Between frames: feminist experimental media 1960-2010

My dissertation maps a trajectory of feminist experimental media made between the 1960s and 2010 that explore the boundaries between bodies, spaces and media. I argue that this work constitutes an under-explored area within feminist film and media criticism, which requires renewed critical engagement from an interdisciplinary perspective. I develop a critical frame based on definitions of embodiment, liminality and intermediality from the discipline of performance studies. I focus on how these diverse art works engage with different formal thresholds including those between the art object, artist, and viewer within the exhibition site, and those between moving image, visual art, sculpture and performance. I argue these works pose a challenge to existing definitions of cinematic specificity and expand the significance of the medium.

I provide three comparative analyses of feminist experimental film and media made between the 1960s and the early 2000s. In the first comparison, I read together Carolee Schneemann's film Plumb Line (1967-72) and Yvonne Rainer's film Lives of Performers (1972). I argue Schneemann and Rainer share a formal aesthetic approach that positions both artists as author and image, employs the body as an art medium and critiques the dynamics of the male gaze within everyday life. In chapter four I consider how Canadian feminist experimental film during the late 1970s and 1980s employed different modes of inter-subjective address. I outline how Patricia Gruben, Brenda Longfellow, Kay Armatage and Midi Onodera construct liminal viewing spaces that blur the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic space in order to fully engage the viewer. In chapter five I examine the contemporary screen-based art of Shirin Neshat and Eija-Liisa Ahtila. I argue Neshat and Ahtila's use of intermediality includes a feminist critique of cinematic traditions and women's limitations within public and private life.

My dissertation concludes that this trajectory of feminist film and experimental media importantly troubles the boundaries of time and space, presence and absence, and subject and object, and expands the possibilities of the different media involved. I situate this research within the intersecting fields of performance studies and media studies. I aim to bridge the discourses of film and performance together, arguing that each discipline benefits greatly from the insights of the other.