Susan Stein

Tracks

Tracks uses the character of a struggling female teacher in order to connect areas of pre-feminism such as the suffragette movement, contraception and abortion rights, motherhood, later feminist writings and poverty, whilst highlighting the contradictions and differences within feminist discourse at the time. It’s a collage film which combines photographic, animated and live-action parts, black and white and colour footage. The voice-over soundtrack is partly a reworking and rewording of individual experiences and also a reflection on perceived actions of women due to historical and contemporary circumstance. It draws on a rich collection of personal and public imagery, re-made and manipulated, layered and textured, while taking a critical look at certain feminist theories.

She Said

She Said explores the theme of women and work, using the formal properties of film to reflect on the overlap between work and free time. The film begins with a series of old and contemporary photographs, cut to a rhythm, which echoes that of monotony. A fragmented dialogue creates a feeling of alienation and lack of control (often identified with the labour process), interrupting further sequences of live action and images. “Feeling strongly that women's work is continuous, I realised that the film work could only be seen after work or in moments of non-work which I hesitate to call leisure. With this in mind I tried to bring this contradiction to the surface within the film itself”' (Susan Stein)

Returning

Looking outside and looking back in the same moment; the collision of memory and reluctance. In Returning Susan Stein achieves a simultaneous sense of identification and displacement by filming from the ‘inside out’ – a subjective camera places us inside a house, behind a door, peering through blinds – and from the ‘outside in’ through a voice-over whose broken streams of memory describes ‘her’: “Fragments – she arranged them as moments to be watched.” Filmed in black and white, it is though we were invited into the shadowy area of our own fragmentation, our own sense of stopping and starting.

G

In Susan Stein’s early film, G, her interest is language and work and how the two are connected. Experimenting with the conjunction of images and sound, she shows a typewriter from a variety of angles, punctuating the images with the almost abstracted sounds of a clock, typing and a monologue. The result is a reflection on both the material and artistic processes confronting an author. “Thinking about writing and hearing and writing of the film, the same alphabet which has been shared by many women.” (SS)

Journey

Images of the filmmaker on a train are intercut with shots of an ice cream parlour, shops, a woman glancing at herself of the mirror, etc suggesting the filmmaker’s reverie as she looks out of the train window.