Woman taking a stand, no relativistic shilly-shallying
I would love to see this film: Resisting Paradise (2003) by Barbara Hammer.
A still:
.A snippet of description:
Resisting Paradise is a 16mm experimental documentary that explores the relationship between art and politics through a juxtaposition of the work of French painters Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard with interviews with French WWII resistance fighters. A study of disjunctive image and sound, the film addresses issues of artistic identity and political responsibility through Matisse and Bonnard’s very different views of the political arena. (source)
Barbara Hammer’s films are on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art from 9/15 to 10/13.
Galvanized by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, she soon became a pioneer of queer cinema. Hammer has since directed more than eighty films, using avant-garde strategies to explore lesbian and gay sexuality, identity, and history, along with other heretofore unrepresented voices. In the 1970s her films dealt with the representation of taboo subjects through performance, and in the 1980s she began using an optical printer to make films that explore perception. In the 1990s she began making documentaries about hidden aspects of queer history. (more)
See also:
It is “by reappropriating and remaking lesbian and gay visual history out of the misrepresentations of the past,” notes Hammer, “that the former oppressive collective memories of identity will become the power site of social change.” (more)
“…social change”: maybe that’s one of the reasons homophobia continues to thrive – it’s embraced by those who resist social change, including religious fundamentalists of all persuasions.
Let’s just say I prefer change.