Childbirth has long been a defining preoccupation of American avant-garde film. Through the 1960s, the theme became emblematic of filmmakers’ interest in organic movement, visual immediacy, and the private conquest of public space. The genre is usually said to begin with Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Stan Brakhage’s lyrical portrait of Jane Brakhage (née Wodening) giving birth to their daughter, Myrenna. But there were precedents at the outer edges of avant-garde film. In New York, the influential film society Cinema 16 often programmed medical birth documentaries alongside experimental works. These proto-birth films included Childbirth: Normal Delivery, A Normal Birth, Margaret Mead: First Days in the Life of a New Guinea Baby, All My Babies, Hypnosis in Childbirth, and Intra-Uterine Movements of a Foetus. Cinema 16’s self-consciously transgressive programs helped link childbirth to a rhetoric of opposition to the moral hygiene of mainstream cinema. From the beginning, experimental birth films emphasized not only birth but the value-laden act of showing and seeing birth on film. At the level of editing, Window Water Baby Moving seems to anticipate the scandalized response of its audience; the visceral portrayal of Jane’s experience of giving birth is inseparable from a series of metaphors for the breakdown of the boundary dividing private and public visual space.

Maya Deren was among the first to question this strategy from a woman’s point of view. She reportedly denounced the film at its premiere, remarking that “Even the animals, when they give birth, retreat into a secret place.” Interestingly, Deren herself had collaborated on an animal birth film, The Private Life of a Cat (1947), with her first husband, Alexander Hammid. In any case, Brakhage’s film would exercise enormous influence on other filmmakers. It was screened North America and Europe. And in keeping with the movement’s DIY ethos, many audience members responded by making their own birth films, emulating, revising, and critiquing earlier instances of the genre. In its persistence, the theme provides a particularly suggestive index of the broad continuities and discontinuities between Romantic “visionary” and feminist experimental film.

This program features a selection of important but infrequently screened birth films from the FMC collection. The program begins at the beginning with Adam’s Birth by Freude Bartlett. This is followed by Blue White, a rarely seen Brakhage birth film. Other Reckless Things (Janis Crystal Lipzin) responds to news reports about a woman who performed her own Caesarean section. In the context of 1960s avant-garde film, male birth gained currency as a metaphor for filmmaking; Takahiko Iimura’s Onan explores the analogy between female procreative labor and (conventionally) male acts of artistic creation. The program concludes with Marjorie Keller’s landmark experimental birth documentary, Misconception, a film about the everyday marital negotiations surrounding a birth.

PROGRAM:

Freude Bartlett, Adam’s Birth (1973) 1 min

Stan Brakhage, 3 Films: Blue White/Bloodstone/Vein (1965) 8 min

Janis Crystal Lipzin, Other Reckless Things (1984) 17.5 min

Takahiko Iimura, Onan (1963) 7 min

Marjorie Keller, Misconception (1977) 43 min

Total Run Time: