British avant-garde women filmmakers and expanded cinema of the 1970s

My thesis examines the expanded cinema of Gill Eatherley, Annabel Nicolson and Lis Rhodes. My intent has been to locate them within their historical context, addressing in particular their relationship to the cohesive, 'Structural' film culture then emerging from the London Filmmakers' Co-operative, and the distinct expanded film form with which it was associated in the early part of the 1970s. The main focus of my methodology, however, is interpretative rather than empirical. Through close textural readings of key works I have attempted to open up fresh critical frameworks for understanding their work, referring to discourses of phenomenology and the haptic, for example, as a means of exploring their subjective and embodied relationship to the materials and apparatus of film. My thesis proposes a multi-interpretative analysis of Eatherley, Nicolson and Rhodes' rich and complex film works. The aim of my research is to create a dialogue of ongoing questions between the different theoretical, political and subjective positions their films engender, from which, it is hoped, productive juxtapositions and convergences can emerge.