Interviewed by Lynn Hershman
October 24, 2006
New York, NY
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Part 1 of 2
Lynn Hershman: [Question inaudible
(Dubs on Channel 2 only)]
B. Ruby Rich: Well, I first became
aware of the feminist movement before I had any work or any sense of
myself. Because it was in 1965, I was in high school, and my friend's
mother told her to invite a few of us over because something very unusual.
Was going to be happening, somebody was coming to speak to her and her
friends and she thought we should be there.
So we went over, and it turned out that
it was Betty Freidan, doing all these preliminary house parties, I guess,
to organize the National Organization of Women. It was about two years
after Feminine Mystique had come out, two or three years, and
she was there to sort of mobilize housewives, and get them you know,
to sort of believe in the cause. And they were all furious. Because
she told them that by functioning as schoolteachers and nurses and secretaries,
they were doing the housework of industry. And that they should, you
know, demand better jobs, and they were all outraged, and felt insulted.
And um, we sat there listening to it
all, wondering what all the fuss was about. And so it was a very bizarre
way to first get introduced to feminism. But I suppose it wasn't really
my feminism. That I got introduced to at that point. It was more
a way of thinking about my mother, a way of thinking about women in
the world, and that then took you know, another half decade, a decade,
to filter down into something that I was taking on.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Well, I think that in a way,
um, Betty Freidan was very old-fashioned for us, because we were all
about life style. This was, you know, all about counter-culture, May
'68, student strikes-uh, that's where/what I went into from there.
You know, I came out of high school into that kind of world. Sex, drugs
and rock 'n roll. And so that's what, you know, was the pre-feminist
formation. It was about, you know, sleeping with lots of men and taking
lots of drugs and hitchhiking around the country or around the world.
And um, being anti-bourgeois, or being anti-materialistic and that's
really what it was about.
And for me, feminism came out of that;
it wasn't something separate. Um, it came out of a whole series of
oppositional positions, a whole series of life style choices, and you
know, it was almost a version of a kind of Salon des Refusée,
you know. "No, I won't do that." Um, because you know,
you have to remember the era that uh lots of us were coming out of,
which is, seems inconceivable now. We were so restricted in terms of
gender. I mean, I remember being yelled at, the job that I had
when I dropped out of college and was working in an office, and I was
reprimanded for wearing tights. I wasn't allowed to wear
tights.
Because that meant that you were some
sort of bohemian, untrustworthy, um, unreliable-I don't know what.
And I was supposed to wear nylon stockings, and of course you know,
skirts and dresses. It was a completely different era. So to move within
a year or two from that to wearing, you know, thrift shop clothes and
hats with veils and picking up people on the street to take home was
like this giant leap.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Oh…let's see…nineteen-sixty-six,
sixty-eight, seventy, seventy-two, that period.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Well, I think that figures
in as well. I mean, I was a little bit late for Free Speech movement
and Civil Rights movement. Um, I remember certain rallies, I remember
the, you know, the death of, you know, Martin Luther King, the rallies,
the death of Malcolm X. But it was all about anti-war activity. It was
all about what in Boston was called "The Resistance." That was the
organization that was organizing draft resistance. But of course that
wasn't exactly feminist. That mostly meant, you know, sleeping with
draft resistors.
It wasn't you know, like this really
enormously feminist activity. It wasn't really gendered-it was gendered
male, basically. Um, and so I was sort of a "hip chick." You know,
that's what the role was at the time. Um, and if you keep a strong
sense of yourself, then it can be a comfortable place to be. If not,
you know, women really got chewed up by that. And I had, my good friend
was in art school at the time. And she, I remember her telling me that
it was really hard to get the attention of the teachers, and the professors,
because they would tell the women students that they were just gonna
get out of there and marry artists and have babies and they weren't
gonna waste their time on them.
And um, I was working, I spent one summer
working as an artists' model up at Tanglewood. I loved it, I could,
you know, read Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin and sit around, you know,
naked in the barn, then go out and then go out and have fun. I don't
know. I mean, I don't know what I was thinking! Um, but, uh,
that was the situation, I mean, Shulamith Firestone was an art student.
At the school of the Art Institute of Chicago. Um, uh, Jerry Blumenthal
who works with (?) made a, a, documentary about her, and about her art
critique. Which Elizabeth Subrin re- restaged in this piece called
Shulie. And it shows, I mean, I saw the original documentary, these
male art professors, completely savaging her, denigrating her, telling
her that her work as worth nothing, and she, suggested that she should
have a different career.
And she did, you know, she became
this, you know, feminist theorist. Firebrand. …stop being an artist.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Well, you know, I started
out being interested in film as a social activity. I used to sell popcorn
at the college film society, and my then boyfriend and I had a 16mm
projector that had been stolen out of some abandoned closet somewhere
on the university campus. And I had a very good friend who uh taught
me photography, and he and I used to go out um shooting photographs
together, and he was the treasurer of the Film Society.
And after we graduated,
we moved to Boston together, and I really missed, having uh, films around,
because this was in the era of pre-video-well, pre-VCRs and VHS, I
mean, people had Portapacks. But it was an era before you could get
movies on video. And so the only way you could see films was to have
a 16mm projector and, you know, some kind of really big 16mm film rental
budget. And so we decided we really missed it and we started a film
society in Woodshole, Massachusetts, for the summer. We both worked
in these crummy jobs in Boston for a year. Saved money. He managed to
find another projector in another closet somewhere, and we started up
a little community film society. In Woodshole, Massachusetts. Now, this
is pre-video. All these city people there at the Woodshole Oceanographic
Institute with nothing to do. Um, one movie theater playing, you know,
third-run Hollywood, and we were a huge hit.
Uh, we started up this repertory house.
