Block Cinema: Terra Femme (2021) with Courtney Stephens

A live documentary-performance hybrid in which Courtney Stephens investigates the history of women as travel filmmakers from the 1920s-1950s

In this live documentary-performance hybrid, Courtney Stephens investigates the history of women as travel filmmakers from the 1920s through the 1950s. Drawing entirely on archival materials, Stephens scrutinizes the traces left by these women with a movie camera, asking questions about gender and genre: what common subjects drew their eye? What social roles did they challenge, reproduce, or inhabit? What do these films say about the place of women in the economies of cinema and colonialism? Hearkening to the illustrated lectures of travel societies and 20th-century home movie projections, Stephens uses the live performance mode to reflect on the personal stakes of her inquiry as a traveler and filmmaker. The result is a film essay as moving as it is transporting.