Silenced Images, Fragmented Histories: Sharon Green's Self Portrait and the Gendered Dynamics of Avant-Garde Filmmaking in 1970s Pittsburgh

Sharon Green's short film Self Portrait of a Nude Model Turned Cinematographer (1971) represents a collision of incipient cinefeminism and autobiographical filmmaking. Containing a blend of still photographs and subjective moving-image shots of her body, the work has largely been overlooked because of a reductive framing of it as mere homage to male avant-garde artists such as Stan Brakhage, for whom Green was a nude model. By analyzing aspects of visual form, production, and exhibition, this article performs a corrective “microhistory” that reclaims Green's film as an important hybrid of erotic self-portraiture and social critique. It also situates Green in relation to proximate artists Carolee Schneemann and Yvonne Rainer. Despite ongoing neglect of the work, Green's Self Portrait remains a potent visual archive that reveals the power hierarchies of the 1970s film community in Pittsburgh, while it questions the masculinist assumptions that underlie avant-garde media and historiography.