We showed a different film every night, we charged one dollar, we gave
out free popcorn. We dressed up in costumes to go with the films. We
made up mixed tapes of music from the same era. We'd go on the local
Cape Cod radio station, Saturday morning, to talk about our movies for
that weekend. We were like a legend. Everyone loved us. We did hand-drawn
posters uh, that my friend would draw and I would write, I would type
on the typewriter. We would put them up all over town, they were collectors'
items.
And, you know, we showed things like
Touch of Evil, and you know, The Marx brothers, Sancho the Bailiff-the
kind of thing you would see at repertory houses back then. And I got
really hooked on that. And so we moved to Chicago together, and decided
we were gonna start a film program at the Art Institute School, where
he was gonna go to school. And we found out that there was this new
thing starting there. A film center and it had funding. It was legitimate.
It had funding by something called the National Endowment for the Arts.
That had just started this new, um, program, to start up this kind of
non-profit exhibition.
It was modeled on something called the
Pacific Film Archive, in Berkeley. And um, he got hired as the projectionist
and I got hired as the ticket-taker, and I started learning all about
film, and it was pure autodidacticism. And I loved it, and nobody every
told me not to. So it wasn't bad.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Well, I was working for someone
who had, was very insecure about her own authority. So she was afraid
to hire, as her assistant and eventually associate director, anybody
coming out of film schools, or Ph.D.s. She was afraid they would just
take over from her. Um, so I was perfect for her. And I was very willing
to work very hard, I was twelve-hour days. And um, I was in charge of
getting mostly graduate students to write our film program notes-because
you had to have program notes, with your film. That was part of the
NEA requirement.
But sometimes the film print would be
delayed, and there wasn't time to get anyone. To write the notes.
So then I had to do it. So I carried a 16mm print home, and put it up
on the projector. This is pre-computer, so then I had to put the paper
into the typewriter, and it better come out exactly the right length
by the end, so I had to think really fast on my think. Figure out, you
know, what I could say in a paragraph, and run it to the printer in
time for the show that night. That was my training in film criticism.
It was the craziest profession by default.
But I never took it seriously, because
I thought, "Well, come on. Who's reading this? They're gonna read
it in the theater and half the time at the end of the evening they were
thrown all over the floor you know? It was worse than, you know, writing
for a tabloid. And I never took it seriously, and only years later,
did I find out that filmmakers kept those, distributors kept them. They
were circulated. Um, people would Xerox them and send them around and
then eventually some of them began to be reprinted, and then I discovered
that Jump Cut, which started off as a radical film magazine,
in Chicago at that time, wanted to start printing some of them, and
I thought, "Oh, okay," and that's how it all started.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: I honestly can't say, that
I ever felt any gender resistance back then. Later I would. But in the
beginning, um, I think there was tremendous momentum to it. There was
tremendous joie de vivre to it. I was young. I think people thought
I was sort of a novelty? I was kind of fearless? I think I had more
nerve, maybe, than I do now? I'd say, I'd write anything, say anything
that I thought. And I really had fun with it.
And the point at which it began to change
was when some friends of mine, who were getting their Ph.D.s at Northwestern…I
need a sip of water…
And I think it changed when some friends
of mine who were graduate students at Northwestern-who are now both
quite well known, Bruce Jenkins and Bill Harrigan-invited me to go
with them to a film conference at Purdue University, to do a panel on
questions of naming in film studies. And Bill was going to talk about
melodrama and Bruce was gonna talk about structuralist [structuralism?]
and I was going to talk about feminist [feminism?]. And this became
this big manifesto, that ended up writing [who ended up writing…?]
and publishing in Jump Cut, on the crisis of naming in feminist
film criticism.
And that's when I began. To encounter
some resistance. When I suddenly began to cross over into a more scholarly
sector, into a more theoretical. World. And that's when I began to
get a kind of reaction of, "Wait a minute, who are you?"
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: No, I never took it too seriously.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Well, my whole education
in film really happened in those early years in Chicago. And uh, in
1972-73, I was living in this loft with a bunch of art school boys.
We used to do rent parties, for the school to make our rents, we always
had blues, fabulous legendary blues bands playing there. And somebody
was bringing Carolee Schneemann to town. And they asked if we could
do the party there afterwards. And I said okay. And um, at the screening,
which my friend Warner was the projectionist for, and where I was sort
of somehow involved, I don't know what I was doing there, she came
under attack.
And it was um this early kind of really radical feminist audience. And they were furious that she had made this film in which she was having sex with her boyfriend. They thought that um, intercourse was demeaning to women. And she was also showing herself going down on him, giving him blow jobs. They thought that this was self-exploitation, that this was an example of false consciousness. People were just up in arms, she had to barricade herself inside the projection booth, and then we had to kind of smuggle her out over to our loft for a party of celebration, because we thought, "What, what was wrong with those women?" you know.
And I used to say that's where I discovered
the difference between party women and "Party women'-capital P,
small p. The women who were ideological and the women who wanted to
have a good time. That was kind of an early glimmer of a kind of feminist
split, I suppose. But what happened in that same period, was that
a group of women and I were organizing the Women's Film Festival.
For Chicago, it took place in 1974. And I was working with this British
woman who happened to be in town, by the name of Laura Mulvey. Because
she was married to a guy, Peter Wollen, who was teaching at Northwestern.
For all anyone knew, she was a faculty
wife. She had yet written her famous "Visual Pleasure" article.
She was still working at Compendium Bookstore back in London (tremendous
crash)…
And she was just hanging out, you know,
in Chicago-in Evanston, actually, with, with Peter and their son,
Chad. And um, was sort of advising us on this women's film festival.
And we had an example of one that had been done in Canada, that was
a very famous one? Um, that we all looked to? And so we were very busy
organizing this and the Chicago Tribune.
Offered to pay for it. And it wasn't the editorial side, it was the
marketing department, because the Chicago Tribune, then as now,
is a very conservative newspaper, and they wanted to expand the subscription
base, they were losing ground to the Sun-Times.
