FUTURE FEMINIST ARCHIVE
MARGOT NASH &
N ATA L I E K R I K O WA
Women’s Gaze
& the Feminist
Film Archive
It is time to return to what feminism has to tell us.
It is time to make the case for what women have to
say about the perils of our modern world.
JACQUELINE ROSE, 2014 ¹
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Women’s G aze and the Feminist Film A rc hive × M a rg ot Na s h & Nat a l i e Kr i ko wa
The Australian feature film renaissance and the emergence of a new ‘women’s cinema’
occurred at the same time, but the story of feminist filmmaking in Australia is less
well known and in danger of being forgotten. The mainstream film renaissance of
the 1970s was concerned with nationalistic artistic longings and the desire to com-
pete with European art films at Cannes and Hollywood at the box office. But the new
‘women’s cinema’ arose from other more complex desires. Second wave feminism was
sweeping the world, offering women an analysis of male power and female subjec-
tivity. Women wanted to create alternative images of women to those offered by the
dominant white male patriarchy and epitomized by the Hollywood dream machine.
Women had mostly been excluded from active participation in the ‘new wave’ film
movements of the 1960s. Now there was a growing hunger amongst young feminists
to gain access to the means of production and to make films about women’s issues.
These included discrimination against women, domestic violence, sexuality, beauty
and body image, and the notion that women’s ‘place’ was in the home not in the pub-
lic sphere. Films that emerged spoke of women’s passionate desire for justice and
freedom, of the quiet desperation of many women’s lives, and of stories of resistance
ignored in the history books.
Martha Ansara, who was a member of the Sydney Women’s Film Group, lat-
er wrote:‘In 1971 some of the members of the burgeoning Sydney women’s libera-
tion movement decided to add films to the collection of pamphlets we were writ-
ing, printing and distributing. Since there were no appropriate films around, we
decided to make our own’.² The Sydney Women’s Film Group was formed and one of
the first films to come out of it was a short called Woman’s Day 20c (1972) - about a
housebound mother addicted to barbiturates. In Melbourne, photographer Sue Ford
made Woman in a House (1972), exploring the same issue. These films, and many of
those that followed, were part of the feminist movement’s intention to ‘politicize
personal life and to rediscover the historical causes of women’s exclusion from the
public sphere.’ ³
Film theorist Lesley Stern described the new ‘women’s cinema’ at the time as
‘the irruption of a cinema which marks its ‘independence’ not as national, but as
sexual.’ ⁴ It was to be a transformative cinema, reflecting women’s desire for funda-
mental economic and political change in their lives, as well as in the representation
of women in film. Film scholar Felicity Collins described second-wave feminism as
a ‘crisis’ of female subjectivity.⁵ Another scholar, Mary Tomsic, suggests that ‘when
we focus on the history of feminism in the 1970s feminist filmmaking should not be
neglected, as it is an invaluable “case study” of a moment of feminist history.’ ⁶
In November 1973 women gathered from across Australia for ‘Womenvision’
at the Sydney Filmmakers Coop, where the Sydney Women’s Film Group was based.
This event led to the 1974 Women’s Film Workshop and in 1975 to the International
Women’s Film Festival where films by women from all over the world screened, along-
side local women’s films, to packed houses in every capital city of Australia. The Syd-
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FUTURE FEMINIST ARCHIVE
ney Women’s Film Group campaigned for a 50% female student intake at the newly
formed Australian Film and Television School and for a Women’s Film Fund, which
was established at the Australian Film Commission in 1976.
