Subject to Reality

Abstract

This book reconsiders the history and study of women’s documentary filmmaking in the United States from 1920 to 1940, and during the long 1970s--when significant transformations in cinematic technologies coincided with major transformations in sociopolitical discourses surrounding gender and race. Rather than comprehensive, the approach is transhistorical, setting women’s cultural expression during these two periods into conversation, and thereby provoking a reconsideration of a number of key debates about subjectivity, feminism, realism, and documentary that have had lasting epistemological and material consequences for film and feminist studies. The book excavates a lost ethnographic history of women’s documentary production and investigates the political and aesthetic legacy of this early history in later, more deliberately feminist and yet equally misremembered periods, especially the 1970s. In particular, Subject to Reality asks how ethnographic thinking and seeing shaped the historical arc and aesthetic, ethical, and political commitments of women’s realist documentaries throughout the twentieth century. The shared interests of women in anthropology, academic film studies, and political feminism have long shaped the production and reception of documentary in the United States. Subject to Reality explores the consequences of this cross-pollination as it has shaped women’s documentaries, and especially the realist films that have been glossed over as “boring” “organizing tools” or merely “talking head films.”