Where Roger Ebert was. And so Gene Siskell
convinced them that they should finance this women's film festival,
and called me up and asked if I would, you know, do this, with Patricia
Erens. Uh, who also went on to become quite well known for her
writing. And unfortunately, we said, "Oh, no, this is a feminist
film festival. We have to have a collective." And so we organized
a collective, and this became like endless headaches, with women fighting
over who would get to do what and who was going to get credit.
But in fact, we put on this tremendous
film festival. We had 10,000 people come. In 10 days. To see films.
Um, Gene Siskell was basically ordered by the Tribune,
to write about it every day. Every day he had to review our film festival,
because it was their event. They had ads in every day, and I had
to go to all these negotiating meetings with the marketing meetings
and I would take cigars. I didn't smoke. But I thought, I have to
somehow hold my own with these marketing guys.
So I would go there with cigars and I
would sit there at the table and say, "No, we need this," and "You
need to increase the budget," and make demands and they always said
okay. And they were quite happy because all the coverage that came out,
said, "What is the Chicago Tribune doing?" Sponsoring something
like this? So they were happy, they changed their image. And that was
where I first got to meet Nellie Kaplan (pronounces it Kaplan).
Who we brought in. And she had made a film called um, A Very Curious
Girl. And this film is sort of representative of that moment. In
early feminist film. Because part of that was about discovering women
filmmakers around the world, who were being discriminated against, were
unknown, didn't have distribution, because they were women.
That was like one of the big, um, functions,
of the Women's Film Festivals. So we brought her and she had made
a film about a small town where one woman, central character, is a prostitute,
a mistress, to half the men in town, and has finally had enough. And
sneaks into the church, in the early morning, with her tape recorder.
Puts it up in the rafters, and turns it on and leaves, and goes off
with a traveling projectionist who's come to town with a movie show.
And when everyone files into the church they begin to hear, all of the
wayward husbands, talking to her, telling their secrets, complaining
about their wives, and nobody can get up there that's her revenge,
her final revenge.
So this kind of film, that was taking
on bourgeois morality, that was turning the tables, that was talking
about women's revenge, that was talking about women owning their own
sexuality and not suffering for it. That was in a way a kind of emblematic
film for that moment, and the kind of film that people were looking
at, when they were trying to come up with the idea of what a feminist
film should be. It should be about changing representations of women.
It should be about changing the way we look at women's bodies. It
was about rediscovering women, so sometimes that meant women filmmakers.
But also, another film we brought, was
called Antonia. It was made by Joe Godmellow, and it was financed
by the, the, huge megastar of the time, Judy Collins. Because Antonia
had been her music teacher, who could never get a job as an orchestra
conductor, because there was no orchestra that they would allow women
to conduct. Nobody would have her.
So it was all about societal injustice,
blocking women's opportunities. So you had all of these different
kinds of trends running through these early festivals. And there was
this notion of a very large umbrella that everybody should be there.
There were workshops in portapacks, how women could make their own media.
Which wasn't so easy then as now. Um, there were all kinds of uh debates,
around the films that we were seeing. And there was an internationalism,
to those events, that sometimes got people into trouble.
Um, for example, uh, that film festival,
we had somehow ending up bringing Leni Riefenstahl, to show The Blue
Light [Das Blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932)] because we thought
even though she made all of these you know, really contemptible ideological-marked
Nazi films, before that, she had made this really interesting
nature film. About this sort of you know, wild um, nature girl, climbing
the mountain peaks. So, "let's bring that one." Well, all
hell broke loose. There were demonstrations, and before we could uninvite
her, she uninvited herself. She just went to Telluride instead.
But that set off a whole debate, in the
pages of the New York Review of Books, between Susan Sontag and
Adrienne Rich. Over what was at stake with women's film festivals,
and what was being claimed in the name of feminism. So it was a fascinating
period, you know, it was such an explosive time, where all of this was
really getting sorted out. There wasn't the ideology yet, there wasn't
a prescriptive way of doing things, and half the intoxication was that
we were there helping to figure it out, helping to write what this was
going to be.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Well…you know, one of the
things about that early time, is that um, a lot of worlds were in the
same room together. You didn't have the academic women off at university,
in department meetings, figuring out what should be required, for the
canon, what should be required for the syllabus. Those courses didn't
exist yet, they were just about to be invented. Nobody working in film
then had degrees in film. At the same time, there wasn't an expectation
of what women's cinema should be, because so little of it had been
made.
Um, and, at, you know, people weren't
professionalized in the same way yet, so everyone's opinion counted
equally. That was both wonderful and a total nightmare. And sometimes
it just simply ground to a halt. But when it didn't grind to a halt,
then you could sometimes get a kind of combustion. A kind of nitroglycerin
effect, that shot off all kinds of new directions and ideas in really
productive ways. And that's some of what occurred then. So we were
reading Women in Film magazine, which was trying to draw a certain
line. Uh, at the same time, wanting all women to be covered because
if it's a woman's film it should be covered.
Camera Obscura
split off from Women in Film then and for a while had a very,
very orthodox line, in keeping with the orthodoxy that had already overtaken
avant-garde. When Jonas Mekas and Anthology Film Archive
and Annette Michelson and Peter Kubelka and all of these people were
decreeing what cinema should be, and throwing all kinds of people out
to the margins. You have to remember that in those early days, Yvonne
Rainer wasn't part of the avant-garde, because she had people.
And dialogue, and stories, instead of just having the minimalist materiality
of cinema going on.
Joyce Wheelant (?) was kicked out. Michael
Snow was let in. All of this was happening in that period in the '70s.
And um, I think that uh, it didn't always turn out the way people
expected. You know, I remember going to the (?)heist Experimental Film
Festival, in 1974, and meeting this young woman filmmaker that Laura
Mulvey had told me to look out, who was doing something interesting.
