Feminist Observation: The Case of Processo per stupro
7. Jänner 2025 Kepler Salon
(A Trial for Rape, 1979)
Vortrag von Erika Balsom (London) im Rahmen der Reihe relatifs.
Processo per stupro is an observational documentary of the trial of four men for the rape of an eighteen-year-old woman whom they lured to a villa with the promise of employment as a secretary. Shot in 1978 just south of Rome, the film was made by a group of women who worked for the Italian national broadcaster RAI; several of them had formed part of the Collettivo femminista di cinema earlier in the decade. Processo per stupro aired on Italian television twice in 1979, reaching some 14 million viewers.
This presentation will make two interventions. First, it will explore how this understudied yet landmark work demands a retheorization of observational strategies. Observation is typically associated with remoteness, mastery, and a pretence to objectivity but is also criticized for being too close – too absorbed – in the event, such that it engages in “mere” description rather than critical analysis. This paper will show how Processo prompts a rethinking of observation as a strategy bound to care, implication, and authorial humility. It engages in a form of committed absorption that mobilizes observation’s connection to concreteness and particularity to do more than “merely” describe. Second, I will ask how this embrace of observation challenges the historiography of feminist filmmaking in the 1970s, which is dominated by a divide between realist documentary on the one hand and more experimental idioms on the other, particularly those informed by political modernism.
Erika Balsom is a reader in film studies at King’s College London. She is the author of four books, including After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017, Columbia University Press) and TEN SKIES (Fireflies Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in venues such as Artforum, Cahiers du cinéma, Cinema Scope, e-flux, Frieze, Grey Room, New Left Review, and Screen. With Hila Peleg, she is the editor of Documentary Across Disciplines (MIT Press, 2016) and Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image (MIT Press, 2022). In 2018, she was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize and the Katherine Singer Kovacs essay award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. In 2021/22, she was the co-curator of the retrospective exhibition “Peggy Ahwesh: Vision Machines” (Spike Island, Bristol/Kunsthall Stavanger), and in 2022/23, she was the co-curator of “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” (HKW Berlin/Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw).
Gastgeber*innen
Henning Engelke, Julia Grillmayr, Anne von der Heiden
Eine Veranstaltung der Kunstuniversität Linz (Abteilungen Kulturwissenschaft sowie Kunst geschichte und Kunsttheorie) in Kooperation mit dem Kepler Salon.
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Erika Balsom: Feminist Observation: The Case of Processo per stupro (A Trial for Rape, 1979)
