!Women Art Revolution

With director Lynn Hershman Leeson Q&A

Trailer Link: http://womenartrevolution.com/

USA, 2010
Director: Lynn Hershman Leeson
Screenwriter: Lynn Hershman Leeson
Cinematographer: Hiro Narita
Editor: Jesse Spencer
Composer: Carrie Brownstein
Cast: Guerrilla Girls, Miranda July, Lowery Stokes Sims, Howard Fox
Running Time: 83 minutes

For more than 40 years, director Lynn Hershman Leeson has collected hundreds of hours of interviews with visionary artists, curators and critics who shaped the images and values of the feminist art movement. Her rousing film !Women Art Revolution collects an explosive sampling of these interviews and explores the strategies used to empower female artists and integrate women into the established art structures and institutions. The film elaborates on the relationship of the feminist art movement to the antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s and reveals how historical events sparked the early feminist actions against major cultural institutions.

Elisabeth Subrin for Film Comment describes the film as “an elegantly layered visual and sonic web of politics and powerful emotion.” Through intimate interviews, art and rarely seen archival film and video footage, !W.A.R. reveals how the feminist art movement fused free speech and politics into an art that radically transformed the art and culture of our times.

!W.A.R. features a number of famous figures, starting with Yoko Ono and artist-author Judy Chicago, writer B. Ruby Rich, photographer Cindy Sherman and Ingrid Sischy, Vanity Fair international editor and former editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. Among the other exciting interviews presented in the film are those with dancer-choreographer-filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, along with Carolee Schneemann, Rachel Rosenthal, Miranda July, Cornelia Butler, Guerrilla Girls, Harmony Hammond and Miriam Schapiro.

Carrie Brownstein composed the original score for the film, and Laurie Anderson, Janis Joplin, Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, Erase Errata and Tribe 8 contributed to the soundtrack.

Note: Q&A discussion between filmmakers and audience adds approximately 30 minutes to running time.