Diffracted Landscapes by Irene Revell and Kerstin Schroedinger
What does a feminist landscape look like? Or rather, how does a feminist look at landscape? What if our (point of ) view is not a defining one? The landscapes we look at are not to be explored and occupied; but how does our gaze escape these tendencies? Teresa de Lauretis speaks about mechanisms of coherence: she espouses a fundamental suspicion towards narrativity and yet simultaneously argues for its re-articulation, in reference to the narrative strategies in Yvonne Rainer’s films.1 “[F]eminist work in film should be not anti-narrative or anti-oedipal but ... working, as it were, with and against narrative in order to represent not just a female desire ...; but ... the duplicity of the oedipal scenario itself and the specific contradiction of the female subject in it.”2 This duplicity is meant to be specific in regard to the history of cultural forms and also the contexts of reception. In analogy we assume a suspicion towards narrativity transfers to a suspicion towards a 360-degree pan, a full panoramic picture, a panoptic control scan, amidst other mechanisms of (visual) coherence.
Greenham Common and the Menstrual Hut The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (1981– 2000) was a women-only protest against the threatened deployment of nuclear cruise missiles at Royal-Air-Force Greenham Common in Berkshire, England. Numerous works were produced in this context that take activist, documentary, or social approaches. Within the Cinenova collection, the films also make wider connections with concerns of ecology and the (feminist) body, a coming-to-terms with a growing contamination of public (as much as personal) space.3 In her essay on artist Annabel Nicolson,4 Felicity Sparrow describes the entanglement of these spaces: “The tension between public and personal space, between introspection and action, were further developed, often collaboratively with other women, like the Menstrual Hut in Concerning Ourselves (1981) which literally created a private meditative space within a public art gallery.”5 The Women’s Peace Camp functioned as such a space of collaboration, being simultaneously inclusive and exclusive, public and private. This tension may, or may not, take form in a paradoxical structure, as much suspicious of spatial incoherence as coherence. Returning to de Lauretis, it is important to consider narrativity “strategically and tactically in the effort to construct other forms of coherence, to shift the terms of representation, to produce the conditions of representability of another—and gendered — social subject.”6
3
1 2
Cinenova distributes The Man Who Envied Women (1985) and Privilege (1990) by Yvonne Rainer. Teresa de Lauretis, “Strategies of Coherence: Narrative Cinema, Feminist Poetic, and Yvonne Rainer”, in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 108.
4 5 6
Tina Keane, In Our Hands, Greenham (1984); Caroline Goldie, Greenham Granny (1986); S. Fonseca, S. Gillie, V. Grut, and J. Holland, Nuclear Defence “Living In a Fool’s Paradise” (1984); Lis Rhodes with Jo Davis, Hang on a Minute / Swing Song (1983); among others. Cinenova distributes Slides I-V (1971) by Annabel Nicolson. Felicity Sparrow, “Annabel Nicolson”, luxonline, http:// www.luxonline.org. uk/artists/annabel_nicolson/essay(2). html, accessed 3 April 2015. Teresa de Lauretis, op. cit., p. 109.
the films and words of Sandra Lahire
33
