And what can we infer about Boston Brahmin Adelaide Pearson, defying propriety to lavish two minutes of celluloid on a pair of Berber belly dancers? In shots of a middle-class Black neighbourhood in late ’50s Seattle, mistakenly scanned backwards by archivists, Stephens sees women “pulled back and up, sucked back into homes” as if assailed by some mysterious reactionary force. Footage of the British colonies attributed for decades to an officer stationed in India, later discovered to have been captured by his wife, transforms everything in an instant, and the banality of the image becomes loaded with subtext. Stephens is maybe doing her own pioneering archaeology, decoding the films and finding clues to the experience behind the gaze. The women behind these pilot home movies include “colonial wives”, wealthy ladies on endless world tours, early socialists, a teenaged explorer named Aloha Wonderwell, even a pioneering archeologist. The filmmaker’s erudite monologue draws from poets, authors, and academics, and ranges across ancient myth, fairy tales, film scholarship, psychoanalysis, and finally Ursula Le Guin.
In turn, words perhaps cannot express the pleasures yielded by the exercise, not just for the ghostly images of a now disappeared world collected by these privileged travellers, whose own stories turn out to be fascinating, but also for the quality of Stephens’s insights. The line resonates throughout the entire 60-minute essay on the “female gaze”, a nebulous thing that Stephens hopes to find inside scratchy amateur film shot by women hobbyists in the early 20th century. IN HER HAUNTING voiceover for Terra Femme, Courtney Stephens quotes the poet Madeline Gins: “Words cannot express how I am she.”