D is for Daring

Excerpt from the Introduction, by Gail Vanstone

A scant two years before it closed in 1996, the National Film Board of Canada's Studio D adopted the slogan "D is for Dare." A brochure announcing "20 Years of Making Films, Breaking Stereotypes" set out its film releases for 1994 along with a list of "daring" accomplishments claimed by Studio D on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary. "We have to dare as we have in the past to be different, to be feminist, to be 'out,' to fight back," proclaimed Ginny Stikeman, then executive director of Studio D (1991-1996), marking the occasion. "Our films dare to be different by challenging the way in which women's lives are depicted by the mainstream media. Our goal is to make films that encourage discussion and dialogue among women, and that promote action aimed at improving the status of women in society." Daring to be different and daring to provoke discussion that would lead to feminist activism, indeed, marked the entire body of work credited to Studio D through out its lifetime.

... Studio D came into being without much institutional forethought or fanfare on the part of the NFB. It was formed in response to the local demands of a small group of women headed by Kathleen Shannon, a long-time National Film Board employee and a filmmaker in its Challenge for Change series. The women were inspired by second-wave feminism, which ascribed to the Canadian version of the American Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This small group wanted to create an official mechanism that would allow women's voices to be heard and their stories told ... to create films that would reach out, inform and create a vibrant dialogue between the Studio and its spectators — in this case, a feminist audience. I had been among those Studio D spectators and I became intrigued, and so I began to formulate a series of underlying questions: What were the politics of operating a feminist unit such as Studio D within a national institutional setting? How did it negotiate with the state? How did it negotiate its path within the women's movement and in relation to other filmmakers?

What I expected (naively) to find was a feminist utopia — a group of feminist innovators working within the National Film Board with state-of-the-art, state-sponsored equipment and an established international distribution network connected to a wide range of Canadian feminists in universities, in community-centre groups, in artistic communities, and producing documentaries that tracked and documented feminist debates of the time. But what I found instead was a series of issues and circumstances that dispute this myth of privilege — and herein lies, I hope, the contribution of this book. It is framed around drawing attention to Studio D's attempts to achieve feminist change that are found in conversations with some of the women who made up Studio D, news reports and articles, film reviews, NFB memos and internal documents, minutes of meetings and, of course, the documentary films themselves, which recommend a more sober but sanguine understanding of such institutionalized ventures if Studio D's feminist legacy is to endure.