And she was there to see what was going on in experimental film because
her work had been rejected. Turned down. Not, not up to snuff. She was
Chantal Akerman.
The next film she made, after that, was
Je, tu, il, elle and then Jeanne Dielman. Nineteen-seventy-six,
I went to the Edinburgh Film Festival. And it was um, a festival on
avant-garde cinema. I met this young performance artist, who was
doing really avant-garde performances and was interested, getting
interested in making films and her name was Sally Potter. And uh, I
met Yvonne Rainer there and we went driving around the Highlands for
a week. And so there was a sense in which this was all coming to be,
people were struggling with notions, on what it should be. What was
it that was coming into being.
So with Yvonne, it was about the legitimacy
of emotion. The legitimacy of women's emotions. And how you
could choreograph that, coming out of dance, into film. What that would
mean. How we read gender through what we saw on screen. All of that
kind of notorious work she'd done in dance, being carried over into
film. (? Unclear)
With Chantal, it was all about how you
represents women's time. Showing Jeanne Dielman in almost
real time. It wasn't really, but it passed for that. Something
must closer to real time. And what having the camera, famously, set
at her own height, so everybody said, "Oh, this is like Ozu." And
she said, "No, I'm just short." And um, different women were coming
up with different solutions. As to what, you know, this should be, what
this might be.
Sometimes this was very bare bones documentary.
Especially coming out of women on the left. Who wanted to represent
women's struggles, who came up with things like The Woman's
Film from California Newsreel. And, um, by the time it got to New
York, in 1981, they were beginning to finance the cross-over fiction
films, out of the Arts Council, so things like Claudia Weill's
Girlfriends, or um, I think Susan Seidelman then had already made
Smithereens, and a whole new feature movement was starting, and
that was going to change everything. And before long, you had filmmakers
like Lizzie Borden making Born in Flames and Sheila McLaughlin
doing Committed and She Must Be Seeing Things.
And, and everything began to shift yet
again. But there was always a struggle around those films. I remember
a very um, uh, respected film festival, that I used to go to, and the
director telling me that they couldn't show Born in Flames,
"because it was just so technically terrible of course." But, what
were they showing? You know, made by men back then (speaking softly),
what films were they showing that they had no such objection to?
LH: And now?
BRR: I don't think things are
all that different nowadays. Um, I think what's different is there
is that there isn't any movement behind a different approach to filmmaking?
Um, you know, we have certain signpost directors you know, we can point
to the legacy. Of Chantal Akerman or Ulrike Ottinger or Patricia Rosamaar
(?) or Yvonne Rainer. By now, Sally Potter. Many, many, many different
filmmakers. We can look at um, Rose Troche films, we can look at Cheryl
Dunye's Watermelon Woman, we can look at Mary Herron's work.
All of it very exciting, but the field has gotten more and more and
more crowded.
And as the women in Eastern Europe discovered,
when the Soviet Union came to an end, and their careers, which under
the Soviet system had flourished because they wanted women filmmakers,
they wanted women directors, they wanted local and national cinemas-their
careers collapsed because suddenly all anyone cared about was the free
market. Well, that's essentially what's happened in the United States,
as well, and many other parts of the world.
France is the big exception. France cares
about the cultural patrimony. Of the cinema. And so that's where you
find. Women directors who are able to make film after film after film.
Interesting, isn't it? Whether it's Catherine Breillat or Claire
Denis or Chantal Akerman or the millions of other French women directors
who keep making films. They're able to, because there's something
to put into. The decision making process. Other than what investor can
be found and what return can be had.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: I was totally part of the
feminist art world in Chicago. In the 'seventies when I lived there.
All of my friends were in ARC
and Artemisia. Um, Hollis Sigler, who was my very dear friend,
uh, was one of the founding members. She lived downstairs in the loft
building that I lived in. Um, in 19-let's see, what year did we
all move in there, 1974, we all moved into this loft building, and then,
in a few months, uh, Kate Horsefield and Lynn Blumenthal moved in downstairs,
and we all were part of figuring out what was going on and where, what
we thought was important.
And who we thought should be paid attention
to. So, Lynn and Kate, you know, drove off to the Southwest to tape
a video interview with Georgia O'Keefe. And went out to the Woman's
Building to, you know, learn from what Arlene Raven was doing there.
I was reading Heresies, I was reading Chrysalis, I was
published in both of them. My feminist "Crisis of feminist film criticism"
piece was published in Heresies. In 1976, I had met Joan Braderman
at a huge anti-bicentennial march? In Philadelphia? She was involved
with Heresies and said, "You have to start publish in Heresies,
we're doing this special issue, can we have your piece?"
Um, I was hooked up with Chrysalis,
through [sounds like--Lenny/Rennie Kay (?) and Arlene Raven who I got
to know. And she wanted me and Michelle Citron, who was then teaching
at, uh, Northwestern, to put together a special section on women's
films and feminist filmmaking. And we thought that Chyrsalis
had the wrong idea. We thought that they had a really backward view.
Of what feminist film should be, so we decided we were going to put
together this huge, encyclopedic insane special section. On women's
films, and all kinds of people. Wrote entries for this. And then
Chrysalis folded before it ever got printed. I still have it in
a file folder somewhere.
And again, these worlds for me weren't
very separate. I was writing about my friends' work. I was interested
in photography, I had started, I was a photographer, and still was following
what was going on. I was following Holly Sigler's work, and on and
off throughout the years wrote about that. I don't know, I think that
there was kind of exuberance to the feminist enterprise that crossed
the discipline lines that the boys were still paying attention to.
