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Marjorie Keller was one of very few experimental filmmakers who was as active in scholarship and teaching as in artistic production. Keller received a doctorate from the cinema studies department of New York University in 1983 and taught at the University of Rhode Island until her death in 1994. Throughout this period and earlier, she was active both as a filmmaker and as a participant in the cooperative avant-garde film communities in Chicago and New York. Despite the widespread recognition of her more than twenty-five films and the fact that her body of work is now complete, Keller has received little critical attention. This oversight is partially the result of the neglect of avant-garde film practice in general in the academic film studies community, and particularly the invisibility of many women artists. However, the more intriguing and unsettling cause for Keller's obscurity concerns her informed refusal to work within the paradigms established by feminist film theory in the mid-1970s. Having studied with the likes of Annette Michelson at NYU in the mid-igyos, she was not unaware of the significance of Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," which introduced the precepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis into film studies and called for a counter-cinema in reaction to classical Hollywood structures. Rather, Keller rejected film practice based on feminist theory because she believed, as she said in a review of E. Ann Kaplan's 1983 book Women and Film, that theory "obfuscates women's filmmaking in the name of feminism."1
In the context of the heightened emotions that characterized debates in the 1970s and 1980s about varieties of feminism, Keller's status as an outcast was assured.2 Not only did she reject the structural demands on her work made in the name of feminist film theory, but she also declared openly that her primary influences were the maligned lyrical and diarist filmmakers Marie Menken, Gregory Markopoulos, and Stan Brakhage. Complicating the situation further is the fact that Keller was not just a practitioner of poetic cinema but also a committed activist in the politics of her day. Thus she was not one to accept passively the decree that her work was non-feminist simply because her films did not follow a trajectory put in place by people who were not...