Feminist Relationality in the Americas: Women’s Practices in Filmmaking & Quilting

Amy Reid
Film and Digital Media
UC Santa Cruz

My dissertation includes my experimental documentary entitled Grandmother’s Garden, as well as community-based screenings of this film and 1970s feminist films through the Gravitational Lensing series. Grandmother’s Garden touches on the interrelated subject matter of my 1970s case studies—gender, national identity, and labor employing similar experimental documentary methods. Additionally, the Gravitational Lensing screenings are informed by the ways feminist films were being screened and distributed in the 1970s—in consciousness-raising meetings, in cooperative distribution models, and in other non-institutionalized methods of showing work.

While each chapter focuses on a particular facet of feminist film practices, interwoven are personal reflections on both creative chapters and how they relate to broader questions of feminist screening cultures, participant/filmmaker relationships, and affective forms of labor within filmmaking. These reflections are informed by how feminist modes of scholarship—auto-ethnography, memoir, and oral history exchanges—entangle the relationship between theory and practice and complicate the relationship between scholar/filmmaker and subject. This interweaving speaks to an overarching provocation my dissertation interrogates: How can feminist film histories of the long 1970s be generative for myself and other feminist filmmakers today?