And so we were able to cross those lines
along with that, along with that spirit and energy. And it made life
a much more interesting place, really, to be. Um, yeah.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Well, something very funny
happened when I arrived at the New York State Council on the Arts. Because,
um, a lot of women thought that since I was now here, finally, like
life was going to be a Utopia. And one of the groups that I met with
was called Women Make Movies. And it was a small filmmaking collective,
that taught filmmaking to ordinary women. Uh, they did production workshops,
that was also very much a part of that feminist impulse. From the 'seventies.
When I went to look at the organization, I didn't like what I saw,
I thought that they were just using this as a slush pile for their own
work. They weren't really doing workshops.
I was very stern. I don't know, I was
taking my job very seriously. And I defunded them. That's what I did
when I got there, and there was this uproar! That you know, here this
feminist lesbian had arrived at the Arts Council, and had defunded this
group. That had been supported for years. Um, and so one of the interns
came to talk to me about what they could do to get the funding back.
And her name was Debbie Zimmerman. And
I said, "Well, I think distribution, the distribution part of what
you're doing is really good. Why don't you expand that?" That's
my recollection anyway, maybe she'll tell a different story. And so
she took over, and I immediately restored funding to them, and doubled
it and tripled it, and it became one of the most successful organizations
that I funded in that period. ….sorry.
Productions grants, for filmmaking, were
relatively new then. They had only begun to be able to start funding
individual filmmakers in 1976 with special money for the Bicentennial.
And I arrived in the beginning of 1981. So it was just five years into
being able to do it. And the way in which women didn't show up adequately
was that there was a huge emphasis on avant-garde film. As defined
by the boys, mostly. As the "artistic" kind of film that the Arts
Council should be supporting. And what I tried to do very fast, was
expand that. Um, to a much larger group. Because of course experimental
film was changing at this time as well.
Uh, feature filmmaking was started. Documentaries
were flourishing. And so I tried to really expand the vision of what
was an appropriate use of um, the state tax money. For filmmaking. And
almost inevitably, almost immediately, um, it was very easy to kind
of see a lot of women getting funded. It was nothing that I had to really
impose, or think about-although I was accused, by some of the
old guard, of avant-garde male filmmakers. Who now felt pushed
out. I was accused. Of having these instituted quotas and having them
for women, and have an ideological you know, row to hoe, but it really
wasn't true.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: I don't know what the answer
is to that.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Um, well I was, I was fighting
uh, through some of this period, with the women from Camera Obscura.
Journal. Because I felt they had this psychoanalytic line, that had
been laid down over everything and began to smother what I saw. As this
great lowering. Of experimentation and creativity and imagination.
So I was often fighting with them, in
the late 'seventies and early 'eighties. Um, I used to call them
the "Obscurettes." And so I got this hilarious phone call last year,
from Patty White, who is now on the editorial board. Of Camera Obscura.
Asking me if I would join their editorial advisory board. And she said
the question that they had before asking me was, "For how many minutes
would I laugh, when I got this phone call?" Because it was kind of
a laying down of very, very old swords.
But of course by now, the Journal's
complete different. It's not what it was back then or what I objected
to back then. Um, uh, Laura Mulvey, who had been my uh, good friend
uh, in the 'seventies, uh, had gone in very dif-, opposite theoretical
directions from me, and we never really fought but we kind of had less
and less, to do with each other. Uh, when I was involved with Jump
Cut in the late 'seventies, I had been fighting very vigorously,
with Teresa de Laureates and Steven Heath over their elitism.
And many years later, oh! In, must have
been the late 'eighties, I was at a conference, with Theresa, at Bellagio.
And the night before the conference we spent the evening in Milano together
and she wanted me to meet some of the Italian women from the feminist
bookstore collective. And we were walking back to our lodgings at the
end of the evening, and uh, having had a bit of wine to drink, and she
turned to me and said, "You know? I used to hate you!" And I said,
"Yeah, me too," you know. "Isn't it good that time is over."
So I think by now a lot of us, um, who
survived those fights? Bloodied but, you know, relatively unscarred?
Are kind of like the old CIA and KGB agents who get together for reunions.
Who else? Knows what we were fighting over. Who else is interested in
these issues, that have really been consigned. To a sort of historic
scrap pile that people don't seem all that concerned about anymore.
So it's kinda fun. I, I don't know that I have any enemies left,
from those old days.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: (overlap) Well! I
think, I think in the art world, um, feminism had a huge impact, because
who was I meeting at this time? You know, Ana Mendieta was my good friend.
Um, uh, her death was an enormous moment, in the history of the later
days of this kind of thing. Um, the kind of work that Lucy Lippard was
writing about, the site-specific work. Um, a lot of women were doing
work that incorporated their bodies, instead of the body being the enemy.
Uh, a female body being the enemy of an artist or the muse for an artist-suddenly
it really became? Not just the stuff of work but the tool of work?
Um, the kind of films that Carolee Schneemann
did. Uh, the kind of work that Barbara Kruger began to do? I met Barbara
Kruger for the first time down at Linda Cates' loft (?). Or Reed (?)
Morton's work. This was my tragic involvement with the art world,
I'd gone away to Latin America for four months. I'd taken a leave
from my job at the film center, and we had sublet our loft to Reed (?)
Morton. And we came back from Latin America, after four months, arrived
at the loft that night, to discover, that Reed Morton had been in a
terrible car accident and was hovering between life and death.
And all of her stuff was there in the
loft and we didn't want to move anything, we, I was sure that if we
moved anything. It would change the energy and make her die. And so
we kept everything exactly as it was. Stayed with a friend, and then
she died. And her daughter had to come back and clear all of her fantastic
work. Out of our loft.
So my sense of the feminist movement
then, was that women were kind of strumming the art world. The kind
of work that my friend Holly did that rejected. The male standards of
mastery, she was celebrated as a photorealist painter, and I mean, absolutely
rejected it. Turned her back on it, and began to paint in a mock primitive
style, like a folk artist. To reclaim a female voice. I was very, very
aware, of that. And I think that early filmmakers like, Yvonne Rainer,
Chantal Akerman, Sally Potter, uh, uh, Ulrike Ottinger, did a similar
thing for filmmaking at that time. That they began to move out of old-fashioned
narratives. Began to pick up with the kind of energy that came out of
something like the Warhol scene.
