Feminism as Documentary Method

A Conversation
Irene Lusztig, Hannah Jayanti, Noorafshan Mirza, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, and Andrea Luka Zimmerman

Introduction
The conversational chapter that follows emerges from a multi-day gathering of five artist-filmmakers—two of us based in the United States and three based in the UK—in New York City, during the summer of 2023. Using a collective dialogue framework and a shared co-writing and co-editing process, our goal was to explore expansive ideas around feminism as a method in our respective documentary practices. Our gathering aspired to articulate capacious ways of understanding feminist documentary-making that are not necessarily tied to traditionally “feminist” or gendered subject matter. In the introduction to their edited collection Feminism and Documentary, Diane Waldman and Janet Walker call for a wide-ranging approach to documentary scholarship that can “bring feminist approaches and concerns to bear on works usually exempt from them” (1999: 6). Yet, on the practice/filmmaking side, we’ve observed a persistent and frustrating conflation of the idea of “feminist filmmaking” with work that centers women as subjects. Sensing a narrowing of the documentary industry in terms of what forms, processes, and approaches are supported, we hoped to arrive, together, at a set of ideas that might untether content from form, process, and politics, through a commitment to feminist approaches.

By design, the heterogeneous range of creative practices represented in our group pushes against normative boundaries of “documentary.” We work variously inside of and in opposition to the documentary industry, on screens, in galleries, and in community spaces and with performance, social practice, public art, archives, collage, multi-screen installation, activist organizing, curation, teaching, football coaching, and sewing (to name just a few of our many ways of working).

Beginning with time spent sharing our work and getting to know each other’s practices (several of us were meeting for the first time through this project), our gathering also foregrounded spaciousness and hospitality as methods. Over three days, we shared meals, images, experiences, rest, and space as we traversed a wide-ranging terrain of topics. With this conversation-essay, we hope to put forward ideas of a feminist documentary method invested in listening, vulnerability, power-sharing, encounter, failure, community process, co-creation, screening spaces as gathering/conversation sites that disrupt or exceed the framework of creative capitalism, and new approaches to form and visual language.