Film Studies Speaker Series: Dalila Missero (Lancaster) "Visualize Women as a (Global) Collective: the International Conference Film and the Decade for Women (1975-85)"

“Visualize Women as a (Global) Collective: the International Conference Film and the Decade for Women (1975-85)”

Dr Dalila Missero (Lancaster University)
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/arts/people/dalila-missero

In this talk, I introduce the ‘conference film', a sub-genre in feminist non-fiction media that consists in the documentation of international political meetings, from diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives, like those of activists, governments, NGOs and other institutions. By retracing visual and narrative tropes in a wide range of activist and institutional media produced during the United Nations Decade for Women (1975-85), I look at this sub-genre for its political and imaginative uses in articulating diverse notions of ‘women' as a global political subject.
For this seminar, I am going to focus on two documentaries produced by socialist state companies to record the World Conferences on Women organized by the Women's Democratic International Federation (WIDF) in East Berlin (1975) and Prague (1981) – World Congress for International Women's Year (DEFA, DDR, 1975) and Women Speak Up for Peace (TsDF, USSR, 1981). These two case studies offer an unusual entry point into women's internationalism, which reveal the entanglement of state-driven women's organizations, Global Socialist politics — and its affinities with US Civil Rights Movement, and post-colonial and Third Worldist feminist perspectives. While my talk makes a case for inserting these films in the media histories of the women's movement, I also argue that institutional and state-sponsored films from the former ‘Second World' complicate notions of canon, authorship, and pleasure in Western definitions of the ‘woman's film'.