Began to pick up some of the energy that
came out of European art cinema. And think about new ways of telling
stories. And new kinds of bodies to tell stories with. Um, and I think
that that, you know, had a very short-lived place, and then very quickly.
Got taken up. By you know, new genres, different ways of making films.
Um, new productions scales that required more money. And (voice trails
off)
I think you see it happening again, with
video. I think you see some women once again. Charge through in a kind
of feminist wave, into a new kind of fresh video practice, in the '80s.
And then you see it with the new queer cinema again, although
on a much more minor note. Gets dominated by the guys, they're the
ones that can get the money. But Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner come
in and make Go Fish. Lisa Cholodenko comes in and makes High
Art. Uh, Cheryl Dunye comes in and makes Watermelon Woman.
Um, and uh, there's tons and tons of videos are being made, by all
kinds of women, uh, doing terrific work.
And this creates a new platform, from
which, once again, a style gets consolidated, and the guys gets advanced.
I think that's what happens, I think a lot of these doors get broken
down, by the women, and then later by these um, queer women filmmakers,
and then it shifts. You see something like um, Trinh Minh-ha changing
the shape of a certain kind of experimental film. In the 1980s, and
that's very powerful. Where she's taking on ethnography and anthropology
on one hand. But she's also taking on a kind of national parochialism
and/in a system of a different kind. Of Third World inclusiveness.
And that's very powerful for people.
Uh, nowadays you see somebody like Lucrecia Martel, in Argentina, doing
La Cienega, and La Niña Santa, and putting women's stories,
and women's way of observing life, and … let me start that again.
Right now you see somebody like um, Lucrecia
Martel. In Argentina. Making a very new fresh kind of Latin American
Cinema that's all about. A woman's vision, and it's very subtle.
It's all about how women look, how women observe. What makes sense.
What you notice. And she's constituting new kinds of narratives around
that that are just wild. That are completely uh, unwilling to
stop at any boundary. And so that in La Cienega, you know, drunken
mothers are falling out into the glass, and the girl is climbing into
bed with the maid, and the brother's sleeping with his father's
mistress. And the sexual order is really thrown up in the air. So much
so that she caught the attention of Almodóvar, and he and his brother
produced her new film, La Niña Santa, the Holy Girl. That's
about young girls fuse eroticism with religion. And the, the complete
disaster that that can lead to.
So I think there's still places around
the world, where these kinds of sparks are being set off. But the kind
of moment that you had in the 'eighties, when women like um, Allison
Anders are really kind of getting…let me think…
But I think that the kind of openness
that you found at an earlier moment of fea-- American independent feature
movement, the Indie movement, when you had people like Allison Anders
being able to work really productively, uh, Nancy Savoko (?) being able
to work really productively. Uh, Susan Seidelman being able to get bankrolled-that
moment kind of vanished, in a rush for the boys.
And so I think there's, you know, it
wouldn't be bad, to have another round on this. But there's not
a vocabulary for doing it anymore, frankly. Every time that I'm on
a panel to discuss women's filmmaking, or a feminist film, or why
isn't there more representation? You can't get anyone. To agree
on even the basic facts or the basic contours.
And women will sit there, young women
will sit there on the panel and say, "Oh, but those other women did
it wrong, I'm doing it right, I know how to take meetings," you
know, "We're being trained…" And every time, I end up having
to act up. And I stop the panel, and I say, "This is not about
personal style. This is not about how good or bad you are at
this. Don't kid yourself. This is systemic, and come back in five
years and talk to me."
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: I think sexuality was very
central and at the same time very fraught, in those early years. You
know, Carolee Schneemann was almost alone, in terms of what she was
doing. Uh, although there was this notorious piece that was made by
Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Uh, called Rape about aligning a woman
being pursued by a camera, with the act of rape.
Um, with Carolee, it wasn't that, it
was all about using the camera to create a kind of sexual vision,
to create a kind of sexual fulfillment. But I think that a lot of women
back then were really uneasy about it. You know, people were going around
making statements like, famously, "The women's liberation movement
is not a movement for sexual liberation." A lot of women were afraid
that if they took up the sexual subject matter, they would fall right
back into that, you know, lie on your back and enjoy it ethos of the
New Left, male hippie culture, that they were kind of crawling out of.
So I think there were a lot of, of double
messages. Um, at the same time there was all of this uh, of debate around
the "myth' of the female orgasm. Uh, there was the sense that women
would be had sexually. So not only was it maybe not fit for representation,
but, you know, what, how were women going to transform sex itself any
way? Um, then there was all this radical separatism that started up.
Some of what turned into Lesbianism, some of which didn't.
So there was a lot of staking out of
territory. Um, there was a lot of ideology that was too clear,
and yet there was a lot of confusion. So out of that, what kinds of
representations could you have? And I think that a lot of women felt
implicated in pornography. Because coming out of the '60s, you
were supposed to go to pornography. This was supposed to be "cool."
If you didn't want to go to pornography, you were some sort of puritanical,
old-fashioned woman. And so going into feminism out of that, you kind
of get the bends. You know, where are you supposed to go?
So on the one hand, there were these
wonderful celebratory kinds of films, what Carolee was doing. On the
other hand, there were women who said, um, women's bodies should not
be represented on the screen, because they're inherently objectifying
and exploitative, um, to do that. It's it's, I'm sorry…
Women's bodies shouldn't be represented
on the screen, because to do so, is inherently exploitative and objectifying.
And so you have somebody like the British um a- structuralist filmmaker
Peter Gidal saying, "From this day forward, I will not put women in
my films. Because," you know, "as a feminist, I cannot do this."
