Headlines and Hearsay: Reporting from Experimental Women Filmmakers

Hearsay, gossip, rumor—information about others outside of official channels like classrooms and newsrooms may easily be dismissed as unreliable. But what can we learn when we take gossip seriously? And what can experimental film show us about unsanctioned testimony? Featuring all women directors, this collection of experimental films shares a common element—news reporting.

Each film is an example of reworking, reviewing, or retelling around news reportage. With an eye to feminist theory, this program builds upon interrogations of knowledge access and credibility. Take part in an evening of reflection upon the blurred line between headlines and hearsay.

Featuring

Ransom Notes, Kelly Egan (US, 2011, digital, 5 mins) 

The ransom note, in our collective imagination, is an interesting entry point to the politics of ownership, freedom and exchange value, made by transforming mass media (newspapers) content into a personal message – the re-appropriation of language and meaning through the act of collage. Ransom Notes explores this as a means of sorting out the filmmaker’s experience of feeling hijacked during the Toronto G20 Summit and subsequent riots of June 2010. 

The Task of the Translator, Lynn Sachs (US, 2010, digital, 10 mins) 

Lynne Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains. 

Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS, Barbara Hammer (US, 1986, digital, 8 mins) 

"I first heard of AIDS in 1985 when I was teaching at Columbia College in Chicago. I noticed the strange and inflammatory articles in the newspapers and I asked my students to collect hysteric headlines for me. And so I began my work on Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS. I examined the public ignorance, stigmatization, and just plain wrong attitudes towards this new illness. By making a snow storm of newspaper clippings I could show what a 'snow job' the media was making." — Barbara Hammer 

Miss Jesus Fries on Grill, Dorothy Wiley (US, 1973, 16mm, 12 mins) 

"Miss Jesus Fries on Grill is a mysterious striking evocation of pain and the short-circuiting sensations of living in this predicament of death. It is a short film and again the color is fine and sharp as a good paring knife. Beginning with a newspaper clipping, written in a remarkably detailed manner of a bizarre accident in which a Miss Jesus was killed when a car smashed into the cafe where she was eating. The impact threw her on the grill, heated to 500 degrees." – Mike Reynolds, Berkeley Barb

Souvenir of Lebanon, Carolee Schneemann (US, 1983-2006, digital, 6 mins) 

 "Souvenir of Lebanon follows a long video pan through destroyed Palestinian and Lebanese villages. In 1982-83, Israeli ceaseless bombardments destroyed bridges, farms, roads, hospitals, schools, libraries, apartments, and historic sites and towns dating back 2000 years. The live color footage was received unexpectedly from an anonymous news photographer. It is intercut with black and white disaster stills I re-shot from daily newspapers, edited in juxtaposition with color slides of bucolic Lebanon given to me on the day the Lebanese tourist bureau in New York city closed." 
 
"Souvenir of Lebanon is the video component for the kinetic sculpture War Mop; a flailing motorized mop rises on plexiglass cams and is dropped, slapping the video monitor every eight seconds. The sound on the video recorded layers of reverberation as the mop hit the monitor." — Carolee Schneemann 

Exhibition, Mary Helena Clark (US, 2022, digital, 19 mins) 

Exhibition moves through gallery rooms and archives, compounding multiple biographies into a single imaginary subject. A woman marries the Berlin Wall, stabs a Velásquez painting as an act of protest and longing, declares herself a doorknob, and plumbs the erotics of the Klein bottle. Using citation, appropriation, and museological forms of display, the film is a meditation on the assertion and refusal of subjecthood. 

Curated by Arcadio Andrea Oranday as part of the Film Studies Center’s Graduate Student Curatorial Program. Presented with support by The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.