The filmic mode: Feminist art practices and the avant garde in North America and Britain during the 1970s

This dissertation charts the emergence of a feminist avant garde in North America and Britain in the 1970s. The artists involved turned to film to develop new aesthetic forms for the social and political challenges of the Women's Movement. Filmic concerns such as narrative, duration, and point of view enabled the emergence of feminist practices. Film was widely perceived as a more radical art form; it promised a more actively involved, that is, "productive" viewing experience. The engagement with the trope of production is a revival of debates central to political modernism, and I connect the 1970s feminist interventions to earlier, better known traditions in the European avant-garde. The first two chapters deal with the relationship between European avant-garde documentary and US formalist experimental film. In a close analysis of the Berwick Street Film Collective's experimental documentary film Night Cleaners (1975), the first chapter situates the dissertation in relation to film theoretical debates in post-May '68 Britain and France. Yvonne Rainer connects sexual difference to new kinds of narrative organization to overcome the opposition between politically orientated avant-garde film in Europe and formalist (structural) avant-garde film in New York and London (chapter two). In chapter three I trace the transformation of the trope of production in relation to female-specific labor and reproductive labor in works of photography and film by the American artist Mary Kelly. The photographic works of Jo Spence and Terry Dennett (chapter four) reconnect to film and photographic practices of the inter-war avant gardes, this work is driven by the feminist intersection with working class history, radical pedagogy, and new film theory. In chapter five I chart a shift in the work of American artist Martha Rosler from the idea of the image of female sexuality as fetishistic consumption in performance, photomontage and video to other ways of figuring sexual difference and consumption through the recorded maternal voice. This study shows for the first time the effects of a feminist political transformation on avant-garde practice in the 1970s and demonstrates that an engagement with feminism and film enabled the reassertion of a political understanding of the modernist project.