Overview

Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the rebellious, feminist punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s, tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new “punk audio visual aesthetic”. A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture, Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.

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9781788313995

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Reviews

Girls to the front! Garfield's book places female filmmakers at the forefront of experimental film and video. Reclaiming the energy of punk, DIY, deflation, the kitchen table aesthetic and the amateur to enthuse a new generation of filmmakers, where the emphasis is on making and being heard rather than slick production values and aspiring to mainstream monotony. Oh bondage! Up yours! I wish I'd had this book growing up. -- Abbe Leigh Fletcher, Kingston University, UK Densely research, fiercely argued, Garfield's book goes a good way toward toggling our view of punk and No Wave film toward the exhilaration of feminist autonomy. -- Michael Atkinson, Long Island University, USA Experimental Filmmaking and Punk is the rare study that not only captures subcultural counter-histories (in this case, of music and film) but traces social, political, and aesthetic interconnections that have never fully been acknowledged, simultaneously offering a completely new way of thinking about life and creativity in this place and time. -- Amelia Jones, University of Southern California, USA

Girls to the front! Garfield's book places female filmmakers at the forefront of experimental film and video. Reclaiming the energy of punk, DIY, deflation, the kitchen table aesthetic and the amateur to enthuse a new generation of filmmakers, where the emphasis is on making and being heard rather than slick production values and aspiring to mainstream monotony. Oh bondage! Up yours! I wish I'd had this book growing up. -- Abbe Leigh Fletcher, Kingston University, UK Densely research, fiercely argued, Garfield's book goes a good way toward toggling our view of punk and No Wave film toward the exhilaration of feminist autonomy. -- Michael Atkinson, Long Island University, USA

Author Information

"Rachel Garfield is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Reading, UK. She an artist who works in video and also writes on contemporary art. Garfield is the Principle Investigator of a large Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded research project ""The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin"" (2019-2021)."

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