Rachel Garfield – författare

Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the rebellious, feminist punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s, tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new “punk audio visual aesthetic”. A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture, Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.

Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making.In this book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the rebellious, feminist Punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s, tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new "Punk audio visual aesthetic". A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture, Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.

This open access book presents the first critical analysis of the work of Stephen Dwoskin, groundbreaking filmmaker, artist, graphic designer and writer.Stephen Dwoskin (1939-2012) was a groundbreaking filmmaker, artist, graphic designer and writer, most renowned for his key role in establishing the London Film Makers Co-Op and The Other Cinema, his book Film Is…(1975), and his experimental, feature length and documentary films. Though his films continue to be screened around the world, his work has - until now - remained chronically under-researched.Emerging from a major AHRC-funded University of Reading/LUX/BFI research project which explored the unique archive from Dwoskin's estate, this book is the first to critique, analyse and give new insights into this influential but under-studied figure. Inside, a range of established scholars, artists who worked with Dwoskin, emerging critics, curators, cultural historians and archivists highlight Dwoskin’s continued relevance to the fields of art history and fine art, film studies, archives and collections, graphic design, and disability studies.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Royal College of Art.