Women Make Waves International Film Festival

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    Playing a Part: the Story of Claude Cahun

    Lizzie Thynne 2005 UK Documentary color 45min Digi-Beta
    Playing a Part explores the life and work of Claude Cahun (1894-1954), one of the greatest, yet almost forgotten, 20th century photographers with movement sequences devised by choreographer Lea Anderson. Cahun collaborated with her life-long lover and stepsister, Marcel Moore, to produce an astounding series of images of herself from her teens to her death that defy a fixed gender and identity. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, the pair were part of the vibrant artistic life of interwar Paris. Posing as a treacherous German soldier, the women carried out an ingenious counter-propaganda campaign against the Nazi Occupation of Jersey, where they had moved in 1937, until their arrest and condemnation to death. Combining rarely seen war archive and contemporary footage, the film mimics the photographer's own surreal style. Key critics, including David Bate, Mary Ann Caws and Elisabeth Lebovici highlight her significance to modern art and personal acquaintances recount memories of this remarkable couple.

    Director

    Lizzie Thynne

    Lizzie Thynne is Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Sussex University, Brighton UK. Her work spans different forms of critical practice, written and visual. She made films for Channel Four's ground-breaking gay programming including After the Revolution and Child of Mine, as well as work for galleries and commercial television. She has published on lesbian representation in film, practice as research and women's employment in television. She has worked in cinema exhibition, including on the Tyneside Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, adult and higher education. Her other interests are surrealism, photography, film theory and documentary production.

    Lizzie Thynne

    2005 Playing a Part: The Story Of Claude Cahun

    1996 Child Of Mine The House

    1994 After the Revolution

    1990-91 Dreams of Paradise

     

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