Welcome to MAI Issue 3

We honour the feminist queer work and the lasting legacy of Dr Katharina Lindner, who passed away in early 2019.

Ingrid Ryberg reflects on the rich, political life and legacy of filmmaker Barbara Hammer.

Bryony White offers a meditation on the uncompromising career and visionary work of multimedia artist, Carolee Schneemann.

Lauren Elkin reflects on the passing of Agnès Varda and what her art and politics can teach us.

Filmmaker and scholar, Aparna Sharma reflects on her creative documentary practice in Northeast India in terms of both feminism and decolonisation.

For decades, women practising subjective nonfiction filmmaking have worked to develop a language that speaks to their individual perspective while also inviting and including differing perspectives from other women.

Photographer Julia Peirone talks about the importance of girlhood in her work, the relationship between subject and photographer and her influences.

Female documentary filmmakers who seek to re-tell their mothers’ stories create opportunities to re-negotiate and re-invest in the lost, interrupted or ‘slipping away’ maternal relation.

Join Neil Fox who meets American film & TV director, Lynn Shelton to talk for hours about her work. With much enthusiasm, Lynn shares with MAI not only her professional experiences and but also personal views on her successful career.

Following on from her two edited volumes on female authorship and documentary practices (co-edited with Anna Backman Rogers), Boel Ulfsdotter reads Nahid Persson Sarvestani’s work as a form of feminist agency.

In 2018, Noel Nuccioni approached Karyn Kusama, American film & TV director to talk about horror films and today’s society, as well as about women and the director’s creative strategies.

Based on the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film The Virgin Suicides offers a provocative examination of sublimity, specifically in its relation to gendered notions of performativity and emotion.

In Argentina, a woman is killed every 30 hours. It matters neither what her age is nor her social class. Luisa Magdalena documents Argentinian women’s struggle in a series of striking photographs.

Kate Levey reflects on the extraordinary life and legacy of her mother, the writer and activist, Brigid Brophy.

Daisy Patton has been a compulsive collector of discarded family photographs since 2014, a daring colourist whose expressive overpaintings magnify photography and transgress media boundaries to portray becoming.

Photographer Ellen Rogers talks to Sabina Stent about her cultural influences and artistic practice in relation to literature, landscape and feminism.

Fjoralba Miraka re-reads Barbara Loden’s Wanda as a representation of class politics that works to reclaim the road movie genre from the romanticised notion of the lone hero on the road and replaces it with the motif of a woman on the run.

Ingrid Ryberg’s film En armé av älskande is a documentary about queer filmmaking as a crucial part of the gay liberation movement in Sweden in the 1970s.

‘It’s difficult not to fall in love with danger unless it makes us squirm. What if you would drink the water from the red river, then? What if the Jordan was, in fact, red?’

Iranian artist Marjan Khorram Golkaran showcases a series of works that centre on our fraught relationship to the environment.

In a powerful response to David Jones’ Madonna and Child in a Landscape,  Amy Acre reimagines Mary as one who ‘doesn’t feel holy / stuffing pigskin in bloody knickers’. 

In poetry, which mirrors Maya Deren’s methods as a filmmaker, Elinor Cleghorn responds to her films in three hypnotic language rituals.

Samantha Walton responds to depictions of Saint Lucy, who ‘holds her eyes on a plate / or sometimes at the ends of two twisting green shoots’ in psychedelic poetry. 

In this absorbing lyric essay, Nell Osborne considers Charlotte Salomon’s representations of her ‘unhappy love’ in Life or Theatre? using a pithy fragmentary style.

‘Devil temptress, egg thief, child thief, hag’. In this electrifying three-part poem Louise Buchler examines the figure of the ‘witch’ from multiple perspectives

In a searing triptych of polyvocal poems, Lara G. explores the question of whether (and how) queer-lesbian pornography can propose counter-imaginaries to the desiring hetero-male gaze.

The Gender & Performance Studies Group (GECE) from the University of Aveiro explore the performance of gendered bodies in a memorable and poetic documentary.

In response to Sally Potter’s energising critique of La bohème in Thriller (1979), McNeill’s video essay explores feminist possibilities of re-visioning culture from the past.

In her video essay, Piotrowska considers the possibility of imagining a different future, asking how female authorship can translate women’s anger to give expression of a female voice.

Using lines from Judith Mayne, Kazemimanesh’s film offers a meditation on traditional narratives and their re-appropriation of the role of women.