From Reel to Real: Women, Feminism, and the LFMC

As part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the London Film-makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), this film programme, which opens Tate Modern’s Counter-Histories series, explores the unique contribution of the women filmmakers associated with the LFMC to both experimental and feminist film. This presentation of more than forty films—both single screen and expanded—by twenty-five filmmakers from different generations, aims to reveal the breadth and diversity of these women’s practices while attempting to foreground commonalities in their approach to filmmaking and to the ways in which film can intersect with feminism.

The LFMC was an artist-led organisation that, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, anchored a vibrant filmmaking community operating independently from the commercial industry. This alternative movement quickly became associated with a mode of filmmaking characterized by a hands-on exploration of the structural and material properties of film, often to lay bare and counteract the ideological conditions of film viewing.

Stemming from this context of material experimentation at the LFMC, the women filmmakers featured in this programme maintained an acute awareness of the politics of representation and a constant commitment to experimenting with the language of cinema. However, as the title From Reel to Real suggests, while they built on the methods, processes and ethos associated with the LFMC, they always did so to address the world outside the projection room – to express something of their subjectivity and respond to pressing social and political issues around them.

In addition to having expanded the scope of experimental film practice at the LFMC, these films also pushed the boundaries of what feminist cinema could be. In comparison to the clear activism or the theoretical didacticism of the most visible feminist films of the time, these women filmmakers opposed the open-endedness of artistic expression, embedding a certain sense of uncertainty and experimentation in the process of making. Through an engagement with the formal, material and affective qualities of film, the filmmakers hoped to give voice to submerged aspects of women’s experience and to emancipate the image, the feminine subject and the body from the colonizing forces of patriarchal culture.

The seven screenings comprising this programme not only offer a rare opportunity to see a great number of remarkable films, some for the first time in several decades, but also constitute an attempt to reflect, in the presence of many of the filmmakers, on the ways in which these film practices have contributed to the projects of feminism. This is particularly relevant at a time when, after having mostly focused on language and semiotics, many contemporary film and feminist theorists are re-engaging with materiality in new ways.

– Maud Jacquin

There is a prologue to this screening series at Tate Britain on 19 September. Please find more information here.

From Reel to Real: women, feminism and the London Filmmakers’ Co-op is curated by Maud Jacquin in partnership with LUX and Tate Film with the support of FLUXUS. It is presented alongside LUX and Tate Britain’s monthly Co-op Dialogues series, which continues throughout the year.

From Reel to Real: Women, Feminism and the London Film-makers’ Co-operative

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