Another Screen
Six Times Woman: In the Shadow of a Dictatorship includes films by Helena Solberg, Letícia Parente, Regina Camlian, Inês Castilho, Eunice Gutman, Maria Inês Villares, made between 1966–1985. In Hanna Esperança’s words: “The films embody the complexities of a period marked by profound contradictions, when art and cinema were shaped by oppressive structures and these structures were challenged through the subversion of formal and narrative strategies.”
The majority of these have films been digitised and restored by our project partner, Cinelimite. The programme features an abundance of new texts, and written and filmed interviews with the filmmakers, as well as a roundtable that discusses film preservation in Brazil. Until December 1.
And a programme of three films about Palestine by Jocelyne Saab, and a feature documentary by Arab Loutfi, accompanied by an essay by Elhum Shakerifar, who writes that “these missives speak with prescience and urgency to our current realities because they are in such deep conversation with their present.”
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Our programmes are free but distribution, subtitling, writer and translation fees aren’t. We receive no funding so please consider donating to us so we can keep this project available to all. We have a Patreon for regular supporters, or you can make a one-off donation here.
Another Gaze
Our “journal of film and feminisms” relaunches online at the end of the year. In the meantime, read:
Kaleem Hawa on the political cinema of Patricio Guzmán, from The First Year (1972) to Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), and how Salvador Allende’s socialist project is depicted and relived through documentary film.
Starting from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s earliest drawings, Tess Little follows a line through to the interactive works in which the artist troubles the separation of subject from object, using feminised characters to subvert cultures of voyeurism and surveillance technologies.
“I thought I was going to see a badly executed film about universities. I didn’t expect there to be a badly executed—and more interesting—film about psychoanalysis inside of it.” Read Helen Charman on Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt.
Please support our return via Patreon, or with a one-off donation.
Another Gaze Editions
Our third book, Susaki Paradise, is finally off to print and will be available in December, with an official launch in January. You can preorder it here.
First published in Japan in 1955, Yoshiko Shibaki’s Susaki Paradise is a collection of six interlinked short stories revolving around the ramshackle Bar Chigusa and its no-nonsense landlady, Tokuko. This outpost on the edge of the canal leading to Susaki Paradise—once an illustrious pleasure quarter, and now a patch of dilapidated broth- els—is a meeting place for those teetering on the edge of desperation and ruin. What unites the women in these stories is the uncompromising urgency with which they go about their lives amid the challenges of the post-war period. A bracing look at the dreams of those whose profession it is to sustain the fantasies of men, the stories in this collection formed the inspiration behind Yūzo Kawashima’s Suzaki Paradise: Red Light and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (both 1956). In the hands of Yoshiko Shibaki (1914–1991)—the second woman to win Japan’s esteemed Akutagawa Prize—these precarious, transient women living on the outskirts of society are handled with a disarming and devastating combination of realism, lyricism, and savage humour. This book marks the first appearance of Yoshiko Shibaki’s writing in English.
You can still order Marguerite Duras’s My Cinema, a collection of the writer-filmmaker’s and Lorenza Mazzetti’s The Sky is Falling
Working chronologically through her nineteen films, made between 1966 and 1985, this collection of reflections by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) includes non-standard press releases, notes to her actors, letters to funders, short essays on themes as provocatively capacious as ‘mothers’ and ‘witches’, as well as some of the most significant interviews she gave about her cinematic and writing practices (with filmmakers and critics including Jacques Rivette, Caroline Champetier and Jean Narboni). In Duras’s hands, all of these forms turn into a strange, gnomic literature in which the boundary between word and image becomes increasingly blurred and the paradox of creating a cinema that seeks ‘to destroy the cinema’ finds its most potent expression.
Both ahead of her time and nostalgically mired in the past, in My Cinema, Duras deconstructs her own methods, going gleefully against the grain in order to “destroy” conventional cinema. A beautifully translated collection of writing by an often maddening genius —Lizzie Borden, filmmaker
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This is no dream, and something more than a novel —Ali Smith
First published in 1961, Lorenza Mazzetti’s The Sky is Falling (Il cielo cade) is an impressionistic, idiosyncratic, and uniquely funny look at the writer’s childhood after she and her sister are sent to live with their Jewish relatives following the death of their parents. Bright and bucolic, vivid and mournful, and brimming with saints, martyrdom, ideals, wrong-doing and self-imposed torments, the novel describes the loss of innocence and family under the Fascist regime in Italy during World War II through the eyes of Mazzetti’s fictional alter ego, Penny, in sharp, witty (and sometimes petulant) prose.
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