DOCUMENTARY
Making Change
The Australian Women’s Liberation Movement in Catherine Dwyer’s Brazen Hussies While screen works about the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s have flourished in recent times, its vigorous Australian manifestation has been relatively overlooked – a cultural gap that Catherine Dwyer’s documentary seeks to rectify. Featuring testimony from the women at its forefront and a wealth of archival material, the film both captures the energy and spirit of the era and serves as an important historical document, as Glenn Dunks discusses. In the opening moments of the new Australian documentary Brazen Hussies (Catherine Dwyer, 2020), an onscreen intertitle notes that the women’s movement was ‘reignited’ between 1965 and 1975. That word stuck with me because, while it was most definitely true of that time period, it’s fair to say that the movement has once again reignited in the contemporary age. While the twenty-four-hour news cycle can allow for the impression that all movements are happening all of the time, social justice is often cyclical, and activism and justice have strong ebbs and flows. Issues that grab public attention inevitably lose their cultural marquee value at one point or another for something else, only to swing back around again when the political winds blow in that direction once more. This phenomenon can be reflected in cinema, too, in which a deluge of titles on a given subject tend to emerge as a response to some (perceived or real) revived interest. For instance, once marriage equality passed into law in the United States, Australia and elsewhere around the world, films on the subject quickly vanished, with queer-activist narratives diverted primarily to transgender-rights issues instead. But a whiff of those gains being challenged and there is no doubt that cinema will get back into gear. It’s what filmmakers, and in particular documentarians, have been doing for generations.
52 • Metro Magazine 207 | © ATOM