Written in October 1977, “Manifesto for a Radical Femininity for an Other Cinema” by Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki is published here in connection with a rare screening of four films by the artists on Thursday, February 12, at 7pm at e-flux Screening Room (more information here). The manifesto condenses the stakes of what Klonaris and Thomadaki would soon theorize as “cinema of the body”(cinéma corporel), insisting on a feminist rupture with dominant language, dominant images, and the hierarchies that organize both sexuality and authorship.1
“It is within the female sex that orgasm remains
the most enigmatic, the most inaccessible;
its ultimate essence has probably
not yet been authentically located.”
- Jacques Lacan2
(1) On a Feminine Culture: Obvious Facts
The existing culture is a male domineering culture, created by man for his own image and benefit.
Woman contributed to its creation, but mostly as a support for the male “spirit.” In this culture, woman is near-absent. Unknown. Ignored. Mute. Imprisoned. Despised. Deformed. Enigmatic. Inaccessible.
In this culture, femininity is but a male projection.
The feminine culture remains to be created.
It is already being created by women unsubmissive to the male order.
Through this culture alone, woman will be able to conquer the political territories necessary to her empowerment.
All woman’s creative acts highlighting the distance between a general, standardized, male fabricated femininity and a self-revealed specific and unique female identity contribute to the creation of this culture.
“This said, I increasingly think that we should refrain from gendering cultural productions: this would be ‘feminine,’ this would be ‘masculine.’ The issue seems different to me: it is about giving women the economic and libidinal conditions which will allow them to analyze and deconstruct social oppression and sexual repression, so that every woman may express and develop her own singularities and her own differences, as they have been produced by the risks and necessities of nature, family or society.” 3
A feminine culture can only be a rupture from the dominant culture.
Can only be the negation of the dominant language.
Can only reject the processes of the dominant art.
Can only let arise all that is oppressed by social order: body, desire, sexuality, unconscious, singularities.
Can only let the rebellion of the repressed fracture the norms of expression.
(2) Vision of Radical Femininity
A radical femininity can only break, shatter, crush, tear apart all that weighs on her and restrains her.
Can only invent and explode.
Ripping her inventions from the depths of her own guts. Giving birth to her own identity.
A radical femininity can only be a harmony between so-called feminine and masculine traits.
A symbiosis of “female” and “male” energies.
Can only be an equilibrium between the physical sex and the mental, subjective sex.
Can only bring together contradictory and/yet complementary pulsions.
A radical femininity can only be a whole, neither fragment nor lack nor deficiency.
A yoghini manifesting a serpentine energy out of her vulva.
(3) Passion for a Radical Creation: This Other Cinema
Unsubmissiveness. Independence. Rupture. Autonomy.
To tear apart the economic dependence of the cinema of huge crowds, huge budgets, huge means, huge consumption, huge dependency.
To tear apart the illustrative images, hostages of the social tales merchandised by the capitalist film industry.
To shatter the academicism of the gaze maintained by the industry of images.
To shatter the prefabricated notions of “real,” “natural,” “normal,” “objective,” “comprehensible,” alibis of a society which can only produce neuroses propagated by mass media.
To shatter the partition of specializations.
To shatter hierarchies and roles.
To shatter the mirror of the fabricated woman, the passive actress, the one who obeys, the one who accepts being manipulated, the one who mediates for a stranger’s orgasm.
To shatter glasses and mirrors.
I emerge.
A radical femininity can only blossom within a radical creation.
I construct my own images.
I invent my own vision, neither “natural” nor “normal” nor “objective,” but real as it surges from desire, and comprehensible if one forgets whatever the institutions have taught us to understand.
I free my own introspection.
I expose my roots and my sufferings: childhood, desire, revolt, repression, torture, old age, death.
I expose my archetypal and social colors: red, black, white, pink, gold, silver.
I stage my own mental structures, my geometries.
My body image imprints the film.
I open myself to you by my sentient and sensitive body. My body of woman-subject.
I offer you the rituals of my identity.
A hemorrhage of identity not mediated by anyone else, but fully asserted by myself in front of you.
I look at you.
I question you.
I give birth to an OTHER cinema.
Paris, October 1977
Originally published in CinémAction, no. 1, special issue: Dix ans après mai 68. Aspects du cinéma de contestation (1978): 84–85. Translated in English by Cécile Chich and Katerina Thomadaki. Courtesy: Katerina Thomadaki.
Jacques Lacan quoted by Irène Diamantis in “Recherches sur la féminité,” Ornicar? Analytica 5 (January 1968).
“Unes femmes. Julia Kristeva interviewed by Eliane Boucquey,” in Les Cahiers du GRIF, no. 7 (June 1975).
