FEMEXFILMARCHIVE: How Can Your Students Make Feminist History?

FEMEXFILM Archive website image with still from Athyrium filix-femina (for Anna Atkins) by Kelly Egan, used with Egan’s permission

by Irene Lusztig

FEMEXFILMARCHIVE was born out of lack: the lack of meaningful history of feminist filmmaking and feminist filmmakers.

In the introduction to her incredible oral history of feminist documentary film Women of Vision, scholar-maker Alexandra Juhasz writes: “I find that those who need and want this history do not have enough access to it. I am consistently saddened to see how little feminist history is known by even those of my students committed to knowing it. Instead, I find a recurring cycle of feminist knowledge and action: feminists exist and are forgotten, make their work and see it disappear, are remembered and get lost, are rediscovered, erased, and re-represented yet again.” My favorite two questions repeatedly posed by Juhasz to her interviewees are “who gave you permission?” and “what do we owe you?” I love the way these simple questions foreground the idea of a chain of intergenerational transmission and the power of the work done by those who have come before us; or, in many cases, the sense of a “chain” that is broken or interrupted—the chronic lack of visible role models for women, nonbinary, and trans makers who, again and again, feel that they have to imagine their own creative potential in a vacuum.

In 2017, I created a new feminist filmmaking class for my students at UC Santa Cruz, at a moment when it felt especially urgent to center my production classroom on intersectional feminist approaches and methods. As I developed my syllabus for this new class and worked to curate class screening programs, I thought a lot about how much feminist work made in previous decades has vanished from film school culture. So many incredible feminist works from the past had never been shown to me in my own film school education and have been essentially erased from film school canons. I thought about how all of the professors I encountered in my undergraduate film classrooms in the 90s had been men, and how it might have bolstered my confidence, changed the trajectory of my work, or given me permission to experiment more freely if I had had feminist filmmaker role models to look to at a younger age—makers who might have powerfully reflected my own emerging creative voice. 

As I thought about these questions of access, encounter, and intergenerational role models, I began to imagine a class interview project that would pair my students with more established feminist filmmakers to have conversations. In my own work at the time, I was making a project using the idea of listening to the feminist past as a creative method, and I was curious to explore how a kind of embodied learning through listening could be part of my students’ classroom experience. Together with my colleague and friend Julie Wyman, who was coincidentally also teaching a feminist media course at UC Davis, I developed the collaborative website that has become the FEMEXFILMARCHIVE. 

 The FEMEXFILMARCHIVE is an ongoing, collective, web-based archive of student-authored interviews with feminist experimental filmmakers that has grown since 2017 to include a diverse range of over 70 makers. Julie and I created this archive as a visibility project that makes space for feminist voices. We also hoped that the project could become a resource for people hoping to learn more about the rich history and dynamic present of experimental feminist filmmaking practices. In our respective feminist filmmaking classes, we invite our students to select, research, and reach out to the filmmaker they want to interview for the project, and it’s been exciting to see the ways that our students have naturally gravitated towards including feminist filmmakers of color, nonbinary and trans filmmakers—makers who reflect their own identities, aspirations, and questions. Aye’lesha Gibson’s interview with Ja’Tovia Gary and Christine Lin’s interview with Anita Chang are both great examples of this, and there are many more! The most moving exchanges in the archive happen when our students ask their interviewees to offer them practical guidance for their own futures as creative producers. Julie and I consistently find that our students are hungry for real world advice about how to find support for their creative aspirations after graduating from college, and we have loved seeing the many ways that these conversations have generated moments of sincere advice and sharing. 

We’ve created a public toolkit , which provides a very clear 10-step process to make it easy for students and others to add meaningful, substantive interviews to the project. We basesd this tool kit on our own experiences supervising students doing interviews, so you can use the tool kit to create an asssignment for classes or to do your own interviews with feminist filmmakers.. We hope that the archive will continue to expand and can, over time, become a space of collaboration with other instructors and student groups. 

Work Cited

Juhasz, Alexandra. Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video. University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Irene Lusztig  is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, and educator. She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Professor of Film and Digital Media. Her film and video work mines old images for new meanings in order to reframe, recuperate, and reanimate forgotten and neglected histories.  Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, BFI London Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, DocLisboa, and RIDM Montréal. She has been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright, and the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow.