Alexandra Juhasz (ed.),
Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video.
Visible Evidence, vol. 9. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
ISBN: 0 8166 3372 X
343pp
US$22.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Women of Vision consists of the author’s introduction and afterword and twenty interviews with women involved in the filmmaking, production, distribution, scholarship, archiving, and promotion of feminist film, video, and other visual media. The order of these interviews is based on the ages of these women: Pearl Bowser, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, Kate Horsfield, Margaret Caples, Julia Reichert, Michelle Citron, Vanalyne Green, Constance Penley, Susan Mogul, Carol Leigh, Juanita Mohammed, Wendy Quinn, Victoria Vesna, Valerie Soe, Yvonne Welbon, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Cheryl Dunye, Eve Oishi, and Megan Cunningham. The order of the interviews in the book differs from Juhasz’s documentary video of the same title, which is divided into three half-hour segments: “Creating an Infrastructure,” “Mothers, Lovers, and Mentors,” and “Reassembly Required” (32-33).
The idea behind changing the order of the transcriptions of these interviews in the book is to allow readers to make their own connections and conclusions.

The central theme is “the reclaiming of power through interactive remembering of feminist media history” (ix). Juhasz defines feminist media as “the diverse work with or concerning film, video, television, and digital production made by those who critique the many inequitable power relations that limit women” (1). According to Juhasz, feminist media production exists within the field of alternative or independent media and is created outside of the “sanction and profit motive of the industrial model” and has been, since the 1970s, an important “site of personal, social, and political action for American women” (1-2). Other important themes are the need for infrastructure and material support for various aspects of feminist media production and preservation, the need for a reflexive methodology that embraces the making of feminist media and the study of feminist media history (xi), the need for cross-generational conversation concerning feminist media and involvement in its activism and thus its history (x), finding continuities, conflicts, and confluences, and challenging the cycle of knowledge of feminist history and feminism.

Identifying and discussing this cycle of knowledge is one of the most compelling accomplishments of this book. Juhasz begins by explaining in her introduction the pattern of the cycle of knowledge: “feminists exist and are forgotten, make their work and see it disappear, are remembered and get lost, are rediscovered, erased, and represented yet again” (2). Juhasz remarks that she is always amazed and saddened that so few of her students, even those committed to learning more about the topic, know so little about feminist history. Today, professors must elucidate the most fundamental aspects of feminist history (for example, describing the similarities and differences between first-, second- and third-wave feminism) because students either have not learned about feminist history before or, more likely, were not aware of how feminism has affected them. Painter, artist, and filmmaker Carolee Schneemann describes this cycle beautifully during her own interview:

It’s what I call ‘missing precedence,’ because if I don’t have a realm of precedence, then I’m anomalous and my experience is constantly marginalized as being exceptional in that there is no tradition, there’s no history, there’s no language. But there is history, tradition, and language (69).

Many factors contribute directly to this cycle. The videotape, a common storage device used in feminist media for its accessibility, low cost, and compactness, is prone to all kinds of preservation problems. They are disintegrating in the archives. According to Schneemann, the National Endowment for the Arts had completely cut all funding for preservation, including videotapes, in the 1990s (72). In her interview Kate Horsfield (artist, administrator, and co-founder and current director of the Video Data Bank) cautions that the lack of funding that has affected the preservation of feminist videos means that “only Hollywood and television will remain as an indication of the ideas of any given generation” (96-97). Another factor is the systematic dismantling of the infrastructure that had supported emerging alternative filmmakers financially or through means of access to equipment, education on aspects of filmmaking, video production, and distribution, archives, and to other people creating feminist media who meet at conferences, festivals, and exhibitions (15-17). Margaret Caples, executive director of Chicago’s Community Film Workshop, explains that less grant money and more competition for remaining funds has been discouraging for those devoted to making or becoming involved in alternative media (114); experimental filmmaker and film production professor Michelle Citron (Northwestern University) observes that ever-increasing incentives to move from the margins to the mainstream also threaten feminist media (139-40).

