WHAT GODMILOW TAUGHT

FILMMAKER IN PERSON!

In 2012, Jill Godmilow wrote to Mireia Sallarès, moved by the film she had made in Mexico about women’s orgasms. For Godmilow, who offered to help distribute the film in the U.S., LAS MUERTES CHIQUITAS (THE LITTLE DEATHS) is not a documentary about a problem of Mexican women, it is a film about orgasms as a political issue that affects everyone and raises the question of who can take responsibility for it by speaking out. How to take responsibility for our problems, how to take charge of them by making political films, was the concern that had led Godmilow to engage years earlier with Harun Farocki’s documentary INEXTINGUISHABLE FIRE, which showed how napalm production during the Vietnam War effectively exempted its makers from any responsibility for it. The fact that Farocki’s film had not been seen in the U.S. and that the problem it raised had not gone away, Godmilow decided to recreate it, in order to involve herself in the problem and put it back into circulation. As a statement about what it means today to be an author, and taking account of this complexity by broadening and politicizing the chain of authorship, she titled her replica WHAT FAROCKI TAUGHT. The present film, WHAT GODMILOW TAUGHT (2014), is a film conversation in which Mireia Sallarès captures Jill Godmilow’s commitment to a political life. Sallarès’s film engages with an artistic practice in which having an idea entails a responsibility, and in which grappling with a political problem requires collaborating with others to make useful films.

Followed by: Jill Godmilow ECSTATIC ORGASM 7.5-min excerpt from an unfinished film, digital

Total running time: ca. 60 min.

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