Carolee Schneemann. Cinema as Autobiography, the Artist as an Actress, the Body as a Brush

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relationship between cinema and women from the film work of Carolee Schneemann, mainly from her autobiographical work Fuses (1964-1966). In this study, we discuss the role the artist plays as producer, director and main protagonist of all her production. We reflect on the role of the creator-director as an actor that would lead to the achievement of a film with necessarily autobiographical overtones. Assuming the avant-garde perspective of the cinema as a personal diary, Schneemann’s cinema will explore different aspects of identity and sexuality of women in an artistic, alternative and politically feminist cinema. Understanding her cinema as a plastic element, the artist will explore at the same time a physical and matteric experimentation through the filmed bodies as well as the very materiality of the film, excluding any narrative, dramatic and illusory chance of projection of the spectator in both the cinematic and the private space of the artist.