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COPYRIGHT 2003 Duke University Press
No woman is filmed as an object; everyone is a subject who combines and presents physical, emotional, intellectual, and political selves.
--Julia Lesage, "The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film"
Feminist Collaborative Video
Feminist video does collectivity exceedingly well. (1) Certainly other politicized cultural movements and individuals work through this method, and, of course, feminists also produce work in collaboration in film and other media (as Julia Lesage testifies above). However, I assert that there is a profound natural mechanics to women's work in video that makes the medium's method, theory, and theme the interactive and politicized subjectification of the female sex. Film and patriarchy share the project of women's objectification--they make victims. Video and feminism see women as complex, worthy selves--they produce subjects. In feminist collaborative video, the medium (inexpensive, debased, nonprofessional), the message (woman, as subject, needs to be constructed), and the ideology (the personal is the political; process over product) align into a near-perfect praxis. I should know: as producer and advocate of a great many such projects, I have found a beauty, synchronicity, and power in the process of making and screening feminist collaborative video that is, in these moments at least, almost emancipatory. And thus, this warning: though it is always postulated as an ideal, there is little writing about the realized feminist collaborative video. Here I will look at RELEASED: Five Short Videos about Women and Prison (a project I produced in 2000) to trouble, and sometimes celebrate, the neat alignment between video, subjectivity, collectivity, and feminism.
Setting the Scene(s)
The scene of class domination is the same as the scene of voyeurism, both depending on an unspoken desire of the object of the bourgeois subject's knowledge repossessing her power in difference.
--Lauren Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary
The art of punishing then must rest on a whole technology of representation. The undertaking can succeed only if it forms part of a natural mechanics.
--Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
The classic victim documentary scene, like that of voyeurism or class domination, demands (at least) two players, separated by power but drawn by desire, who agree to engage together in an art of punishing that reenacts the object's previous victimization through a procedure of representation. Produced with the intention to reveal and heal injustice and pain, such performances serve primarily to cement the systems of domination, suffering, and pleasure that form the natural mechanics of both the original punishment and its depiction. In this way, the documentary exchange is also like the prison. Both systems weaken some and strengthen others, using technologies of vision and distance, all the while buttressing hegemonic power. In both the prison and the documentary, the one charged with vision wields power. Distance and difference, in both scenes, force or coerce silence and testimony in turn. Class, race, and gender relations structure these interactions and are thereby solidified. And, by maintaining the classic position of subject/object, the victim documentary also necessarily reestablishes the inside/outside binarism that is not merely metaphoric but definitive of imprisonment.
Are there alternatives to restaging victimhood in prison, documentary, and similar theaters of punishment? As a feminist documentary scholar and video maker, I felt this as an overriding concern in producing the activist art video RELEASED. Given that female inmates of American prisons are victims of state, social, and ideological systems (not only incarceration but also welfare, racism, sexism, and physical, emotional, or drug abuse) that punish them for their usually victimless crimes; given that a special condition of their punishment is a near blackout of portrayals of their pain and suffering in and out of prison; given that the most common response to such a predicament is the unleashing of that tired tradition, the victim documentary; and given that the victim documentary performs the work of revictimizing, I struggled to represent women's victimization in prison in ways that challenged these harms without perpetuating them. While there is one strain of feminism, victims' rights, that has reconceived and valorized the victim position to some real political success, as a feminist video maker keen on re-visioning punishment, I had different priorities.
So I looked to another tradition--the victim critique--extolled by a variety of linked artistic/political/theoretical traditions, but manifested most holistically in feminist methodology and the (at least) thirty-year documentary tradition it has inspired. In Feminism and Documentary, editors Diane Waldman and Janet Walker insist that "feminist filmmakers have thought long and hard about the politics of people filming people." (2) This has resulted in a counterdocumentary practice that they call "shared-goal filmmaking" (18). Similar linkages built across the documentary scene have been named "continuity of purpose" and "third voice" in feminist anthropology, "collective ethical accountability" in queer film scholarship, and "radical reportage" and "committed documentary" in film studies. (3) But what makes feminist collaborative documentary unique is that the linking of politics, method, and theory defines and indeed created the field: it is foundational, not ancillary. "Feminist documentary filmmaking is a cinematic genre congruent with a political movement, the contemporary women's movement. One of that movement's key forms of organization is the "affinity group," (4) writes Lesage.
Collaboration is the obvious and ubiquitous alternative to victimhood. Since the late 1960s, an affinity with collectivity has been shared by the interconnected women's, countercultural, and other liberation movements, and it has been manifested in the organizing, political art, and research they produce. "THE FEMINISTS is an organization without officers which divides work according to the principle of participation by lot," the group of women with this name proclaim in their early-1970s manifesto. "Our goal is a just society all of whose members are equal." (5) As in politics, so in political art: "If we propose freedom, we need to create our works in a libertarian manner. If we speak of nonhierarchical solutions and inventive leaps, we must make them in the process as well as the resultant art work," expounds Judith Malina on her anarchist group Living Theatre. (6) Film and video, too, were produced collectively during this period--from Newsreel to TVTV--and this work and its radical process were linked to the ideas and practices of the counterculture, the New Left, or the women's movement. Similarly, feminist art, video or otherwise, was often produced through a collective process. In her essay "Collaboration," in The Power of Feminist Art, Judith Stein explains that "it was not until the seventies, with the renewal of feminism in America, that artistic collaboration became for many women a political act and a creative first choice." (7) Antihierarchical, process-oriented, less costly, populist, and user-friendly collective political production has worthy goals wherever it is practiced. "Our intention is to minimize the tendency in all research to transform those researched into objects of scrutiny and manipulation. In the ideal case, we want to create conditions in which the object of research enters into the process as an active subject," write sociologists Joan Acker, Kate Barry, and Johanna Esseveld about their feminist research methodology. (8)
The countertradition of victim critique forefronts the contradictions that are always set in play, yet typically remain repressed when affinity, pleasure, and danger are mobilized by an art of punishing that objectifies one and subjectifies the other in the name of knowledge and control. The collaborative documentary is more nuanced or self-aware about the relations of mutuality existing between even those who are separated by technologies of vision and pain. The feminist documentary video that emerges is as varied as the methods with which practitioners experiment and the causes with which they...
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