About

My research proposes to examine collaboration in feminist artist filmmaking. I will explore collaboration in relation to two organisational principles of the Women’s Liberation Movement, decentralisation and plurality, through the work of artist filmmakers Petra Bauer, Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Alex Martinis Roe and Rehana Zaman, who currently make work with community and activist groups. These will be discussed alongside feminist collaborations, collectives, and organisations working in experimental film and video and active in Britain between 1970 and 1986, a formative period for the development of film as a critical feminist and Marxist practice. Through intergenerational dialogue I look to critically examine collaboration in relation to social, political and institutional developments, and their relationship to the motivations and methodologies for collaborative organising and making. I will further discuss these historic and recent works in relation to public sphere theories; by situating feminist artist filmmaking within the cultivation of counterpublic discourses, I aim to extend collaboration purely beyond co-authorship to encompass the production and circulation by individual makers of multiple feminist discourses. By reading these works in this way I hope to interrogate how we define collaboration and how these questions can contribute towards the creation of collective space and the knowledge produced within these.