Michelle Citron: Daughter Rite
Michelle Citron, Daughter Rite, 1978. Courtesy of the artist.
Presented as part of Films By Women/Chicago ’74, a series celebrating the 50 year anniversary of the Film Center’s pioneering women’s film festival, hosted by the Gene Siskel Film Center and The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University.
A landmark of feminist cinema, Michelle Citron’s staggering Daughter Rite examines the emotional terrain between mothers and daughters while underscoring the many ways the personal is also political. The film links together scenes from her own family’s home movies, verité-style scenes of two sisters unraveling family secrets, and a diaristic voiceover that delves into a daughter's complex feelings of suffocation, anger, and love for her mother. Together, these interlocking parts also raise profound questions about media’s claims on reality and truth. The film’s innovative structure was informed by Citron’s connections to Chicago’s community of feminist organizers, makers, and theorists, many of whom had been a part of Films By Women/Chicago ’74.
After the screening, Michelle Citron will join scholar B. Ruby Rich—one of the Film Center’s founding programmers and a key figure behind Films By Women/Chicago ’74. They will discuss Daughter Rite and the ideas and communities that shaped its creation.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
Michelle Citron is an award-winning film and digital artist whose work explores the lives of women and the border between documentary and fiction through melodrama, home movies, snapshots, and memoir. Citron’s work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, as well as at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and New Directors/New Films in New York. Her films and interactive narratives are in the permanent collections of more than 250 universities and museums. Citron’s book, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (1999, University of Minnesota Press), is the recipient of multiple awards, including a Special Commendation from the And/Or (formerly Kraszna-Krausz) Book Awards, which described the book as offering “a radical new way of thinking and writing about film.” Citron’s films are archived in the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy Film Archive; her interactive art is archived in the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University; and her papers are archived in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
B. Ruby Rich is a film scholar and critic known for her work on queer cinema, feminist film history, documentary, Latin American cinema, American independent filmmaking, and the politics of film exhibition. She’s credited with coining the term “new queer cinema.” Editor at large of the journal Film Quarterly and professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz, Rich began her career in film exhibition and philanthropy, serving as associate director of SAIC’s Gene Siskel Film Center in the mid-1970s and the director of the Electronic Media and Film Program for the New York State Council on the Arts in the 1980s. She is the author of the books New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut (2013, Duke University Press) and Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (1998, Duke University Press), in addition to many other important essays and articles. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a James Grubner Award for outstanding LGBT scholarship from Yale University, an Emmy for her contributions to KQED’s Independent View, and a Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, among others. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and lives between Paris and San Francisco.
ACCESSIBILITY
Conversations at the Edge events have live captions (CART). The Gene Siskel Film Center is fully ADA accessible and its theaters are equipped with hearing loops. For other accessibility requests, please visit saic.edu/access or write cate@saic.edu
TICKETS
$13 General public
$8 Students & seniors
$6.50 Film Center members
$5 SAIC staff & faculty & AIC staff
FREE for SAIC students with a valid ID
All CATE programs are free for SAIC students. Unless otherwise noted, SAIC student tickets are released five days prior to showtime. Tickets must be picked up in person from the Gene Siskel Film Center box office. A student ID is required.
RESOURCE GUIDES
Conversations at the Edge’s resource guides contain articles, interviews, and other material related to upcoming artists and events. Available here.