'An imaginary group, a notional community...'14 Sep — 11 Oct 26
'An imaginary group, a notional community, a community that is impossible, and thus always has to be produced' – Marina Vishmidt
This online exhibition is dedicated to Marina Vishmidt (1976–2024), friend, writer, critic and former Cinenova Working Group member, whose life and work continue to profoundly shape Cinenova and our attempts to engage with its feminist history, organisation and collection. Marina's thinking and writing on film, infrastructure, collective and reproductive labour frames this presentation, and gives us its title.
The title is from I Don’t See A History That Goes Back From Before I Came In, a text written and performed by Marina Vishmidt and Caye Castagnetto at the Women’s Library on Saturday 14 March 2009. One of the many times that those of us who have worked with Cinenova, formerly Circles and Cinema of Women, will have been asked to attend an event, where we reflect on what we do in relation to the importance of materials or media that are aligned with feminism and feminisms themselves. These events both frame the work that we (the Cinenova Working Group) seek to disperse, through our distribution practice and screenings, and the framework of the event creates an observational distance from which to write and try something out socially. It begins:
What precedes what? On the one hand, there are no individuals that precede or objectify the relations through which they come into being, on the other there is also no community which realises these relations as necessary or authentic. And that it’s always transient. Tension: on one hand the pleasure of identity formed by a common project, and on the other, being devoid of communal aspiration and stripped of context, the logic of an interior time. And this idea of an imaginary group, a notional community, a community that is impossible, and thus always has to be produced.
Somewhat counter to the title, and in order to set the exhibition in motion, or produce it, we have selected three film and video works from Cinenova’s collection that Marina watched, screened and wrote about, alongside a description of a video work entitled Me Plus Ultra made by Marina in the early 2000s.
Marina's writing situates community as something made, not inherited. This programme is part of that ongoing, collective work.
Further writing by Marina is available to read on Memory of the World. Her book, Infrastructural Critique: Contemporary Art Between Reproduction and Abolition, will soon be published by Verso.
'An imaginary group, a notional community...' is part of a digital access project supported by BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery Good Cause funding.
'Who Takes the Rap' is about the racist and sexist immigration laws Britain has employed to use and abuse immigrants from 1903 to 1971, and the cumulative effects of those laws on immigrants today.
"Scratch" montage techniques are interwoven with interviews with a number of different immigrant women, complemented not by the usual 'voice of consensus' sound track, but by a commentary provided by two women rappers, locating the terms of reference firmly in the hands of those usually denied access to the means of production. This time, they are representing themselves.
The story of a woman's struggle to bring her son to Britain runs intermittently through the tape, reinforcing the evidence already loaded against British immigration law, that not only racism, but also sexism is used to control immigration in the form of lack of independent status for married women, and disgusting 'medical' tests used to prove the virginity of black women entering the country to marry.
Footage of the Garners Steak House Strike and the Grunwick Strike shows the workers fighting back, whilst archive footage of fascist politicians and fascist demonstrations shows the foul weaponry of racist policy.
Immigration to Britain is contrasted with migration from Britain, to lands of plenty, such as South Africa, where Britons went in droves in the 1960s, to double their income and enjoy the privileges that somehow become the rights of white ex-patriates.
'Who Takes the Rap' raises important issues by locating racism and sexism in concrete legislation history. Its lively and accessible visual and audio style makes it particularly useful and interesting to young audiences, whilst its depth and seriousness makes it important for all.
– Tricia Jenkins, 'Who Takes the Rap' information sheet, Cinenova archive
Please note: The film contains a racial slur at 14:44, 15:31 and 18:12. It has been retained at the request of the filmmaker, who states: "The use of the N-word is in a factual account of what Tory candidate Peter Griffiths said in his election pamphlet, which was distributed through letterboxes in 1964. The angry, rapped response was in relation to his campaign slogan. I believe that hiding how a major actor in UK politics spoke about Black people does a disservice to our understanding of what activists had to face in their fight against racism. We should not ever forget what the Tories said and the campaign language they used."
'Bred and Born', a documentary produced over several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s at Four Corners Film Workshop and televised on Channel Four in 1983, was a co-production by Joanna Davis, Mary Pat Leece, and every woman who watched it being made, some of whom appear in the film. It is an unstable amalgam of a women's group at an East End London community centre meeting to discuss mother-daughter relationships, and a documentary enfolding its own making-of praxis exploring these relationships in four generations of women from the same working-class family on a Shadwell estate. Its heterogeneity of registers, politicised formalism, and analytic tone tell us something about programmers and audiences of that era that is not altogether encouraging to ours.'
– Marina Vishmidt, Her, Her, Me, It, Them, There
Set in a suburban shopping mall, 'Casual Shopper' follows a woman drifting from store to store to a soundtrack of muzak, fondling merchandise and half-responding to salespeople, a quiet study of consumer desire and mall choreography.
'Me Plus Ultra' is a video by Marina Vishmidt, exhibited in 2002 at Century Gallery in London.
