These manifestos are written by a partnership between two artists who work and live together , by a collective group of women working in film and video and by a single film-maker. They could be said to represent differences between avant-garde, industry-led, and documentary perspectives on women’s film and video production. All are searching for another language, another form of representation, and other models for women than those espoused in dominant practices in art, video and film practices. How they think of these opportunities to change representation for “another” future is the subject of this part of the lesson.
Maria Klonaris / Katerina Thomadaki
Manifesto for a Radical Femininity: For an Other Cinema (1977)
The text is available in the ebook in English and on the artists’ website in French. It was first published in French in CinémAction I, Dix ans après mai 68, Aspects du cinéma de contestation, Paris, 1978. The date in the ebook is the date of writing.
About the Artists:
Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki are media artists of Greek origin who have been living and working in Paris since 1975 together. Visit their website. Their work is the result of their extensive collaboration in life and in art and is presented as a single “woman double author”. Maria Klonaris passed away in 2014.
About the manifesto and their work
The manifesto was a statement made to explain and advocate a very specific form of avantgarde film-making, which questions identity and identifications made between the viewer and the work as well as between women’s representation as singular/fixed and between women (one in front of and the other behind the camera).
The manifesto is closely associated with their first body of works (films and photography): Tétralogie Corporelle (Double Labyrinthe, 1976, L’Enfant qui a pissé des paillettes, 1977, Soma, 1978, Arteria Magna in dolore laterali, 1979), to which Ouverture, and Double Labyrinthe X Double Labyrinthe, 1977.
They describe these works in the following terms on their website:
Self-representation is double: one looks at oneself, and at the same time one looks at another, and, one after the other, the “I” and the Other usurp the space in which we express ourselves, in which we perceive. To pass in front of, and behind, the lens – this eye, open to the world – is to destroy the classic dichotomies of subject/object, acting/transcribing, seeing/being seen.
From this flux, from this double stimulation of glances, this interlacing of two bodies and two imaginaries, there emerged the language of the intercorporeal, a language which we have not ceased to explore since.
Their manifesto also ‘defined radical femininity as a “double drive – both female and male”. Their concept of woman as “all including” is opposed to the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan’s statement that “la femme n’est pas toute” (“woman is not entire”). Their concept of a doubling of drives combined with their analysis of the lack of a figure for the lesbian in positive terms led them to the synthetic gendered figure of the hermaphrodite, which they explored through the Louvre’s Greek sculpture of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite and through Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.
Double Labyrinth (1975-1976) is a key work in this period. It is described in the online ReAct.Feminism archive of feminism and performance art. The manifesto is wider than a justification for this work but it helps to understand how much of their work relates to the arguments in the manifesto as the works manifest their ideas.
In this video, Katerina Thomadaki introduces (in English) the screening of Double Labyrinthe (1975-76, dir Maria Klonaris & Katerina Thomadaki) at Fringe! Queer Film Fest. Saturday 17 November, 2018.
Let’s Look more closely at the text
The manifesto is in 3 parts:
1. ON A FEMININE CULTURE: OBVIOUS FACTS
2. VISION OF A RADICAL FEMININITY
3. PASSION FOR A RADICAL CREATION: THIS OTHER CINEMA
The “obvious facts” consider the position of women in culture and reiterate feminist analysis of the silencing of women under patriarchy are outlined in its opening paragraphs, but the language used is graphic and stark: “In this culture, woman is near-absent. Unknown. Ignored. Mute. Imprisoned. Despised. Deformed. Enigmatic. Inaccessible.”
The text then switches to stating how femininity is a fantasy built by men and supported by women.
If a feminine culture remains to be built, the possibility to do that lies with women who are not submissive to the current male order.
It is in this gap between male versions of femininity and a “self-revealed specific and unique female identity” that this culture will be built.
In their manifesto, in the long quote from Julia Kristeva, a different libidinal economy for women is endorsed which will be this deconstruction/reconstruction by women on the basis of risks and necessities, singularities and differences.
The idea of a feminine culture as a rupture in the dominant culture, a negation of its language is also endorsed. This rebellion will be situated in the body, in desire, sexuality, the unconscious, and a radical femininity.
The manifesto speaks of a radical femininity rather than feminism per se.
In the second part, they emphasise how women will break, shatter, crush, tear apart, invent, explode, rip her guts out, merge male/female energies…
They suggest that there should be a new kind of harmony between male/female traits and energies, a physical sex and a mental subjective sex.
These arguments use sex and gender against the contemporary established usages of the terms (over 40 years ago).
“A radical femininity can only be a whole – neither fragment, nor lack, nor deficiency”.
Identifying woman as a lack or deficiency (not-human) is a critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Enlightenment conceptions of woman.
