UCLA

This dissertation examines expanded cinema as a significant site of negotiation between discourses of female identity and the identity of film in 1970s London. Focus is given to women working in and around the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), a collective of artist-filmmakers known for their Marxist politics, their application of Greenbergian modernism to the film medium, and their collective mode of production. Sewn with thread, punched with holes, and printed at a dizzying frame rate, the abstract films of Carolee Schneemann, Lis Rhodes, and Annabel Nicolson seem paradigmatic of the LFMC’s commitment to formal experimentation. Yet unlike their peers, these women eschewed a universal subject without gender, instead engaging with contemporary critiques of patriarchal ideology’s comprehensive infiltration of culture. Chapter One considers expanded cinema’s relationship to feminist critiques of language through the work of Lis Rhodes. Here, I consider her live projector performances, which asserted a new model of language that developed in relation to Fluxus notation. Chapter Two argues that Annabel Nicolson generated a model of expanded cinema that rehabilitated forms of subjectivity denigrated by the most vocal interlocutors of the LFMC. Notions of intuition and gesture were employed as a means to interrogate the cinematic apparatus and the qualities of film she perceived as linear and phallocentric. Chapter Three turns to Carolee Schneemann’s assessment of the relationship between the body and the cinematic apparatus. Analyzing the expanded cinema work she conceived in London, this chapter hypothesizes that the union between body and film that Schneemann trialed can be traced back to ideas about the integrative power of female sexuality rooted in the revisionist psychoanalysis of Wilhelm Reich. This dissertation thus demonstrates the diverse commitments of avant-garde film informed by feminism, countering the conception of feminist art as a field structured by a constructionist-essentialist binary. It provides a new account of expanded cinema at a historical moment when the issue of identity began to push up against the aesthetic dogmas of avant-garde film.