Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience

My work as a film-maker and film-theorist is grounded in the 1970s, particularly in the meeting between feminist politics, psychoanalytic theory and avant-garde aesthetics that had such influence then. After the 1983 election and into 1984, I began to feel that work I considered to be ongoing, in the present tense, had shifted into the past to become identified with the previous decade. My formative experiences, desires and failures that had to do with cultural struggle seemed gradually to be relegated to a closed epoch. The avant-garde was over. The Women’s Movement no longer existed as an organisation, in spite of the widespread influence of feminism. And the changed political and economic climate marked the 1980s off from the 1970s. It was tempting to accept a kind of natural entropy: that eras just did come to an end. But then, the sense of historical closure recalled the distrust of narrative closure that had always been a point of principle for the feminist avantgarde. Once a movement can be reviewed retrospectively its story can be told, but how it should be told could still be considered. It seemed as though narrative patterns and expectations of endings had become inextricably intertwined in history as in fiction. We had argued in the 1970s that narrative closure resolves contradiction and stabilises the energy for change generated by a story-line.