The Feminist Moving Image Across Disciplines is a film-screening–based and discussion-led, open-form writing workshop in which we study work across disciplines of several women and feminist, queer, trans+, and political filmmakers and moving-image practitioners, covering a wide range of art practices and literary forms: production notebook, experimental documentary, archival video, art installation, animation, figurative painting, play-script, critical scholarship, screenplay, short story, dance and theatrical/avant-garde performance, contemporary artist cinema and essay films, and international feminist filmmaking, to name a few. Readings will be provided before the workshop begins. On Wednesday night, we will not have workshop, but will tie our study to a Rotations screening of Liliane de Kermadec’s ALOÏSE in the theater (free for workshop participants).

When grounded in filmmaking, can a political vision be found in the interdisciplinary artist who moves from form to form? What common threads around identity, method, movement, or protest can be found in these geographically and historically disparate figures' strategies of archival collage, reappearance, repetition, dislocation, wandering, staging, and reenactment? In this workshop, we will screen and examine films relevant to our reading and conversations; and then, using unique prompts, we will write—whether poetry, film-script, play-script, fiction, essay, score, or otherwise—toward these threads and figurations, developing our own collective feedback-group as we go. 

We also look for connections in intertexts, reading excerpts from socialist Flora Tristan's diary, as referenced in Claudia von Alemann's Blind Spot (1981), for instance; or Etel Adnan's poetry, painting, and early journalism, which served as inspiration for filmmaker Jocelyne Saab's The Beirut Trilogy but also forged a relation for the directing work of Delphine Seyrig. Postcolonial, speculative and transnational feminist-film analysis around cinema of the banlieue and theories of location and the nomadic will also support the study of our practitioners and texts.

Other practitioners we look at may include Zora Neale Hurston, Rut Hillarp, Noor Abed, Maya Deren, Lis Rhodes, Valie Export, Madeline Anderson, Abigail Child, Barbara Loden, Marjorie Keller, Helke Sander, Jill Godmilow, Assia Djebar, Zeinabu irene Davis, Stanya Kahn & Harry Dodge, Alice Diop, Moyra Davey, Iva Radivojević, Margaret Tait, Chick Strand, Marguerite Duras, Alanis Obomsawin, Barbara Hammer, Maria Schneider, Joyce Wieland, Delphine Seyrig, Yvonne Rainer, Kathleen Collins, Maria Lassnig, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cecilia Vicuña. Feminist and leftist film collectives will be examined. By the end of the week, you will have produced a new, ongoing text formed and informed by our work(s) together. 

Image: Maria Lassnig in Stone Lifting. A Self Portrait in Progress 1971-75, Maria Lassnig © Maria Lassnig Foundation. 

Corina Copp is a poet, writer, and curator of Rotations, an LA-based film series in residence at 2220 Arts + Archives, with programs at Now Instant Image Hall and elsewhere. She is the author of The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) and translator of Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs (The Song Cave, 2019, 2026). She received her MFA in Playwriting (Brooklyn College – CUNY) and pursues doctoral studies in cinema and media at USC. She is currently Special Faculty in the Program in Film and Video, School of Film/Video at CalArts; and Visiting Lecturer, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.

All workshop sessions will be held at Poetic Research Bureau, 2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles.

Read about the Aloïse screening.