Comment « rendre compte » des expérimentations sans récit et comment « expérimenter » depuis les récits du cinéma narratif ? Dans les textes écrits par Prosper Hillairet, des passages s’opèrent, circulent dans les films, entre les films, les styles, les cinéastes, les époques. L’ ensemble, tour à tour consacré à l’avant-garde des années 20, comme aux cinéastes expérimentaux français des années 70 et 80, avec quelques incursions tardives dans le cinéma narratif, tisse une réflexion à partir du cinéma comme « forme visuelle ».

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?