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...performance work became a catalyst for the emergence of feminist consciousness in this sphere. Schneemann was a forerunner of performance art and new media installations before there were terms in place to describe such work. However, up to 1968, women artists working in performance were marginalized in both the realms of production and exhibition, thus little critical attention was paid to such works. It was not until art works by this group of female artists shifted the "collective thinking about art" that the imbalance in the New York art world began to change. (1)
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Schneemann's particular experiences of marginalization extended beyond the visual and performance art circles of 1960s New York. She was also struggling both against sexism within the avant-garde film movement she contributed to and against neglect by feminist film theorists. This paper suggests it was Schneemann's emphasis on the primacy of the female body as tool of feminist resistance that marginalized her work amongst such theorists. At the time, the newly emerging feminist consciousness in film theory was uncertain how to incorporate the sexualized, erotic and self-produced image provided by Schneemann. For most feminist theorists, it was indistinguishable from the objectified female image actively being resisted.
David James locates the unique position feminist film criticism found itself in during women's liberation struggles in the 1960s and 1970s as one with a "double relation" to cinema. Women's particular exploitation in cinema "corresponded not to their exclusion from the filmic but to hyper-exposure within it ... a use that was thought ipso facto to objectify women and to repress their own sexuality." (2) In light of this, Schneemann's film Fuses was "defused and diffused by the terror (her) vision evoked." (3)
Early feminist audiences did not meet the overt sexuality of a female subject of Fuses warmly. Rich (4) reflects that during one particularly heated screening audiences
were outraged by ... Carolee for giving head ... out there on the screen. The practice was ruled subservient and antifeminist. A woman, any woman, performing a blowjob, bigger than life, on film, was not yet acceptable ... The fact that Carolee was simultaneously "actor" and director was lost on [the] crowd.
What is troubling is that traces of these early strains of feminist thought have shaped and created our present perspectives, and can still be found operating in contemporary feminist film theory. The misreading of Schneemann's work, then and now, indicates that early influential critical positions need to be reassessed for what they left out.
Reflecting on early feminist films from the 1960s, and on Carolee Schneemann's film Fuses in particular, I wish to propose a generic category indexing a particular trajectory within the history of feminist film practice. The proposed category--erotic self-portraiture--describes self-reflexive films in which the artist's body figures prominently as an erotic subject. Although there are many instances of erotic self-portraiture present in the corpus of feminist cinema, it remains an under-explored area within film theory. In outlining the parameters of this category I hope to provide a frame for the productive engagement with female-authored films, which may have been overlooked in the formation of the feminist film canon.
There are three central elements that define erotic self-portraiture as a generic category. First, such films are self-shot, thus freeing themselves from the control of an external, potentially misogynistic eye. Second, erotic self-portraiture asserts the presence of the female body as a site of pleasure and desire--as something to be celebrated, not merely consumed. Third, is the use of hand processing techniques (5) within such films, effectively inserting the embodied presence of the artist into the act of production. (6) Through an investigation of Fuses, I wish to suggest that erotic self-portraiture provides a crucial intervention into both conventional cinematic representations of female sexuality and the discourse surrounding such representations within feminist film theory.
At the 1967 Cannes Film Festival Carolee Schneemann screened her film Fuses...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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