“No Master Territories”

Magazine girls with blown-out hair and angular eyeliner; a bloody tampon; Miss USA on TV; a pregnant belly; household pots and pans; rotting fruit; a gunked-up sink; a soiled diaper. Such is the montage logic of Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s Schmeerguntz (1965), a wry, pop-inflected collage that exposes the female body that leaks, shits, and bleeds beneath the smooth surface of mass-media spectacle.

For its third iteration in Oslo, following showings in Berlin and Warsaw, “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” re-evaluates the much-cannibalized term “feminism” through non-fiction film and video from the 1970s to the ’90s, with 49 works (down from more than 100 in the Berlin edition) across three rooms and a cinema.1 In response to the emerging society of the spectacle, avant-garde and documentary practices of the time countered centralized studio productions and televisual media with minoritarian political perspectives, and many works here were made thanks to cheap “amateur” small-gauge formats such as Super 8, 16 mm, and early video rather than standard 35 mm.

Critics praised previous editions of “No Master Territories” for rejecting a unified idea of womanhood and a singular female film aesthetic, yet surprisingly little attention was paid to the viewing experience of female spectators on the other side of the monitor. On a smaller screen behind Schmeerguntz plays Newsreel activists Bev Grant and Karen Mitnick Liptak’s Up Against the Wall Miss America (1968), which documents the protest at the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. The protest was galvanized by a screening of Schmeerguntz at a New York Radical Women’s group meeting—not in a cinema, but in a civil rights office with a portable 16 mm projector. The screens within the gallery are mounted on curved, médiathèque-style pillars, the backs of which are layered with reprinted archival documents that map the films’ distribution histories and original screenings in sexual health centers, community halls, and on public-access television, prompting viewers to reflect on the historical conditions out of which “women’s cinema” emerged.

Both Sara Gómez’s Mi Aporte (My Contribution, 1972) and Barbara Hammer’s Audience (1983), by contrast, are concerned with what happens after the film ends. The final section of Mi Aporte features a group of middle-aged women dissecting the preceding footage about women’s contributions to the Cuban Revolution, exposing the rifts between different generational perspectives—a classic Third Cinema strategy (which usually took place offscreen) that positions cinema as an active catalyst for dissecting social relations. In Audience, a droll Hammer interviews viewers about their reaction to her work, insisting that her films serve a purpose: “I’m trying to get you wet.” Both artists foreground cinema as a site of embodied encounter, while the curators place emphasis on the significance of post-screening conversations which are often lost to history.

Filmmakers across both avant-garde and documentary traditions often reappropriate found footage through montage. For feminist film collective Grupo Chaski, television footage of titular Miss Universo en el Perú (Miss Universe in Peru, 1982), in which white contestants gush over sisterhood, is ruptured by reverse shots of Indigenous women’s faces staring back at the camera and, suggestively, the TV screen itself. In Anne Siri Bryhni and Laila Mikkelsen’s Bildene omkring oss (The Images Surrounding Us, 1978), close-ups of Norwegian weekly magazine headlines and glossy nuclear family imagery are cut with interviews with male editors and industrial printers. More wryly, Anne Haugsgjerd’s Flink pike…sitt pent! (Good Girl…Sit Down! 1991) interweaves shots of dog shows, Marilyn Monroe on stage, and home movies of the artist’s childhood performances, set to a soundtrack of conversations probing her fascination with the spectacle of obedience at dog shows. Waging a new language through the “cut,” these filmmakers extend Eisenstein’s logic of montage into an archaeological method that exposes mass-media’s own contradictions. “Woman” here remains an unstable category that yields to alternating ideologies of subservience.

The montage logic unfolds spatially across the gallery, the visitor’s gaze dispersed across multiple screens. In this edition, Peggy Ahwesh’s She Puppet (2001) and Alice Anne Parker’s Near the Big Chakra (1971) are installed beside one another: an extreme close-up of a vulva set against a video game render of Lara Croft from Tomb Raider. Where Parker zooms into the pulsing flesh, Ahwesh rewrites woman not only as what Laura Mulvey termed a “to-be-looked-at” object but as a newly digital “to-be-programmed” avatar—continuously caught between dead-ends, yet never able to escape the center of the frame.2 Across the room, Tuija Lindström’s black-and-white Kvinnorna vid Tjursjön (The Girls at Bull’s Pond, 1993) resonates with this pairing. As the camera slowly zooms in on nude female bodies floating in a lake like ethereal nymphs, the serene flute music dissolves into metallic clangor: industrial capital penetrates every fairytale of freedom.

Many of these films have been exhibited in new institutional, geographic, and curatorial contexts since the original “No Master Territories” in 2022, and the sense that the show is part of an ongoing journey only underscores the strength of its modular form in which new combinations provoke surprising resonances. The films were not made to be entombed within a singular exhibition, after all, but to encourage meetings between spectators with seemingly divergent trajectories, and to recognize that the issues explored in the films are far from resolved today. In a world of atomized image consumption, “No Master Territories” affirms the potential for cinema as a collective event, one that might not change our realities but can at least unsettle the myth of a singular world.