Filmmaking as women: Glitch Feminism

06/19/23 • 7 min

Part 3. Discussions from filmmakers responding to what Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism idea and how they use it in their practice.

‘Being a black woman in the world means a lot is expected and asked of you... the place I can set my strongest boundaries is in the digital realm’ ‘Apps like Natural Cycle where suddenly we’re using technology to liberate our bodies from traditional medicine and that in a scewed way maybe is a form of cyber-feminism and enters into that world’

Featured short films by artists Salome Asega, Ain Bailey, Anaïs Duplan, Caspar Heinemann, shawné michaelain holloway, Zarina Muhammad, E. Jane, Jenn Nkiru, Tabita Rezaire and Victoria Sin.

Glitch Feminism embraces the causality of 'error' and turns the gloomy implication of 'glitch' on its ear by acknowledging that an error in a social system disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, cultural stratification, and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization—processes that continue to enact violence on all bodies – may not be 'error' at all, but rather a much-needed erratum.

Recorded 17 November 2017.

Credits

Editing: Millie-Beth Wright

Sound: Justin Tam

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Part 3. Discussions from filmmakers responding to what Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism idea and how they use it in their practice.

Featured short films by artists Salome Asega, Ain Bailey, Anaïs Duplan, Caspar Heinemann, shawné michaelain holloway, Zarina Muhammad, E. Jane, Jenn Nkiru, Tabita Rezaire and Victoria Sin.

Recorded 17 November 2017.

Credits

Editing: Millie-Beth Wright

Sound: Justin Tam

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Filmmaking as women: On performing

Part 2. Both Subrin and Syms create narrative works about how women are presented and documented through film and social media.

A Woman, a Part, dir. Elisabeth Subrin, USA 2017 (starts at 17 sec.)

‘I was thinking a lot about performance and what it requires within capitalism to be a person in an economy where you have to perform to survive... I don’t think one can be completely authentic and actually make a living.’‘People don’t change in ninety minutes, I wanted the film to talk about how hard it is to change.’

The feature-length narrative debut of filmmaker and artist Elisabeth Subrin. The film is a critique of how women are portrayed in media, the ways in which personal relationships intertwine with and shape the creative process, and the difficulty of change – all set against a gentrifying New York City.

Recorded 7 July 2017.

Incense, Sweaters & Ice, dir. Martine Syms, USA 2017 (starts at 13 min. 11 sec.)

‘Many women are required to perform emotional labour to succeed, or are expected to.’

Shot on location in Los Angeles, Chicago and Clarksdale, Mississippi, the new feature-length work by artist Martine Syms travels from the rural South to the Northeast, Midwest and West, following routes of the 20th century Great Migration of African-Americans. This multi-location narrative is never overtly region-specific, yet is psychogeography in origin. Similarly, ambiguous, the camera occupies multiple vantages in the film including WB, the interviewer and the omnipotent observer, serving to chart the ways we document ourselves and the lives of others.

Recorded 2 November 2017.

Credits

Editing: Millie-Beth Wright

Sound: Justin Tam

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

Momtaza Mehri: the limits of identity politics, symbolism and Beyoncé

This episode was picked and edited by Amrit Sanghera, one of the ICA’s Public Advisors.

What happens when powerful black women use their positionality to push their identity as cultural product or representational symbol, and how useful this is for the interests of working class Black women?

Momtaza Mehri explores the slipperiness of female power, agency and identification. She touches on the pleasures Black women experience in the symbolism and imagery of powerful figures such as Beyonce and Michelle Obama.

The recording was part of a series of Black feminist programmes exploring pleasure as a politics of refusal, recorded on 9 November 2019.

Editor: Amrit Sanghera

Mixing: Justin Tam

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.