In the third part, they list what will be shattered and torn apart by this new conception of “Unsubmissiveness. Independence. Rupture. Autonomy”.
The text switches to what will emerge, an “I” who will construct my own images, free my own introspection, expose my roots and sufferings…
“A haemorrhage of identity not mediated by anyone else, but fully asserted by myself in front of you”.
The process is likened to “giving birth”, sexual imagery (of the vulva and serpent combined) and of rituals to locate identity through actions in an exchange of looks where “I question you” and subject/object relations before and behind the camera dissolve.
The central claim of this future OTHER cinema is a new kind of assertion of women’s desire and sexual politics, a new kind of mental structure or geometry of desire. A new kind of woman-subject in film-making.
Further reading
Maria Klonaris; Katerina Thomadaki; Klonaris/Thomadaki (Duo artistique) Manifestes, 1976-2002 Paris : Éd. Paris expérimental, 2003 (Les cahiers de Paris expérimental)
It is also reproduced in Scott MacKenzie Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. (Blackwells, 2014)
This manifesto was crafted collectively and adopted by 80 women at the conference of feminist film and video organisations in New York, 2 February 1975. Documentation of the conference where it was written and endorsed as a collective statement can be found on Ariel Dougherty’s website.
To understand the significance of these 2 short paragraphs, I thought it might be appropriate to compare this proposal for women taking control and producing new forms of representation and distribution in the film industry with the criticism introduced 10 years later, known as the Bechdel Test, sometimes called the Mo Movie Measure or Bechdel Rule.
This is a simple test which names the following three criteria:
(1) a film has to have at least two women in it,
who (2) who talk to each other,
AND about (3) something besides a man.
A list of over 8000 movies and whether or not they meet this criteria is available at https://bechdeltest.com/
Clearly the few short paragraphs of the manifesto point to a wider aspiration for women’s film-making but this minimal test draws attention to the problem which persists in the film industry.
Feminist film makers have produced many remarkable and significantly different approaches to film criticism and feminist film criticism has produced many important and significant critiques of the representation of women in films, as well as analyses of women filmmaker’s work. New distribution networks were also established for this work, including film and video archives and independent cinemas, co-operatives and festivals. This manifesto was written as the very first formulations of these questions were being developed and as women film-makers started to come together to discuss, organise and arrange new distribution networks for their films.
Looking back on how feminist film analysis developed in the 1970s, B. Ruby Rich argued in The crisis of naming in feminist film criticism (Jump Cut, no. 19, December 1978) that the terms of the debate about artist’s film and video remain to be addressed. She begins with a quote from Adrienne Rich on the importance of naming tendencies in feminism and women’s histories:
“Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language — this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.” [1]
— Adrienne Rich
In the same article, Ruby Rich argues that this manifesto represents a refusal rather simply an analysis of the conditions women experience under patriarchy. Rich goes on to suggest, as the manifesto does, that we need new language in feminist film criticism to describe the different kinds of films women are actually making and what kind of feminism they represent in content, subject, film-making approach. Her suggestions were for four new categories as a means of naming the alternative forms of feminist film-making which had emerged in the 1970s. She argues for categories to grasp the range of women’s cinema prodution in terms of works that are 1) Validative, present 2) Correspondence, are 3) Medusan or 4) Projectile.
(see also Ruby Rich Chick Flicks:Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Duke University Press, 1998)
The future imagined and generated by these two paragraphs was realised by the activities of many women producing and contributing to feminist film-making. You can find these films in many archives and distribution centres and this movement continues through film festival circuits and special screenings of women’s cinema. Some of these festivals and archives are listed in the Feminist-Art-Observatory on KT press.
This manifesto is in the ebook. The artist, Julie Perini is a video artist and experimental filmmaker in Portland Oregon. Her website is: Julieperini.org
She describes her practice as working with handmade film, in documentary strategies, installation and other techniques to create experimental and often autobiographical films.
If you visit her website you can find examples from the Minute Movies are Julie’s daily video project since April 2011. She shoots one 60-second shot per day.
This video below was made for her University’s talks programme and she outlines her practice and concerns as part of their artist’s talks series.
Let’s consider the text of the manifesto
The manifesto is written as a series of straightforward negative and affirmative statements. A list of alternating “don’ts” and “do’s”.
In these statements she outlines both a critique and an actual practice of film-making.
What are the positive / negatives she outlines?
How do these ideas shift the relationship between the film-maker and their subjects?
Is relational film-making a new kind of ethics in film-making?
Is relational film-making a new kind of practice?
How does relational film-making shift co-creation, our sense of reality made in films, how does it interrogate the roles in film’s production and reception?
Let's discuss this in the Forum
How did you react when you read these three manifestos?
