examples are only a few in a much larger tradition, one which might stretch to include the "fuck you, Hollywood" aesthetic of Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames" (1983) and the equally terse retort to the industry in the work of Abigail Child, Leslie Thornton, and many other makers. The tactic in each of these instances is the turn that takes a series of impoverished pieces of equipment and makes them tell a story, one that lacks all the allure of a Hollywood spectacle but nevertheless engages our desire to hear and see more. Part of the spark, or the flash that de Certeau notes, is the way the most meager images can highlight just how little it really takes to ignite the desire for narrative; another part of it is the brazen refusal to abide by the rules of production value that rank quality.
Thus, in each of these instances, an economically motivated technical imperative is turned into both a means of referencing the maker's position vis-a-vis the industrial realm against which she is positioned, and a method of twisting back on that realm in a way that, as de Certeau notes, boldly critiques the industry's standards themselves.
II. Beg, Borrow, or Steal
The second group of works that I'd like to discuss is that which entails the borrowing or stealing of images and their subsequent revision; this technique is a fundamental component of the American avant-garde, and it has a particularly feminist twist as makers steal from a dominant and patriarchal culture and critically examine, and often parody, that culture. Quite often this borrowing and revising occurs through the use of found footage. Abigail Child, for example, borrows found footage images in order to scrutinize gesture and movement, breaking down everyday activities into clearly coded acts of domination and submission. And Greta Snider's found footage films also scrutinize, but not the images themselves as much as what they evoke. In "Futility" (1989), for example, the images that accompany the two distinct halves of the film powerfully offer illustration of the at once harrowing and mundane futility of everyday acts.
Other makers steal entire films: Holly Fisher's exquisite experimental feature film, "Bullets for Breakfast," uses scenes from John Ford's "My Darling Clementine," for example, and weaves them into a larger collage essay that dissects codes of genre and gender. Other makers steal songs: Suzie Silver's music video spoofs, "Freebird" and "A Spy," appropriate both a song and lots of images from Hollywood B movies and stag films to parody the macho posturing of a rock star (and to show how easy it is to perform the codes of gender) and, in the second video, to offer a literal reading of a culture's deepest, darkest fears.
However, one of the most inventive uses of theft has to be Cauleen Smith's version of autobiography in "Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Kelly Gabron" (1992), a short film in which the ability to write one's self or one's life is shown to be incredibly complex if not impossible. The film chronicles through a series of contradictory voices, text fragments, and images the narrative of a life; that narrative is in some sense a lie, a construction made up of other lives and fictions, borrowed and revised by Smith, and remade in relation to other more oppressive voices, lives, and fictions.
Smith's project began as a series of photographs; when she decided that it would be more interesting to run the photos together and to add sound, she began working on the film version. When she'd finished the first cut, people complained that they couldn't catch everything -- too many voices, too much visual information -- so she decided to run the film twice. The final cut now repeats the first section (with minor changes) and the result is a brilliant text for illustrating a subject as a construct interpolated, composed, connected, and repeated.
III. Textual Tactics
The third tactic that I'd like to address is the prevalent tendency among feminist artists to employ text. The use of text may serve three functions:
1) First, it frequently undermines the image and the sense of fullness or autonomy that an image may seem to have.
2) Second, as in Su Friedrich's "The Ties That Bind" mentioned earlier, text may serve as a secondary or additional voice in a chorus of voices threading through a project. In Friedrich's case, the questions that appear are a daughter's silent questions to her mother, and they represent the filmmaker's inability to ask them aloud.
3) Third, text may take over the image, asserting the predominant role of discursivity, sometimes drawing a connection to a literary avant-garde or feminist writing practice.
One of the most beautiful textual films has to be Elise Hurwitz's short film "I Raise My Arm" (1993). Attaching sections of Super 8 footage which contain fragments of text to 16mm footage, Hurwitz creates a narrative that seems to trace a trip through the interior of a body. She punctuated the story with pieces of scratched black leader and white circular shapes so that between the description of the movement we see what this movement through the veins and arteries looks like. It is the text, though, that we crave. Hurwitz reveals only brief fragments at a time -- two or three words -- and they slide past the frame quickly. The result is a growing desire to read, to catch both the poetry and the unfolding "drama" before it slips by.
The film is reminiscent of Monique Wittig's book "The Lesbian Body." Both describe in graphic detail the most physical components of the body -- Hurwitz describes the walls of a uterus, for example, and in both cases, desire does not romantically transcend the body but rather grapples with the body in its most basic, yet complex, form. This form is detailed in words, however, and thus desire also becomes textual as both Wittig and Hurwitz relish the variety and beauty of the myriad terms that describe our skin, muscles, and bones.
As with both "Strange Weather" and "Chronicles of a Lying Spirit by Kelly Gabron," Hurwitz's film deftly illustrates the potential of limited means; scratches and rough images, pictures scarred with bleach, stories told in pieces: Hurwitz ably employs the tools at hand to spark the flash de Certeau describes.
Holly Willis is the west coast editor of Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film, and curator for Short Cinema Journal, a monthly magazine of moving images on DVD.
