Bodies in Resistance

Bodies in Resistance: Feminist Counter-Archives of Cinema between Canada and Brazil (1965–1990) is a transnational research project funded by the SSHRC Connection Grant, carried out in collaboration with McGill University, PUC-Rio and the Cinemateca do MAM in Rio de Janeiro. The project explores feminist filmmaking and video practices produced in Canada and Brazil between the 1960s and the 1990s, with particular attention to works, practices, and archives that have been marginalized or insufficiently integrated into dominant narratives of film history.

 
The programme is presented in person by Patricia Machado (professor at PUC-Rio and founder of the Arquivo e Contra-Arquivo laboratory) and will be followed by a discussion.

INSOLÊNCIA

Mariza Leão
1974, 8 min, Rio de Janeiro

A MENINA E A CASA DA MENINA

Maria Helena Saldanha
1979, 9 min, São Paulo

SÓ NO CARNAVAL

Eunice Gutman
1982, 12 min, Rio de Janeiro

“This program brings together three short films made by women in Brazil under the military regime (1964–1985), a period during which censorship and an official moral order sought to control bodies, sexuality, and family life. In Insolência (Insolence, 1974), Mariza Leão uses symbolic language to shed light on power relations within marriage; in A menina e a casa da menina (The Girl and the Girl’s House, 1979), Maria Helena Saldanha brings into view the invisible labor of an 11-year-old girl who raises her siblings in a favela in São Paulo; and in Só no carnaval (Only at Carnival, 1982), Eunice Gutman turns to the Rio carnival, where men dressed as women and travestis destabilize gender norms.

These films are part of a corpus of more than 400 works made by women that we have identified: a body of work that challenged the rules of morality and oppression imposed by the dictatorship, remained invisible for decades, and, in many cases, no longer survives today in its original film elements. This heritage is now being rediscovered through digitization projects, such as the one carried out by the Laboratory of Image, Archive, and Counter-Archive Practices (PUC-Rio), which are bringing these images back to the screen.”

–Patricia Machado

This program is presented in partnership with theInstitute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF), le Moving Image Research Laboratory (MIRL) and the Réseau québécois en études féministes (RéQEF).