Rape

F.2011-01-0307

1975

Rape is an experimental documentary that foregrounds the experiences of survivors of sexual violence in formally provocative ways. Finished on 16mm, JoAnn Elam weaves together kinescoped video footage of three women discussing their own experiences with a wide range of fraught imagery, including street footage of women traversing an always-threatening terrain, intertitles that wryly amplify the points made in the women’s conversation, footage of children’s games heavy with symbolism, bits of legal language and monumental cliches, “all combining to create a statement on rape that is both literal and poetic, both collective and individual” (B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader, 7 March 1980). Elam made Rape in her off-duty hours from the USPS, with assistance from the North Side Rape Crisis Line, the South Side Rape Action Project, and Chicago Women Against Rape. 

The film is a fascinating example of second wave feminism and the consciousness raising movement. Both the film’s visuals and soundtrack embody the phrase “the personal is political,” as all of the women involved saw the making of the film as “an explicitly public act” (Julia Lesage, The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film, in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism [ed. Patricia Erens, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990], 235). The filming of the subjects was done collectively, with each of the women taking turns passing a handheld video camera around to one another. Elam explained to the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, “I wanted the women to be comfortable. I didn’t want one-on-one interviews or the women to feel that I was going to be off in a corner somewhere filming them. A camera is a real intrusion” (Roxanne T. Mueller, “Elam’s rape film full of anger, grittiness, wit,” Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, December 3 1978). Elam was seemingly very aware of her own positionality; in a brochure she produced for the film, she included an acknowledgement that “All four women participating in the discussion are young, white, and middle class, resulting in a certain bias in viewpoint and information.”

The film is widely considered a landmark of experimental feminist filmmaking. Scholar B. Ruby Rich described it as "an early classic of feminist avant-garde agitprop" (Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement [Durham: Duke University Press, 1998], 106) and Jump Cut co-founder Julia Lesage called it "one of the most important fusions of the experimental filmmaking tradition and the current wave of self-consciously political films." (“Disarming Film Rape,“ Jump Cut, no. 19, December 1978, 14-16). Lesage elaborates, "Elam has striven to create new cinematic tactics for exploring and explicitly analyzing the topic of rape without being co-opted into using that subject matter for visual voyeuristic pleasure." Scott Meek of the British Film Institute wrote, “Given the rapid interchange of image, definition and text on the visual level, and the complexity of its soundtrack, Rape proves to be more entertainingly provocative than one might expect. Its richness of allusion represents a considerable achievement: a heady mixture of experimental film form and politicised film-making” (BFI Monthly Film Bulletin, April 1979).

34 min 40 sec

16mm

1,240 feet

B&W

Optical

1/1

Yes

English

Distribution Print

Documentary
Experimental

Short

Feminists
Feminism
Women's rights
Sexism