Several of the interviewees also discuss several kinds of resistance to feminism that have had an impact on feminist media history. Juhasz mentions that this resistance has also contributed to the missing precedence (4). From the outside, there is the stereotyping and criticism of feminists and the misunderstanding of feminism altogether. From the inside, there is the very rejection of the word “feminist” by those who associate it with its ugliest aspect: exclusion. Feminism has excluded women of color, women of certain (particularly lower) social classes, women of certain religious beliefs or atheists, women who are gay or bisexual, women from outside the United States, and men who have either wholeheartedly participated in and supported feminism or men who have sincerely wanted to be allies. Yvonne Welbon, who was completing her PhD at Northwestern University and has made autobiographical art videos, owned her own film company, and produced narrative films at the time of her interview, explains her avoidance of applying “feminist” to her work and to herself:

It seems, from the little bit I know about early feminism, it wasn’t very inclusive of black women. And then, what I know of black women’s history is that we were always feminists. We were always doing stuff from before early suffrage. Black women were doing a lot of things, and white women didn’t want to include them. In theory, yes, I have to be a feminist, but I’ve never really used that word to describe myself (271).

Feminism has also excluded people who work as prostitutes and pornographers who believe they are feminists. Carol Leigh, a sex worker and activist filmmaker who works in cable access, discusses how she remains on the outside of feminism, how feminists reject her work (which encourages people to have control over their bodies, promotes acceptance of differences, and applauds risky sexual behavior), and how she has faced censorship (207, 208). In academia, Constance Penley and Eve Oishi have faced obstacles in their explorations of pornographic literature, films, cults, and conventions.

Diversity or multiculturalism in feminist media receives a lot of attention throughout the book. The interview with Pearl Bowser, a scholar, teacher, documentarian, and curator of early black cinema, touches on the black presence in American film history. The interview offers information about race films, black women who have worked in all aspects of cinema, and how Bowser has traced names of black Americans, involved in films but uncredited, through black newspapers and publications. Video-maker Valerie Soe discusses her frustration with receiving grants for her identity work (documenting Asian-American experiences) and not for other projects (249).

There are several perceptive discussions of art and activism or art versus activism. Documentary filmmaker Julia Reichert identifies more with being a leftist activist than as a filmmaker; for her, filmmaking, controlling distribution, and educating are activism. Wendy Quinn, the program director of Chicago’s Women in the Director’s Chair (WIDC), is involved in media education, increasing access also through festivals and exhibitions, and controlling distribution. Although she has worked in video production, she sees herself as an activist rather than an artist (227). Video and film-makers Frances Negrón-Mutaner and Cheryl Dunye consider the relationship between film spectators and film. While Negrón-Mutaner sees her image as changing, depending on her audience (284-85), Dunye is interested in having audiences more like herself, a black lesbian, cross over to see her work, and refuses to be changed by commercial desires (298-99). Juhasz discusses a rift between scholars (outside practice) and creators (inside practice) of feminist media, realizing that perhaps this rift is ending through better communication between the two, new emphasis in film and media programs to combine criticism with practice, and the emergence of scholar-media makers such as herself, Welbon, Negrón-Mutaner, and others interviewed (277).

It is unfortunate that a book of such potential scholarly and practical influence and sizable length does not have an index, which would have offered additional points of access and organization especially for readers who do not recognize the names of women interviewed for this project. The URLs cited experienced minimal link rot (recall the book was transcribed and published in 2001). Photographs of the interviewees add something tangible to these woman and their work, but it would have been helpful for the book also to have provided pictures of the equipment used to make films as well as storage devices, which would have helped those less familiar with the equipment visualize why women would have trouble handling certain kinds of cameras and why certain kinds of media could not be preserved in the short or long run.

Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith
Louisiana State University
Created on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004 | Last Updated: 4-May-04