The Eternal Daughters of Chaos: Girlhood, Play, and the Poetics of Care

Throughout popular culture, adolescent girls have been the target of much cinematic fodder as a distinctly vulnerable and homogenized group within society. While much contemporary media dedicated to the concept of girlhood is dismissed as frivolous, boy-crazed, and regressive, such critiques fail to acknowledge their cultural prevalence as a tool for socialization and conformity. The desire for increased representation and inclusion has subjected girls to exploitation, sexualization, and domestication, forcing them to ‘come-of-age’ as quickly as possible. 

Many experimental filmmakers concerned with childhood and adolescence have addressed such criticisms in their work, questioning notions of gendered identity and subjective experience through their appropriation of thematic and formalist filmic techniques. Their work challenges the simplistic view of girlhood and the freedom it evokes as an antecedent to labor and the ultimate goal of marriage and kids. In doing so, they epitomize the ambivalence of adolescence for girls who at once romanticize and catastrophize the experience of growing up, and reconfigure their presupposed fantasies of traditional womanhood by embracing their feelings of excitement, curiosity, fear, and disgust that accompany them. 

The films chosen for this program represent the “eternal daughters of chaos,” dedicated to play, mischief, friendship, and connection - to others, and to themselves. They explore the inner world of adolescent girls as they grow older, bearing witness to the experiential facets of girlhood and the memories and feelings they evoke through lyrical editing of sound and image, “bringing to light an internal reality that is different from the shared reality of our common culture” (Marjorie Keller quoted in Linda Reisman, 74). 

“It is the girl who is the most profound site of patriarchal investment, her unconstrained freedom representing the most fearsome threat to male control.” -Frances K. Gateward and Murray Pomerance

PROGRAM:

1. The Scary Movie (1994, dir. Peggy Ahwesh, 9mins). 

2. Andrea Acting Out (1974, dir. Rosalind Schneider, 11.5mins)

3. 1x1 (1965, dir. Andrew Meyer, 12mins)

4. Trip to Carolee (1974, dir. Coleen Fitzgibbon, 5mins)

5. Daughters of Chaos (1980, dir. Marjorie Keller, 19.5mins)