Alexandra Juhasz (ed.): Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video (2001)

“Legends and rising stars of feminist film and video tell their stories.

Alexandra Juhasz asked twenty-one women to tell their stories-women whose names make up a who is (and who will be) who of independent and experimental film and video. What emerged in the resulting conversations is a compelling (and previously underdocumented) history of feminism and feminist film and video, from its origins in the fifties and sixties to its apex in the seventies, to today.

Women of Vision is a companion piece to Juhasz’s 1998 documentary of the same name. The book presents the complete interviews, allowing readers to hear directly the voices of these articulate, passionate women in an interactive remembering of feminist media history. Juhasz’s introduction provides a historical, theoretical, and aesthetic context for the interviews.

These subjects have all shaped late twentieth-century film and video in fundamental ways, either as artists, producers, distributors, critics, or scholars, and they all believe that media are the most powerful tools for effecting change. Yet they are a very diverse group, with widely varying personal and professional backgrounds. By presenting their interviews together, Juhasz shows the differences among those involved in feminist media, but also the connections among them, and the way in which the field has been enriched by their sharing of knowledge and power. In the end, Juhasz not only records these women’s careers, she broadens our understanding of feminism and shows how feminist history and documentary are made.”

Interviewees: Pearl Bowser, Margaret Caples, Michelle Citron, Megan Cunningham, Cheryl Dunye, Vanalyne Green, Barbara Hammer, Kate Horsfield, Carol Leigh, Susan Mogul, Juanita Mohammed, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Eve Oishi, Constance Penley, Wendy Quinn, Julia Reichert, Carolee Schneemann, Valerie Soe, Victoria Vesna, and Yvonne Welbon.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2001
Visible Evidence series, 9
ISBN 081663372X, 9780816633722
343 pages

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Film: Women of Vision: 18 Histories in Feminist Film and Video (1998, 83 min)

Lillian Ross: Picture (1952/1988)

In the spring of 1950, when New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross heard that John Huston was planning to make a film of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, she decided she would follow the movie’s progress “in order to learn whatever I might learn about the American motion-picture industry.” What resulted was Picture, which Newsweek has called “the best book on Hollywood ever published.” Picture received raves from the worlds of film and literature in equal measure for its unforgettable portrait of the language, the ways, and the preoccupations of Hollywood: Charlie Chaplin called Picture “brilliant and sagacious” and legendary editor William Shawn termed it “the definitive book on the Hollywood community.” Little wonder, then, that when the Top 100 Works of U.S. Journalism of the Twentieth Century were chosen by the New York University Department of Journalism and a distinguished panel that included David Brinkley, Pete Hamill, Jeff Greenfield, Mary McGrory, and Morley Safer, Picture had an honored place on that list.

Originally published in The New Yorker
Publisher Faber and Faber, 1998
ISBN 0571191924, 9780571191925
386 pages

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William J. Mitchell (ed.): The Language of Images (1980)

“A remarkably rich and provocative set of essays on the virtually infinite kinds of meanings generated by images in both the verbal and visual arts. Ranging from Michelangelo to Velazquez and Delacroix, from the art of the emblem book to the history of photography and film, The Language of Images offers at once new ways of thinking about the inexhaustibly complex relation between verbal and iconic representation.”—James A. W. Heffernan, Dartmouth College

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1980
ISBN 0226532151, 9780226532158
307 pages

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