Description:

Auto-Erotic: Female Sexuality in the First Person
(1967-2006, 16mm/digital, 120 min.)

Curated by Northwestern professors Amy Partridge and Helen Thompson, this program brings together three daring works of film and video that forged new paths towards women's sexual self-representation on screen. Carolee Schneemann’s classic Fuses (1966), shown in a restored print, remains one of experimental film’s uncompromising evocations of intimacy. The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd (1970-75) offers an early use of video as a medium for confession and confrontation. The late Chicago artist Barbara DeGenevieve playfully deconstructs the motives behind her affair with a truck driver in Desperado (2004-06).

Visual Pleasures: The Work and Play of Women’s Liberation
This year’s One Book One Northwestern selection, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, imagines how the hard-fought economic and sexual freedoms won by the women’s movement might be stripped away. The films in this series, co-presented with One Book, the Northwestern Women’s Center, and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, manifest those freedoms in both form and content. Visual Pleasures encompasses both mainstream comedies of empowerment and experimental representations of desire through a distinctly female gaze, celebrating liberation through a spectrum of cinematic forms.