Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s

Description

Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the rebellious, feminist punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s, tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new "punk audio visual aesthetic". A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture, Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.

Rachel Garfield is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Reading, UK. She an artist who works in video and also writes on contemporary art. Garfield is the Principle Investigator of a large Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded research project "The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin" (2019-2021).

Girls to the front! Garfield's book places female filmmakers at the forefront of experimental film and video. Reclaiming the energy of punk, DIY, deflation, the kitchen table aesthetic and the amateur to enthuse a new generation of filmmakers, where the emphasis is on making and being heard rather than slick production values and aspiring to mainstream monotony. Oh bondage! Up yours! I wish I'd had this book growing up. -- Abbe Leigh Fletcher, Kingston University, UK Densely research, fiercely argued, Garfield's book goes a good way toward toggling our view of punk and No Wave film toward the exhilaration of feminist autonomy. -- Michael Atkinson, Long Island University, USA Experimental Filmmaking and Punk is the rare study that not only captures subcultural counter-histories (in this case, of music and film) but traces social, political, and aesthetic interconnections that have never fully been acknowledged, simultaneously offering a completely new way of thinking about life and creativity in this place and time. -- Amelia Jones, University of Southern California, USA Garfield writes a new lineage of experimental film, convincingly rendering the filmmakers' shared stance of "oppositional modernism". Celebrating edgy incompleteness, rhythm rather than plot, multiplicity instead of unity, DIY instead of glossy production values, Garfield sides with the heady, messy and personal. -- Abigail Child, Emeritus Professor, Tufts University, USA Experimental Filmmaking and Punk restores complexity and nuance to an inspiring body of work that has, until now, been under-known and under-valued. Rachel Garfield draws on her deep knowledge of the punk movement to shed light on a generation of important yet marginalised female filmmakers. Exploring the impact of punk's anti-authoritarian spirit, she discusses how women refused gender norms in 'art' as well as 'life.' The DIY and kitchen table aesthetics described here are bound to resonate with the prosumer tactics of contemporary artists and cultural producers. -- Helena Reckitt, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Rachel Garfield searches out the scuzzy filmic scenarios, kitchen table aesthetics and DIY approaches that characterise the "punk films" of overlooked feminist artists in the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, Experimental Filmmaking and Punk convinces us to look beyond the avant-garde milieux of the day and instead towards punk rock to understand why these women made the films they did. Whilst not forgetting the importance of pioneering filmmakers that came before, Garfield shows how punk exemplars of gender non-conformity like Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex and Ari Up of The Slits demonstrated a riotous new ethic of self-fashioning for feminist filmmaking. As Styrene herself sang: "Anti-art was the start"! -- Gavin Butt, Northumbria University, UK