But at the same time as women were gaining access to the means of film pro-
duction, women academics were arguing that it was crucial to change the language of
film itself – to develop a more dynamic relationship where a film is seen as a text, pro-
ducing meanings, and engaging the viewer in the production of meaning. Questions
of audience became both crucial and problematic. As Lesley Stern wrote ‘It becomes
a question of changing people’s minds, of producing new and different meanings, of
winning audiences, but that which escapes the hegemony of the dominant ideology
cannot be by definition popular.’ ⁷
The landmark Film for Discussion (1973) was made by the Sydney Women’s
Film Group over a three-year period with a grant of $1700 from the Experimental
Film Fund, some funds of their own and $800 of government money. Martha Ansara
directed and Jeni Thornley played the main character. The drama scenes were work-
shopped collaboratively with no script. Ansara used a social realist style influenced
by documentary filmmaking, Marxist feminism and the radical feminist movements
in the US and UK. In Melbourne, actors Robin Laurie and Margot Nash looked to the
American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, the French surrealists, Godard and
the American WITCHES (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell)
for inspiration. They called themselves the Anarcho Surrealist Insurrectionary Fem-
inists or AS IF. They wrote a feminist manifesto, produced a poster and two issues of
a magazine. In 1976, with $1300 from the Experimental Film Fund, they produced
the third issue of AS IF in the form of a 13 min, 16mm film titled We Aim To Please.
Theoretical arguments raged within women’s film groups and amongst
academics. In 1975 British academic Laura Mulvey published her short polemical
essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.⁸ She could not have anticipated the
widespread impact the essay’s psychoanalytic formulation of a ‘male gaze’, and its
condemnation of classical Hollywood cinema’s patriarchal bias, would have. The
essay provoked readers, provided grounds for debate and presented an alternative
viewpoint from the existing theories on spectatorship within academia. In Aus-
tralia, Lesley Stern argued that, through utilizing psychoanalytic and linguistic
theories, it was possible to avoid essentialist notions where women were equated
with nature and where the idea of a suppressed essential feminine waiting to be
liberated could be challenged.⁹
Some women’s films produced during this time, both in Australia and abroad,
were dense and theoretical, whilst others were playful, humorous and experimen-
tal. Susan Dermody in her article Not Necessarily a Lead Dress argued that many
feminist films were groundbreaking formally and to see feminist filmmaking as
heavy handed or leaden is to misjudge a group of films that were both adventurous
and often innovative.¹⁰
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Women’s G aze and the Feminist Film A rc hive × M a rg ot Na s h & Nat a l i e Kr i ko wa
FIGURE 3 Jeni Thornley in Film For Discussion (1973) and later in Maidens (Jeni Thornley 1978)
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FUTURE FEMINIST ARCHIVE
In 1977 a program of films by women called Womenwaves toured the country,
screening at filmmakers' co-ops and video access centres. That year also saw the first
‘advanced training’ course for women at the Australian Film and Television School.
The course ‘attempted to improve the standard of women’s technical competence,
and through that build up their confidence to seek advancement in a variety of work
situations in the media.’ ¹¹
In 1978 a ‘Feminist Film Theory and Practice Discussion Weekend’ at Minto
(NSW) was held where feminist filmmakers and theorists came together to debate
ideas. It was an initiative of the Feminist Film Workers who formed in 1978 as a splin-
ter group of the Sydney Women’s Film Group to focus specifically on education, dis-
tribution and exhibition of feminist films.
In the same year Gillian Armstrong directed the landmark My Brilliant Career,
which was the first commercially released feature film to be directed by a woman
since Paulette McDonagh directed Two Minutes Silence in 1933. Less well known
is the fact that in 1978 Aboriginal activist, Essie Coffey, became the first Aboriginal
woman to direct a film. Her documentary My Survival as an Aboriginal was filmed
by Martha Ansara, who also mentored Coffey.
Jeni Thornley’s groundbreaking experimental film, Maidens, also appeared in
1978. It traced the lives of four generations of women in her family, and documented
a time when feminists were questioning their relationships with men and exploring
different kinds of relationships with women.¹² It was a deeply subjective exploration
of a time when the personal was political and the idea that women could change the
world was challenged by the complexities of reality. Sarah Gibson and Susan Lam-
bert’s Size 10 (1978), about beauty and body image, and the collectively produced
history of women’s work, For Love or Money (begun in 1979 and completed in 1983),
were key feminist films from this era. Both examined the issues of public and private,
self and society and the transformation of women’s lives; both were distributed wide-
ly and reached broad audiences.
