Feminist Body Politics and Late Cold War Cinema

• In Event: Rethinking Cold War Aesthetics and Politics: Feminism, Modernism, Socialism

Abstract

A 1977 encounter of Ukrainian-born Soviet filmmaker Larisa Shepit'ko with the avant-garde action-performance art of American post-war feminist Carolee Schneemann reveals a stark contrast between two visions of gender and liberation, art and politics. This talk places archival research into that encounter -- at a performance of the work “The Interior Scroll,” during which Schneemann stripped naked and extracted a scroll with a manifesto of feminist filmmaking from her vagina -- into the context of divergent paths in post-war feminism and in modernist and avant-garde cinema. I propose that the disjuncture between the two women’s work registers two different understandings of the meaning of art, the female body, and the “universal language” of cinema. Focusing on the depiction of women’s bodies in Shepitko’s works, I will argue that the director’s engagement with what she herself called “spiritual education” aligned her with the cinematic modernism of European art cinema more generally, but came at the expense of forms of feminist solidarity and embodied expression.

Author

• Anne Eakin Moss, U of Chicago