What is it you wish to speak of?

This practice-as-research film endeavours to explore questions posed during research for Bridger’s PhD (‘Speaking of Gender, Language and Identity: Writing the Personal’) - in particular, in relation to the work of a group of French female writers who focus on women and writing, and problematise the deployment of the terms ‘female’ and ‘voice’. In an invitation given to some 30 women, Bridger requested written, audio or video responses to her question: “What is it you wish to speak of?”. Using the video material made by the contributors or filmed by herself, Bridger gathered black-and-white digital films from 4 to 80 minutes duration. The films all stem from the same source interviews with 18 women, but their lengths vary according to the editing. Bridger was responsible for camera work in all but three of the interviews, and for the editing. Individual films use as their titles the name of each woman featured - e.g. ‘Misri’, ‘Dot’, ‘Jan’ - and employ subtitles referring to an aspect of the woman's response - e.g. ‘Four Million Women’, ‘Stuck in the House’, ‘Journey’, ‘Unspeakable’.

An 80-minute version entitled ‘What is it you wish to speak of?’ features all these individual interviews shown sequentially, with a short introductory section. This version was screened at Exeter Phoenix and Devon Arts Centre as part of tEXt 05 (May 2005). Subsequently, a 20-minute version entitled ‘Talk Dancing’ was screened at the ‘Women Writing and Reading – Past and Present, Local and Global’ conference, University of Alberta (May 2007).

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