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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, June 1st, 2011 - Comments Off on Review: !Women Art Revolution
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Review: !Women Art Revolution

Quick! Can you name three women artists?

I’m taking a brief break from my immersion in SIFF films to talk to you about !Women Art Revolution, a compelling documentary that opens today in NYC, which explores the dawning of the feminist art movement through archival footage and spontaneous interviews gathered by director Lynn Hersham Leeson over 40 or so years. And even if you think you know everything there is to know about feminism and art, I can pretty much guarantee you will learn something you didn’t know watching this film.

This film is timely and relevant, not only to women in art and film, but in the way those issues cross-pollinate to other areas of women’s lives; in fact, I would argue that there are very few areas in which gender relations do not impact your life, and yours, and yes, even yours. Even if you’re a feminist studies professor, even if you’re a female artist or film director or writer. Even if — perhaps especially if — you are a conservative fundamentalist Christian wife and mother and “helpmeet” living out a traditional, patriarchal gender role in the heart of the Republican Midwest.

The feminist art movement — and the women at the center of it — challenged assumptions about gender roles and the place of women in the world of art, which was (and still is to a large extent) controlled and determined by men. Leeson captures the rise of the feminist art movement in the United States, which was birthed, not coincidentally, with the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, Berkeley, Kent State, Vietnam War protests, free love, Roe Vs. Wade, and a rising divorce rate. Because, as many of the women interviewed herein attest, as they became more enlightened into the role gender plays in determining societal place, it often became necessary for them to end their marriages in order to reinvent themselves as feminist women.

With conservative politicians, preachers and pundits deriding the feminist movement as a significant cause of the rise in divorce rate and subsequent “decline of the American family,” it’s absolutely imperative that positive messages about female empowerment and gender disparity are seen and heard.

Gender issues affect everything from how much women are paid in comparison to men for doing the same work; to whether a woman with children will get passed over for a job in favor of a male colleague; to whether your daughter will receive the same attention and subtle messages of disempowerment from the teachers who will have charge over her for a significant percentage of her waking hours throughout her childhood; to bullying in schools and on playgrounds; to human sex trafficking; to the harrowing statistics for rape both her in the US, where (according to the Department of Justice) a woman is raped every TWO MINUTES; to rape as a weapon of war throughout the world.

Gender equality and the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s are the cornerstone out of which the feminist art movement grew; unfortunately, the issues raised through the history traced in !Women Art Revolution are as relevant in 2011 as they were in 1970. We may have come a long way, baby … but we’ve not come nearly far enough.

!Women Art Revolution has the distinction of having played at Toronto, Sundance and Berlin and opens today at New York City, with screenings nationwide coming your way. Check it out — it’s even coming to Oklahoma City (no doubt thanks to my friend Brian Hearn, who curates at the OKC Museum of Art). If it’s coming to your town, go, go, GO and see it. Bring your teenage daughters and sons, or get together with a pack of smart, creative types and get inspired.

This doc is real gem — as relevant to the feminist art movement as Exit Through the Gift Shop was for street art, albeit less flashy in its composition. If you love art, or have any interest at all in film, art, and the place women have in those disciplines, you don’t want to miss this.

Upcoming screenings:

June 1-7 IFC Center New York, NY

June 10 The Screen at Studio 2 Santa Fe, NM

June 15-19 Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA

June 17-23 Laemmle’s Music Hall 3 Los Angeles, CA

June 17-23 Northwest Film Forum Seattle, WA

June 23-26 Oklahoma City Museum of Art Oklahoma City, OK

June 24-30 Denver Film Society Denver, CO

June 24-27 Northwest Film Center Portland, OR

July 1 Real Art Ways Hartford, CT

October 5 International House of Philadelphia Philadelphia, PA

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon