By frag_editorial This video essay explores gender and power through a contemporary lens, using fragmented voiceovers from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I take on the role of a present-day Woolf, filming my daughter with a 16mm camera as she reflects on images of injustice. These modern audiovisual sections are intercut with a montage of Victorian-era drawings and keywords arranged in a photo contact sheet. By combining these 19th-century images, sourced from antiquarian sticker books, with archival black-and-white footage and my own stop-motion animation, the film delves into questions of gender, class, and race. It shows how these issues, shaped in the past, continue to influence the present day.
About the maker
Dr. Lisa DiGiovanni holds a split appointment in the departments of Modern Languages and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College. Her interdisciplinary research centers on representations of war, dictatorial violence, and genocide in 20th–21st century Spain and Latin America. She explores how film and literature render visible the multiple traumas related to state repression and militaristic culture. In Unsettling Nostalgia, she traces how authors and filmmakers represent memories of the pre-dictatorial pasts in Spain and Chile, as well as the anti-fascist resistance to the military regimes of Franco (1939–1975) and Pinochet (1973–1990). Her second book, Militarized Masculinity, argues that until we connect the dots between masculinity, militarism, and violence, we cannot fully comprehend the causes and consequences of mass atrocity crimes.
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user84946783
Profile: https://www.keene.edu/site/directories/profile/facstaff/1455/