Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) is internationally recognized as one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. The leitmotif of her painting, the act of rendering her body awareness visible, found additional expression in the films she made in New York in the early 1970s. And what films they are! Influenced by painting, but also by U.S. experimental film, the feminist movement, animation, and her new hometown of New York, Lassnig created a remarkable body of radically independent short films in just a few years.

A pioneer of cinema, Germaine Dulac (1882-1942)  is one of the major figures of the 1920s French Avant-Garde. Hugely influential, she founded and directed numerous organisations and, in parallel, was a tireless activist in the defense of women’s rights.

Girl Head shows how gender has had a surprising and persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen. For decades, feminist film criticism has focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation?

Margaret Tait, filmmaker and poet, was born in Orkney in 1918. She trained first as a medical doctor before studying film in Rome in the 1950s. After returning to Edinburgh, Tait established her film studio, Ancona Films, before eventually returning to Orkney in the 1960s, where she lived and continued to make films until her death in 1999. Personae is Tait’s previously unpublished non-fiction manuscript edited by Sarah Neely with a selection of photographs from Margaret Tait’s personal archive with a foreword by Ali Smith and beautifully designed by Maeve Redmond.