Ties that bind : the psyche of feminist filmmaking : Sydney, 1969-1989
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 1995
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The purpose of my research for this thesis has been to investigate the
psychic and emotional history of the milieu of independent, feminist
filmmaking that began to form within the Women's Liberation Movement
in Sydney in 1969. My interest in the psyche of the milieu has been twofold:
to explore the possibility of writing an interior or subjective history,
not of an individual but of a political milieu; and to grapple with the
trajectory of the utopian, activist politics of the 1970s into the 1980s.
I began my research by reading over five hundred funding applications from
the files of the Women's Film Fund - an extensive archival record of the
interaction between the funding femocracy and aspiring filmmakers. The
building blocks of the thesis derived from interviews with founding
members of the Sydney Women's Film Group (SWFG) and the Feminist
Film Workers (FFW), and with former managers and Advisory Panel
members of the Women's Film Fund. I consulted the SWFG and FFW
records held (uncatalogued) by the National Film and Sound Archive, and I
was given access to papers from the personal files of some of the
filmmakers. I also viewed the body of films associated with the women's
collections at the former Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative and the
Women's Film Fund.
From 1969-89 there were three major reconfigurations in the psyche of the
milieu. The 1960s liberationist ethos - characterised by energy, excitement
and eros - was transformed into an ethic of duty, discipline and sacrifice in
the late 1970s. In the 1980s, feminist activism reached a limit point which
turned the milieu's attention to the psychic foundations of its own origins
and to the question of what had been sacrificed in the formation of the
feminist activist. This question haunts the films of the 1980s through the
insistent figure of the maternal. The ties that bound this milieu to a
luminous vision of the future had their origins in a deeply shadowed image
of the immediate past. This psychic reality is a point of origin and return as
the milieu continues to remake itself through the cinema, into the 1990s.
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