Filmforum 50, program 2: The Women’s Gaze: Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction and Courtney Stephens’s Terra Femme

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Filmforum 50, program 2: The Women’s Gaze: Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction and Courtney Stephens’s Terra Femme

Sunday December 7, 2025, 7:30 pm

At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90057

In person: Courtney Stephens

Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members

https://link.dice.fm/S464c7fa1855

This program features a pair of films from two eras (or three, really) of Los Angeles filmmaking.  Chick Strand (1931-2009) was one of the founders of Canyon Cinema, who relocated to Los Angeles in the late 1960s and became one of the critical filmmakers and teachers of film in the region from then until her death.  Opinionated, unruly, insightful, visionary, Soft Fiction is one of her masterworks, an extended semi-personal documentary incorporating several stories by women of sensual experiences they had had.

Comprised of rare amateur travelogues shot by women between the 1920s-50s, Terra Femme is a live documentary by Courtney Stephens that weaves together questions of female authorship, cinematic excavation, and the Western gaze, complicating the freedoms these women experienced while traveling through foreign landscapes. 

Both films pursue an alternative notion of what has been called ethnographic film, rooted in the experiences of women, released from standard expectations of behavior, removing false notions of objectivity in their personal expressions of worldly experience.  The films speak to one another across eras: women traveling the world in the first half of the twentieth century, through a feminist documentary lens of the late 1970s, to the insightful reflections of today.  Please join us for this special evening, with Soft Fiction on 16mm and the now-uncommon live performance version of Stephens’s Terra Femme.

Chick Strand's (1931-2009) accomplishments as an artist spanned more than three decades. In the early 1960s, with a new anthropology degree in hand, she turned her attention to ethnographic filmmaking. Her early work focused on Meso-American cultures explored through the language of the experimental documentary.  In 1961, she founded Canyon Cinema with Bruce Baillie, an organization that, in 1965, spawned the San Francisco Cinematheque. They organized screenings of experimental, documentary and narrative films in East Bay backyards and community centers. Acting in response to a lack of public venues for independent movies, they were part of a wider explosion in American avant-garde film. The era was one of social idealism and communal energy, and the films they showcased boldly embraced purely cinematic visual expression and cultural critique.

Strand left Northern California in the late 1960s to pursue studies in ethnographic film at UCLA. She then joined the faculty of Occidental College, where she served as the director of the film as art program for a quarter of a century. In the 1970s she continued to define her visual technique, and her subjects more frequently became women. She soon evolved a distinctive film style: backlit subjects photographed in close up and in motion, with a handheld telephoto lens. The technique produced sensual, lyrical images that became Strand's signature. Her entire filmography numbers nearly a score of works, and along the way, she also become an accomplished photographer and painter.

Courtney Stephens is the director of four feature films. The American Sector (with Pacho Velez) follows slabs of the Berlin Wall installed around the US, and was named one of the best films of 2021 in The New Yorker. Terra Femme, composed of amateur travel footage shot by women in the early 20th century, was a New York Times critic’s pick and has toured widely as a live performance. John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (with Michael Almereyda) explores the life of neuroscientist and psychedelics pioneer John C. Lilly, and Invention is a hybrid fiction film about an esoteric healing device that premiered at Locarno. Her films have been exhibited at MoMA, The National Gallery of Art, The Barbican, Fondazione Prada, Jeu de Paume, ICA London, and film festivals including the Berlinale, Rotterdam, Viennale, New Directors/New Films, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, Morelia, and the New York Film Festival. Her work has been released theatrically in the US, UK, and France, and she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and grants from the Sloan Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Art.

She has co-curated the miniature cinema Veggie Cloud since 2014, and organized film programs for The Getty, Museum of the Moving Image, Flaherty NYC, and Human Resources. Her writing has appeared in Film Comment, BOMB, Filmmaker, The New Inquiry, and Cabinet.