Some American Feminists
1977 · 55m · Canada
Directed by Luce Guilbeault, Nicole Brossard, Margaret Wescott
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Six leading figures of American feminism, including Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, discuss their central concerns in interviews interwoven with newsreel material that places the movement in historical context.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A direct-address doc from the '70s sounds like the consensus play, but Guilbeault and Brossard's refusal to editorialise—letting Friedan and Millett argue past each other in real time—is genuinely uncomfortable in ways modern talking-heads documentaries have trained us out of.
This is cinema as archival argument: three women working in the NFB tradition of essayistic documentary, weaving primary testimony against newsreel to construct a genealogy of American feminism that's both historiographically rigorous and formally considered in its montage choices.
The decision to let the newsreel material sit unironic and unsmoothed against the interviews—no underscoring, no mediation—makes the gap between 1977 rhetoric and 1977 footage do all the work; it's a sound design choice masquerading as restraint.