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Anne Severson (On Near the Big Chakra)
Laura Mulvey (On Riddles of the Sphinx)
Yvonne Rainer (On Privilege)
Probably the most important film critical development since 1970 has been fueled by the larger feminist revaluation of Western culture. Of course, there have been feminist films as long as there has been critical filmmaking: Germaine Dulac's
Theme and Variation
(1925) was a feminist response to
Ballet Méchanique
; her
The Smiling Madame Beudet
(1923) prefigures Chantal Akerman's
Jeanne Dielman
. . . (1975); and Maya Deren's
Meshes of the Afternoon
can easily be understood as a feminist response to marriage. But the renaissance of pop and theoretical feminist writing in the sixties and seventies inspired, and was inspired by, a significant increase in the production of films that had as their central agenda a critique of the conventional cinema's imaging of women. During the past twenty years women (and men) have devised a variety of feminist tactics for confronting sexist dimensions of the commercial cinema, especially its depiction of the female body. The three films discussed in the following mini-interviews with Anne Severson (now Alice Anne Parker), Laura Mulvey, and Yvonne Rainer reveal a variety of these tactics.
As a filmmaker, Anne Severson was (she has not made films since 1974) a product of the sixties, especially the sixties' reaction to an earlier puritanism about the human body. For many sixties artists the body was a territory in need of liberation, both from the residue of Hays Office demands that it be hidden in film (more recently known as the Motion Picture Association of America, the Hays Office was the Hollywood censorship organization from 1922 on), and from the more general cultural assumption that sexuality was a moral issue, rather than a natural processan assumption that had been evident during much of conventional film history and that was equally evident in the new pornographic inversion of puritanism. Severson's earliest films confront these issues in several ways. In
I Change I Am the Same
(1969) a man and woman stand before the camera in brief alternating shots (the entire film is forty