Psychiatry and our prejudices, our daily response to the women we call crazy… what if we listened to the words of stifled women, the words of silence? No longer to be afraid, afraid to experience intensity, complicity, creativity and, above all, to have the power to invent our own lives. A reflection with creativity as its starting point, pieces of poetry, songs, texts, plays, readings, assembled together Iike a patchwork quilt. 

– Helen Doyle

The novel aspects of the theme raised in Helen Doyle's tape are represented by her attempts to forge conceptual Iinks between creativity and madness in women. The participants in the film – singers, writers, dancers, artists, musicians – all share three things in common: all are women, all have at one time been hospitalised and all have sought to dispel the label “crazy” through creative work. In interview these women talk of their experiences with hospitals, psychiatrists and drugs, in many cases expressing their so-called madness as the silencing of an inner or bodily voice. 

Through different video techniques Helen Doyle probes at the reasons for these women's experiences. Those same social structures within which some members of society can function successfully exert a repressive effect on women particularly – effectively silencing them. For the women participants of this film that silenced part of themselves can find expression through their creative work. But – and the point is forcefully made – that expression must reveal the wounds of silence. Not a gentle subject. 

– Jill McGreal

Description source: Circles Catalogue (circa 1983). Compiled by Helen MacKintosh and Margaret Gillan. Edited by Felicity Sparrow.