These legacy films are part of a larger body of work by women, which has pro-
vided the foundations for much cultural work by third wave feminists. Whilst fem-
inism has evolved, feminist projects continue to analyse identity, gender roles and
representation in new ways. ¹³ Third-wave feminists, whose interests vary and often
intersect gender, queer and race studies, are now working across multiple platforms
in a digital world and discovering new audiences.
In 2015, forty years after International Women’s Year, second and third wave
feminist filmmakers continue to produce cultural works as activists for change.
As film stock crumbles and precious works lie neglected in lost rooms, the cre-
ation of a digital feminist film archive with links to an adequately financed National
Film and Sound Archive, seems all the more urgent.
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Women’s G aze and the Feminist Film A rc hive Ma rg ot Na s h & Nat a l i e Kr i ko wa
FIGURE 4 Robin Laurie and Margot Nash in We Aim To Please (1976)
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FUTURE FEMINIST ARCHIVE
Margot Nash is a filmmaker and a Senior Lecturer in Communications at the
University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) where she teaches screenwriting and
Alternative Australian Film history. Her latest film ‘The Silences’ (2015) is a per-
sonal essay documentary about family secrets and her relationship with her mother.
Natalie Krikowa is a transmedia story producer currently undertaking a DCA at UTS.
Her research interests include film, digital media and transmedia practices. Her
principal supervisor is Margot Nash.
Women’s Gaze and the Feminist Film Archive
Curators: Loma Bridge, Margot Nash, Jeni Thornley
Co-ordinator: Sarah Attfield
Film For Discussion, We Aim To Please, Maidens, My Survival as an Aboriginal, Size
10, and For Love or Money will screen in their entirety in the Sydney College of Arts
Gallery as part of the ‘Future Feminist Archive’ exhibition.
The Women in Film and Television (WIFT) group was formed in 1982 and continues
to work on improving the position and representation of women in the film and tele-
vision industries through screenings (WOW), mentoring and lobbying.
1 Rose, Jacqueline (2014), ‘Preface’, Women in Dark Times, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, x.
2 Ansara, Martha (1978), ‘Program Six. Films By Women’, Filmnews, vol. 8, no. 9, September, 15.
3 Collins, Felicity (1998), ‘The experimental practice of history in the filmwork of Jeni Thornley’
http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fir598/FCfr3a2.htm
4 Stern, Lesley (1985), ‘Independent Feminist Film-making in Australia’ in An Australian Film Reader,
edited by Albert Moran & Tom O’Regan, Sydney: Currency Press.
5 Collins, Felicity (1998), ibid.
6 Tomsic, Mary (2007) ‘“We will invent ourselves, the age of the new image is at hand”: Creating, Learning and
Talking with Australian Feminist Filmmaking’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 22, no. 53, July 2007, 288.
7 Stern, Lesley (1979), ‘Independent Feminist Film-making in Australia’, The Australian Journal of
Screen Theory, nos. 5-6, 108.
8 Mulvey, Laura (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 6-18.
9 Stern, Lesley (1979), ibid.
10 Dermody, Susan (1988), ‘Not Necessarily a Lead Dress: Thinking Beyond “Redress” in Women’s Films’,
Signs of Independents: Ten Years of the Creative Development Fund. Comp. Megan McMurchy and
Jennifer Stott, Australian Film Commission, Sydney, 11-15
11 Stott, Jennifer (1987) ‘Celluloid Maidens: All teched-up and nowhere to go’, in Don’t Shoot Darling:
Women’s Independent Film-making in Australia, edited by Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed and Freda
Freiberg, Melbourne: Greenhouse Publications, 6.
12 Collins, Felicity (1998), ibid.
13 French, Lisa (2003), ‘Preface’, Womenvision: Women and the Moving Image in Australia,
Melbourne: Damned Publishing, 9.
