Toward a Feminist Montage: Reading for the Cut in Ana Mendieta's Sweating Blood

Abstract

abstract: This article develops an alternate concept of the filmic cut with influences from both montage theory and feminist film history. Deriving this alternate concept of the cut from Ana Mendieta's moving image work, I examine Sweating Blood (1973) as it couples the cut with an aesthetic violence, producing a version of the cut that contributes to a feminist discourse on filmic manipulation, intermedia, and montage. This theory of the cut is informed not only by Mendieta but also by those who have inspired alternate ways of thinking about "the cut," including Yoko Ono, Maggie Nelson, Sergei Eisenstein, and Luis Buñuel.