Live performance with digital projection

Conversation with Courtney Stephens to follow.

With the emergence of cinema came the phenomenon of amateur movies, a small subset of which were filmed by women. Courtney Stephens’s Terra Femme is comprised of archival footage from the first half of the 20th century, shot by women in locations far from home. An essay film, a memoir, a post-colonial reckoning, Terra Femme is a work of live cinema that takes the form of a narrated travelogue, with Stephens leading the viewer through errant cinematic scrapbooks, seeking out the stories behind the images, and wondering after the women who captured and witnessed them. Richard Brody writes that Stephens “develops far-reaching analyses of women’s filmmaking in an era when few women had professional directing careers—and ultimately connects their work to the sociology and the spirit of travel itself.”

Remix the Archive is a collaborative series with Vidiots and Media Arts & Culture Department at Occidental College, highlighting media centered on the reuse and recontextualization of archival film.