The summer season at the movies is traditionally a time for tentpoles and blockbusters, but this year’s wonder women don’t wear bulletproof bracelets. Independent cinemas are offering a sizzling summer of radical, intersectional film as an alternative to the franchise releases. A revival of radical movies made by feminist and queer film-makers from the 60s promises to show that revolutionary cinema and the spirit of 1968 isn’t all about angry young men.
As the weather sizzles, provocative films by directors including Věra Chytilová, Agnès Varda, Laura Mulvey, Greta Schiller and Mai Zetterling will raise the temperature inside the cinema, too. Leading the charge, the queer feminist collective Club des Femmes has collaborated with the Independent Cinema Office, the BFI and several international archives to roll out a programme called Revolt, She Said: Women and Film after ’68, to venues around Britain. The season is named after Julia Kristeva’s 2002 book, which defines revolt as “a permanent state of questioning, of transformations, an endless probing of appearances”.
The films, which range in vintage from 1966 to 1991, speak to this idea in different ways. The oldest in the season is Daisies (1966), Chytilova’s kaleidoscopic classic, an irreverent vision of female rebellion; the most recent is Pratibha Parmer’s A Place of Rage (1991), a documentary featuring interviews with Angela Davis and Alice Walker on racism and homophobia.
“The story of ’68 as it’s often told is one that’s very much about a certain kind of masculine energy, a certain very explosive political activism,” says So Mayer, a co-curator of the programme. “We wanted to look at how women were at the forefront of many of those movements, and they were often making the first moves, and the first artistic moves, and then maybe their work was sidelined or less seen.” Mayer highlights Parmer’s A Place of Rage: “One of the things it’s about is the place of women, and particularly queer women, at the forefront of the African American liberation struggle, particularly the militant struggle, and of LGBT politics.”
Four 1980s films in the selection, for example, deal with subjects and movements as geographically diverse as the Troubles in Northern Ireland (Pat Murphy’s Maeve, 1981), the nuclear protest at Greenham Common (Beeban Kidron and Amanda Richardson’s 1983 Carry Greenham Home), LGBT culture in the US (Before Stonewall, Greta Schiller, 1984) and the life of indigenous women in Australia (Tracey Moffatt’s Nice Coloured Girls, 1987).
At screenings, audience members will be able to pick up copies of the old-school typed-and-stapled Revolt, She Said zine, which places all the films on a timeline of history from the Cuban revolution in 1959 to the birth of third-wave feminism in 1992. New essays on all the titles, some of which have been very hard to see before, are available on the Club des Femmes website and many of the screenings will be combined with panel discussions to thrash out the politics and aesthetics of the films. The anger of these movies still seems uncomfortably relevant to the current political landscape, but perhaps cinema offers a therapeutic way to deal with these issues, beyond raising consciousness. The question is, says Mayer: “How do we bring together this desire to celebrate intergenerational relationships, activism being handed down, the things that we’ve changed, the gains that we’ve made, to reflect all of that, while also experiencing anger at incredible injustices and inequalities?”
The 1977 feminist musical One Sings, the Other Doesn’t is a great example. Watching Varda’s playful exploration of the friendship between two women and their struggles is particularly poignant in 2018. The film may be entering its 40s, but the lead characters’ fight for the right to legal, safe terminations in France reflects recent events in Ireland. Its theme of female solidarity and the quest for personal happiness is timeless, while the lyrics to its quirky musical numbers are often drily witty and provocative at the same time – one song quotes Friedrich Engels’ comment that in a family “the man is the bourgeois and the wife is the proletariat”.
Varda, who is still working at 90, is the subject of a continuing retrospective at the BFI Southbank in London and her latest video installation opens at the Liverpool Biennial this weekend.
The other films in the season provide a backdrop to Varda’s seven decades as a film-maker. They are all deliberately stimulating: from Chantal Akerman’s domestic tragicomedy Saute Ma Ville (1968), to Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s landmark video essay Riddles of the Sphinx (1977). The idea is that on leaving the cinema you will be enthused by the boldness of the film-making or inspired by the voices you have heard – ideally both. “It’s never just a radical exercise for its own sake,” says Mayer: “The formal and political radicalism are always working hand in hand, trying to wake audiences up, to get them thinking and seeing in new ways.”
In fact, one film in the programme, The Girls (1968), Mai Zetterling’s brilliant re-imagining of Lysistrata, poses the question of what it means to be an active, engaged audience. Bibi Andersson plays the leading actor in a revival of the Aristophanes sex-strike comedy who is frustrated by her snoring audience and confronts them disconcertingly from the stage. “You’re sat there like stuffed creatures … Don’t you understand that it’s we who make the world what it is?”
Revolt, She Said and Club de Femmes are not working alone. There are a proliferation of feminist and activist film festivals in the UK, as well as diverse programming groups who curate one-off screenings and seasons. Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered festival at the end of the month includes a strand called Women on the Periphery that will screen a series of feature debuts and shorts by female directors including Ildikó Enyedi, Margaret Tait and Gurinder Chadha.
Mayer hopes Revolt, She Said will “open us up to a different way of thinking about film history – it’s not auteurist, it’s not national, it’s not about movements”. There’s an important film-preservation angle to the project, too, because it has always been tough to get hold of work by marginalised film-makers. Beyond censorship issues, very few prints tend to be struck in the first place and independent low-budget productions are often plagued by copyright limbos and distribution problems. Now that digital copies have been made of these works, they will reach broader and broader audiences, this summer and beyond.
“With these kind of films, just obtaining the materials is a process of often detective work, persuasion and a lot of conversation,” says Mayer. “It seems counterproductive to do that and then not invest in making it so that other people don’t have to go through that again in 20 years’ time.”
One example of this recovery process is a German film, Ula Stöckl’s 1968 work The Cat Has Nine Lives. This gorgeous, essayistic and often melancholic movie was Stöckl’s graduation film, and it follows five women testing the boundaries of the late 60s as they try to discover what they want out of life and how to get it – and it is the first question that is the most difficult to answer. The film sank without trace after its distributor went bankrupt and it was years before it was rediscovered and heralded by Christa Maerker as West Germany’s first feminist film. It was recently restored by the Deutchse Kinemathek, allowing its vibrant Technicolor photography to shine. Now, it is screening as part of Revolt, She Said.
In a mordant fantasy sequence in the middle of The Girls (1968), a group of men congregate to chuckle over their womenfolk’s latest complaints. “Do you know what I think?” offers one of them, between guffaws and slaps on the back. “I don’t think women ever existed!” It’s a suggestion that tickles his comrades, who fall about all over again. “Whatever the case,” replies his pal, “we’ve always behaved as if they didn’t.”
It is a grim analogy for the film industry, in which the contributions of women have consistently been erased or sidelined, even though they have been making successful and often very progressive films since the silent era. These screenings constitute part of the fight to put female film-makers, and their radical voices, back into the canon and to the narrative of film history, which is ripe, in Kristeva’s words, to be questioned, probed and transformed.
