The Heretics

I may have breasts and a cunt, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do absolutely anything I want in the world.

— Su Friedrich

“We fell in love with each other’s minds.” Remembering what it was like to work on Heresies, performance artist Marty Pottenger still sounds smitten. Back in the day, when a New York City women’s collective was conceiving this feminist journal of art and politics, they were pretty much making it up as they went along. Together, they published 27 issues, with topics like women and violence, feminism and ecology, racism, women’s traditional arts, and music, from 1977 to 1992. As artist Ida Applebroog recalls, “It was an incredible time. The world was up in flames. I felt like I was up in flames.”

Such excitement, according to Joan Braderman’s The Heretics, emerged from a (spreading) belief that “everything was possible.” As she travels to interview 24 of the women she worked with on the journal, Braderman is moved to think back on the interests and ideals they shared. “Tracking down the heretics and shooting them on location was an adventure in itself,” she muses over collagey images of city streets and rural roads, and herself behind the wheel of an antic 2D car.

Screening at MOMA through 15 October (and at Northampton, MA’s Academy of Music on 22 October 22, and DC’s American University 30 October), the documentary is part personal essay, part archival project, and part political rumination. It’s the result of Braderman’s own search: “I set out to discover,” she says, “how we had moved from that time, when everything seemed possible, to this one, where fear corrodes even the young and too often, it’s every man for himself again.” While the film doesn’t come up with explanations for this shift (or perhaps more accurately, this reversion), it does submit that the hopes and efforts of the Heresies collective remain relevant today.

Heretics sometimes seems erratic, sometimes superficial, covering a lot of ground briefly. For a few minutes the heretics reminisce about the first feminist books they read (no surprises: Kate Millet, Doris Lessing, Simone de Beauvoir) and the importance of CR (Consciousness Raising) groups, and for a few more, they list journal issues that were controversial or groundbreaking (the Sex Issue, the Goddess Issue, the Third World Women’s Issue, the Food is a Feminist Issue Issue). It’s good to remember what the journal did, but the film provides little self-examination or analysis of context.

Describing her own readiness for the initial adventure, Braderman remembers, “I considered myself an anarcho-pagan, post-situationist, democratic-socialist feminist. But as a woman, who was I really supposed to be?” The heretics didn’t come up a single answer; as critic Lucy Lippard recalls, they debated “whether we were Marxist feminists or feminist Marxists,” and focused much of their energy on “the demystification of art” (“It sounds like an air freshener,” jokes writer Elizabeth Hess). They came together through shared questions, about how language and goals are linked and might be changed. “I think we began to understand how to develop the self,” says Elizabeth Weatherford. I was attracted not because of gender the abstract, but because I was female and had to understand the self in a political way.”

This assumption, that being female obliges political awareness, shapes the film fundamentally, from its historical contextualizing (say, a brief trot through the American women’s suffrage movement) to its ironic use of ’70s TV footage: after writer Arlene Ladden calls her miniskirt a form of sexual-political expression (“That was the way I punched myself out of a paper bag”), the film illustrates the world she was up against, through ABC’s Howard K. Smith’s observation that the miniskirt “is the biggest advance in urban beautification since Central Park.” Suffice it to say that we’re still punching our way out of that paper bag.

Su Friedrich similarly notes that Heresies helped give voice to women’s experiences, her own included. Extolling the creativity and collaboration of filmmaking as art and work, she adds that then and now, “Going out into the world meant dealing constantly with technicians, and equipment rental firms.” With her signature wry humor (which informs her films, brilliantly), Friedrich deadpans, “Oh yeah, we have Title IX. Everybody gets to play soccer now. But the reality is that women are still seen differently than men and our stories are still considered to be particular, for the Women’s Channel, and men’s stories are universal, even though they’re not.”

And yes, we’re still working on that paper bag too.