And um, then, uh, you have women trying to unpack sexuality in other
ways. So that you have Chantal Akerman using her own body, in Je,
tu, il, elle, to show herself in bed with another woman. This was
outrageous, and in later interviews, she actually said she wished she
hadn't done it, because she didn't realize, um, how this would kind
of haunt the rest of her career.
Then, Sally Potter makes Thriller,
which is all about unpacking the sexual myths of La Bohème,
and how women get used so men can be heroes, in the work of great, grand
opera. And this becomes a kind of sexual manifesto as well, because
at the very end, the two women, Mimi and Musetta, turn to each other
and say, "We never had a chance to know each other. If we had, maybe
we could have loved each other," and go to climb out the window. Um,
or rather the man goes to climb out the window, to remove himself from
the scene.
So, you have people playing with all
of this. Ulrike Ottinger, Madame X, the women sail off on a pirate
ship. And Yvonne Rainer, who's over in Berlin on a DAD grant, gets
on the pirate ship with them, and off they sail to found a new world
order, composed of, you know, erotic female sexuality.
Uh, it was an imaginative leap, to think
that women could represent sexuality on the screen, without somehow
being either condemned by it, without its being career suicide, without
being laughed at, or without being attacked by other women. Because
that wasn't any nicer, in those days. And it's only later, when
the larger social discourse around sex that evolves. After the 1980s,
after the fights on the anti-pornography movement and what I call the
"sex wars."
The um, the sex positive work
that got done. The kind of writing that got done by Carol Vance and
Ann Snitow and Janet Thompson, (???) and others. That you begin to have
a way of approaching this material on screen. And then you begin to
see much more daring. You begin to see films that can take this up.
And so ultimately now we have films like Catherine Breillat's um,
really groundbreaking. Films she makes in France. Or the work of Linda
Williams, the scholar, in Analyzing Pornography, and imagining
how women relate to that.
But, you know, you're talking about
different decades. Uh, Carolee Schneemann has already been diced and
shredded by the time these larger debates come along and are able to
kind of create a level playing field. And then she comes right back.
And then, you know, she gets sort of searched out and celebrated and
becomes a kind of goddess figure to a whole new generation of women.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Huge. Huge.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: But when Marcia Tucker put
on um, the Bad Girl show up in the museum, that was, you know,
another signal moment. Um, of trying to say, Okay, what does it mean
to be a bad girl in the art world? And my favorite exhibition then was
the, the San Francisco women who worked, someplace like Lusty Lady and
took photographs of their customers. And had these amazing. Black and
white photographs of her customers in their booths. Jerking off or doing
whatever they were doing, while she was performing.
I asked her how she was ever able to
get those images and she said she gave 'em a discount.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Uh, but, you know, the, the
kinds of systemic battle lines that were drawn were really clear, at
the time of um, Ana Mendieta's death. When even some of the best-known
feminist art critics and feminist artists wouldn't come to her defense.
And wouldn't testify at the trial. And wouldn't help to convict
Carl Andre.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Because they were um torn
by split allegiances? And were too connected? To Carl Andre from the
old days of minimalism. To be willing to go against that male establishment
that immediately closed ranks around him. All of the male artists …put
up the money for his very expensive defense attorney. Um, Rauschenberg,
all the rest of them. And even the Guerrilla Girls. Were so split. By
differences. That they weren't even able to put out a fucking poster.
In her defense. That was a sad moment (speaking very softly)
for what's happened.
LH: [Question inaudible]
BRR: Nineteen-eighty-five. And
Barbara Kruger. Was one of the only women. From the art world. That
came to that trial every day. And saw what he was saying and what he
was lying about. Because he told the art world not to come. "Don't
come to this." And therefore they never heard the testimony. They
never heard what he had actually done. Or what he was suspected of doing.
And Barbara Kruger, and Nancy Spero were the two artists that came.
And oh, what's her name…the Italian woman…(speaking very softly)…she
was the only other one. And that was it.
Um, and uh, you know, Nancy Spero and
Barb Kruger were terrific…I'll never forget that. Other than that,
you know, the women that came to that courtroom, it was like a wedding.
The groom's side was absent. The bride's side was packed. With artists
of color. Cubans. A few, few, few, few really staunch feminist artists,
and those of us who were (?) the artist's friends.
LH: What advice would I give young
artists today?
BRR: What advice would I give
to young filmmakers? Um, the film schools are full of women now. But
there also filled with ideology that says that you will fail or succeed
purely on the basis of your own talent and brilliance. I would advise
women to not believe that? I would advise women to make really strong
contacts, with each other and with the men who are willing to be true
collaborators. And I would advise them to kick out the stops. To kick
through the plasterboard. I would advise them not to spend five years
working on their screenplay, like some women I know.
I would advise them not to make polite
films. I would advise them to make the lowest budget films they can,
and the strongest voices they can, and to learn a lesson from the whole
Riot Grrrls movement in music. In the old days I never would have believed
that women would have broken through in rock music and not in film.
That would have been absolutely inconceivable to me. And yet that's
what happened.
And um, you know, I remember when Sadie
Benning, first made her Fisher-Price pixelvision videos, and got celebrated
all over the world by the time she was eighteen. And then kind of ran
away from it. I remember thinking, why aren't more women doing this?
Where's all the rest of them? Well, we're in a whole new technological
moment again. When You-tube and podcasts are for a minute, just for
a minute, scrambling the hierarchies. And I would say, Get in there
fast. It's all gonna coalesce again.
The walls of the Red Sea are parting
and they come back really fast. But you know, Stuart Hall, in his work
in cultural studies has always pointed out, that amidst these hegemonic
structures, there's always points of contradiction. There's always
windows of opportunity that you can sneak through, when the gears are
shifting. And I would say, Sneak through and keep going, and don't,
like Lot's wife, turn back to see if anyone's gaining on you.
