A Question of Silence / We Aim to Please (1982 / 1976)
@ Doc Films at the University of Chicago
1212 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637
Opening Tuesday, October 29th, at 7PM
A Question of Silence / We Aim to Please (1982 / 1976)
Marleen Gorris, Margot Nash & Robin Laurie · 92m / 13m · 35mm / DCP
An exhilarating court drama, psychological thriller, and women’s crime film all in one, A Question of Silence trembles with palpable feminist rage. Marleen Gorris’s directorial debut centers three women who are accused of killing a man together. Mysteriously, they are all strangers to each other. A psychiatrist assigned to the case becomes obsessed with figuring it out and comes to question her own ideas along the way. Preceded by We Aim to Please.
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Echoes of Films by Women/Chicago ’74
In 1974, Chicago held its first women’s film festival, screening over 70 films spanning works by early directors like Leni Riefenstahl and Dorothy Arzner to avant-garde filmmakers like Maya Deren and Marie Menken. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Doc revisits the Films by Women/Chicago ’74 program in conversation with screenings at Northwestern University’s Block Cinema and the Gene Siskel Film Center. While one original choice, Loving Couples, is replicated, the rest are additions, or echoes: the inclusion of a Soviet presence through Murotova’s The Long Farewell, as well as an alternative choice of Duras (Nathalie Granger, instead of 74’s Destroy). The series also includes screenings that attempt to capture the spirit of the festival through post-’74 films that were made in the long lineage of feminist filmmaking on display at the festival. Marleen Gorris’s A Question of Silence evokes the feminist rage of Mai Zetterling, while We Aim to Please and Untitled 77-A by Han Ok-hee (founder of Kaidu Club, a South Korean feminist experimental film group) presents another idea of what a woman’s avant-garde film can be. Finally, the series closes across the ocean with a screening of videos made by French women working within feminist video collectives of the 70s. Works include those made by Delphine Seyrig and Carole Roussopolous (a continuation of Doc’s Spring 2023 screenings of Les Insoumises’ video work) that address the pressing women’s issues of the time, not unlike our own, and a film reflecting on the ideas and goals of a women’s film festival through the lensing of the Musidora Women’s Film Festival (also occurring in 1974). This last screening is introduced by London-based scholar and curator Erika Balsom.
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Tags: A Question of Silence / We Aim to Please (1982 / 1976), Chicago, Doc Films at the University of Chicago, Echoes of Films by Women/Chicago '74, Erika Balsom, Han Ok-hee, Hyde Park, Margot Nash, Marleen Gorris, Robin Laurie
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