About this Event
An evening of short films and discussion with curator and scholar Erika Balsom.
(Multiple Artists, 1965-1982, multiple formats, approx. 77 min)
The wave of feminist film festivals that swept New York, Paris, Toronto, and Chicago in the 1970s represented the first essential step in charting the vast history of filmmaking by women. But the work of rediscovering, recirculating, and recontextualizing women’s cinema is never done. Perhaps no recent undertaking has proved this point so dramatically as No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, an expansive exhibition and screening series organized by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg and exhibited at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in the summer of 2022.
No Master Territories uses an intersectional, inclusive lens to survey dozens of short and feature films—in Balsom and Peleg’s words, “moving image works by and about women, made in defiance of commercial norms, that seek to invent new languages for the representation of gendered experience.” This program brings together three exemplary works that collectively attest to the diversity and depth of the exhibition as a whole. The screening will be introduced by Balsom, who will also appear after the screening for discussion.
SCHMEERGUNTZ (Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley, 1965, 15 min, USA, 16mm)
In a dynamic, poppy montage, flashes of dirty diapers, pregnant bellies, used tampons, and vomit puncture the glossy perfection of television and magazine images. A screening of the film at a meeting of the New York Radical Women in August 1968 sparked the idea to protest the Miss America pageant the following month.
MI APORTE (Sara Gomez, 1972, 33 min, Cuba, Digital)
Sara Gómez began working at the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) in 1961, two years after its founding, and went on to direct 20 films there before her death in 1974 at age 31. Begun in 1969, My Contribution was commissioned by the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, the organization responsible for advancing the rights of women after the revolution, yet was censored upon completion. With keen attention to the experiences of Afro-Cuban women, Gómez throws into relief the tension between the promises of the Cuban Revolution and the reality of women’s lives.
MISS UNIVERSE IN PERU (Grupo Chaski, 1982, 45 min, Peru, Digital)
The backbone of Miss Universe in Peru is found in a juxtaposition of two events that took place simultaneously in Lima in July 1982: the Miss Universe beauty pageant and the sixth national congress of the Confederación Campesina del Perú, an agricultural labour association. With an eye for irony, Grupo Chaski ― a collective of Peruvian filmmakers ― conducts interviews and refilms television broadcasts to craft a pointed indictment of how gender intersects with race, class, and ongoing forms of coloniality.
Individual film descriptions courtesy of Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg. 16mm print of SCHMEERGUNTZ courtesy of Canyon Cinema.
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Erika Balsom is a scholar and critic based in London, working on cinema, art, and their intersection. She is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London and holds a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.
See her website at erikabalsom.com.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, United States
USD 0.00