LH: Anything else?
Interviewer II: …you obviously
need support…critical…
BRR: The whole question of critical
and popular support is a really crucial one. Part of the reason that
the feminist art movement could happen, was that there were feminists
writing about art. Part of the reason that the women's film movement
could happen was that there were women starting magazines to write about
them. Um, part of the reason that underground film could happen way
back when was that there was an underground press.
Part of the reason that the anti-Vietnam
War movement could happen the way it did was because there was an underground
press. So, coverage is really crucial. Debate is really crucial. Um,
I think kinship systems are really important. I think networks of/and
friends are really important. So I would say, have a lot of parties.
Play in traffic. Find backers. Don't be doctrinaire. Accumulate allies.
And I think that men have a great ability to do this. Men have a great
ability to get their game together, to be generous to one another and
you end up with entourage, right?
Where's the women's version of entourage?
I don't think it's really Charlie's Angels-maybe that's as
close as it gets, but that would be depressing. So I would say that
there need to be some girl gangs. That women need to take a page out
of the Riot Grrrl's book. Take a page out of the Bitch magazine book.
Um, and figure out, um, a DIY system that can work again.
Uh, the problem is, that women never
feel safe enough to do that. That women never feel confident enough
to do that. There's a terrible lack of generosity because everyone
can see there's not enough to go around. They don't believe, that
by getting more, everyone can get more. That more is more. Um, I like
to think that women's sports helps this. I like to think that women's
soccer helps this. That there's a way in which um, u h, team spirit
uh can be taught (…?), in schools, in a way that wasn't possible
pre-Title IX, when I went through. But so far, I can't say I've
seen it. Carried through.
Um, I'm always optimistic, though.
I think the technological changes right now, create a possibility, for
a kind of amnesiac optimism.
[End of Part 1]
Part 2 of 2
BRR: And of course there were
lots of conflicts in this period too, and lots of, you know, mud wrestling,
dirt fights. Over different kinds of issues, and one of the big issues,
in the '80s, was around race. Because, it had become apparent that
the um, women's movement seemed to have, you know, evolved into this
very middle-class white feminist movement. That was um, you know, just
ridiculous in terms of the kind of organizing that could go on, the
kind of issues that should have primacy, and this erupted into the world
of, of film making and video as well.
So that there were um a lot of fights
over who was getting to define what the turf was. You know, why were
the white women the ones that were getting the grants, and then, you
know, maybe a few women of color would be invited to a conference. Who
was getting uh the productions green-lighted, who was getting to define
issues. And I remember this very contentious conference at Hunter College.
In the '80s in New York. That left a lot of bruised feelings.
Um, Coco Fusco was beginning to write
about um, uh film and video at that time, wasn't yet doing performances
or making pieces. She was often found at the kind of fault line at some
of these sorts of fights. Uh, Trinh Mihn-ha was a very big voice in
them. In terms of requiring/inquiring, or rethinking in terms of, you
know, who were the self or who the other really were in these situations.
And I think that was immensely healthy,
I think that a lot of important work came out of it. But it was very
bruising. For some of the women involved with it. Uh, class became an
issue. Sexuality became an issue. I remember uh Sheila McLaughlin ripped
out of a projector in London, the women furious that she had made a
sadomasochistic film-hardly! I mean, I, I show it to students
now, and they say, "Where? Where? What were they talking about?"
And yet at the time, you know, this was
beyond the bounds. So, lots of these kinds of line kept being drawn,
and battles being fought, over sexuality. Over um, uh, the place of
lesbianism, and feminist film, I remember being part of the Jump
Cut special issue on Lesbian film actually denouncing all feminist
film theory for excluding lesbianism.
And so these fights really um, were being
joined pretty reliably every half decade. And really never resolved
then, you know, sort of moving on, to the next battlefront. And I was
often moving between them, because I was doing a lot of international
travel. I was going to Cuba, I was going to Latin America. I remember
taking a print of Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames" to the first
Rio film festival, just at the end of the dictatorship. Or going to
Cuba, where uh Delphine Seyrig the late, great, Delphine Seyrig, was
fighting with the Cuban men, over the lack of representation of women
video artists.
And, you know, and, and we're, Maria,
Maria Russo Bemberg's film was playing that starred Julie Christy
as Miss Mary, or where Susana Amoral, the mother of nine, from São
Paolo, who'd never made a film. Till she went to NYU film school was
there, with her film, "The Hour of the Star." Based on the work
of, of, um, Climis (?) La Specter (?), who was hardly even known. In
the United States then. One of the greatest Brazilian writers. So there
was a lot of ignorance. There was lot of um, uh, myopic vision. There
were a lot of the field that was being defined, exclusively, through
a certain theoretical lens that left out Latin America, that left out
lesbian thinking, left out um, women of color. Left out um, uh, lesbian
work-left out all kinds, of issues and rallying cries that
should have been part of it.
And at the same time, I always felt,
that, it was obvious to me, whole kinds of issues weren't exactly
theorizable. Who was writing theory about women's shelters? Who was
doing films about um, the battered women's movement, apart from the
anti-porn crowd, whom I didn't agree with. Um, who was really looking
at questions of domestic violence back then? Um, very few. It was being,
there was, there was almost as though these gulfs sprung [sprang] up,
between the political work on the one hand, the film making or video
work on the other, and the academic theoretical work. And that the worlds
that were all together when I started out, um, had become separate domains.
Separate specializations. Separate vocations.
And I think it takes times of extraordinary
trouble, extraordinary crisis, to bring these worlds back into discourse
again, and I'd like to think, that in this um post-9/11 moment, this
moment of horrific militarization. This time of horrific privatization.
Um, disenfranchisement of all of us. That some new alliances will be
able to come about. [? Nearly inaudible]
[End of Interview]