Looking Back: Don’t Shoot, Darling and Feminist Film
- Scarlet Thomas
- Feb 8
- 6 min read
Last year, I attended Don’t Shoot Darling: Women’s Independent Filmmaking in Australia, a lecture and screening held at RMIT’s Capitol Theatre in collaboration with the Australian Screen Research Collection. The evening foregrounded a lineage of feminist filmmaking that felt both urgently historical and deeply present — a reminder that women’s cinema has always been political, even when it has been intimate, domestic, or deliberately small.
What struck me was not just the historical importance of the work discussed, but how insistently alive it felt. This was not a lecture about a closed chapter of feminist filmmaking; it was a reminder that feminist film practice has always been social, political, emotional, and collective.
The lecture centred on the seminal feminist text Don’t Shoot Darling (1987), written by Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, and Freda Freiberg — a book written not about women’s filmmaking from a distance, but from within the movement itself. Equally compelling was its emphasis on feminist filmmaking as a living practice: women making films, writing criticism, organising screenings, lobbying for funding, and documenting their own labour simultaneously. There was no clean separation between theory and practice, activism and art.
This approach also extended to feminist film criticism. Don’t Shoot Darling rejected a singular theoretical framework in favour of contradiction, disagreement, and feeling. Articles ranged from reflections on funding structures to deeply personal statements by filmmakers about their own work. This refusal to tidy feminist history into a clean narrative felt especially relevant now, when cultural discourse often demands clarity at the expense of complexity.
In the wake of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, women across Australia formed film groups, festivals, workshops, and funding bodies: the Sydney Women’s Film Group, the Melbourne Women’s Film Group, the Women’s Film Fund, and many others. These weren’t just production spaces; they were political ecosystems. Women made films, taught each other technical skills, distributed work locally and internationally, and lobbied for structural change in funding and film education.
The screening of three short films — Woman’s Day (Sydney Women’s Film Group, 1973), Super Duper (Sara Dowse, 1976), and And TENO (Margot Nash, 1984) — offered powerful, varied representations of women’s labour: not just paid work, but emotional, domestic, bodily labour. These films resist spectacle. Instead, they insist on attention — to repetitive gestures, undervalued work, and the rhythms of women’s lives that mainstream cinema has historically ignored or aestheticised without care.
This resistance to spectacle speaks directly to what John Berger famously articulated in Ways of Seeing: that “men act and women appear.” Within classical cinema, women have often existed to be looked at — their bodies framed as surfaces rather than sites of experience. What Don’t Shoot Darling foregrounds is a refusal of that logic. These feminist filmmakers were not interested in making women appear more beautiful or more palatable; they were interested in allowing women to act, speak, labour, and exist without translation for a presumed male viewer. Looking, here, becomes ethical rather than consumptive. Attention replaces surveillance.
What emerged clearly in discussion was the importance of intimacy in feminist filmmaking. Many women working during this period chose to tell personal stories — not as confession, but as resistance. Family violence, reproductive labour, domestic routines, exhaustion, anger, absurdity: these were not marginal themes, but central political concerns. Violence, when depicted, was often intimate rather than sensational. Emotion was not smoothed out for academic distance; it remained present in the writing and the films themselves.
What still feels radical is how openly these filmmakers claimed personal voice. Their films and writings were not neutral or detached. They were emotional, political, sometimes angry, sometimes playful. This challenges the myth that “serious” film criticism or filmmaking must be objective. Feminist film culture, as presented through Don’t Shoot Darling, insists that subjectivity is not a weakness — it is a method.
Crucially, the technological accessibility we now take for granted — cheaper equipment, expanded modes of distribution, online communities — rests on groundwork laid by women who fought for access to resources when filmmaking was far more restrictive. As one filmmaker noted, “We were here all the time.” The problem was never women’s absence, but the structures that refused to see them.
This legacy of feminist critique becomes especially relevant when thinking about contemporary conversations around gendered violence on screen, particularly in the wake of the Me Too movement — which has not so much revealed new behaviour as made visible what was long normalised. Take The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985), a film often remembered fondly for its teen angst and character archetypes. One scene involves Bender hiding under a desk and placing his head between Claire’s legs without her consent. It’s played as a joke. The camera does not linger on her discomfort. The narrative moves on. At the time, this kind of moment was framed as harmless rebellion. Seen now, it reads clearly as sexual violation — normalised, minimised, and unchallenged.
Feminist film criticism gives us the tools to name this violence retroactively — not to cancel the past, but to understand how deeply embedded these attitudes were (and still are). It reminds us that what cinema presents as “normal” shapes what society tolerates.
What excites me is how many contemporary women filmmakers have reclaimed violence as something that can be reversed, reframed, or turned back against patriarchal power. Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night(2014) is a striking example. The Girl targets men who prey on women — addicts, abusers, men who mistake vulnerability for access. Crucially, she is not framed as “fragile and ethereal” (Backman Rogers, 43), nor as a moral lesson. Her violence is quiet, deliberate, and unsettling. She seduces in order to expose. She punishes without spectacle. The film refuses to eroticise her actions for a male gaze; instead, it positions violence as a form of protection — even a grim, ambiguous justice. Power is not decorative here. It is dangerous.
Similarly, feminist horror — from The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) to The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024) — uses genre to explore women’s bodies, ageing, motherhood, and rage. Horror becomes a language capable of holding what realism often cannot: the internalised terror of living in a body that is constantly watched, judged, and disciplined.
By contrast, not all contemporary films directed by women succeed in escaping spectacle. Promising Young Woman (2020), despite its feminist branding, feels misaligned with the values articulated in Don’t Shoot Darling. Presented as a candy-coloured revenge fantasy, the film mistakes stylisation for critique. Trauma becomes a device rather than a lived condition — flattened into pop songs, ironic costumes, and narrative “twists” designed for audience satisfaction. The so-called revenge does not feel healing or cathartic; it feels hollow, even cruel. Instead of sitting with the long, unglamorous realities of survival — insomnia, panic, intrusive memory, endurance — the film stages violation as performance. It asks us to applaud cleverness rather than confront harm.
What makes this especially troubling is perspective. Promising Young Woman feels written for the viewer’s thrill, not the survivor’s truth. It weaponises flashback-like imagery in ways that feel invasive, daring the audience to confuse shock with solidarity. In this sense, the film reproduces the very logic feminist film culture has long resisted: turning women’s pain into spectacle. Don’t Shoot Darling reminds us that feminism in cinema is not about aesthetic provocation alone, but about responsibility — about who is being looked at, who is being heard, and who is being protected.
What the Don’t Shoot Darling lecture made clear is that none of this emerged in isolation. Contemporary feminist cinema exists because of the groundwork laid by women in the 1970s and 80s — women who made films on tiny budgets, fought for funding, wrote their own histories, and refused to wait for institutional permission. Many of them only made one or two films. That does not diminish their impact. If anything, it highlights how difficult it was — and still is — for women to sustain creative careers within unequal systems.
Feminist film history is shaped as much by refusal — to aestheticise, to simplify, to entertain at the expense of truth — as by production itself. It is fragmented, collective, and emotionally charged. But that is its strength. To revisit these works is not an act of nostalgic recovery; it is an ethical engagement with the past that sharpens how we look at the present.
Watching these films, listening to these voices, I was reminded that cinema is never neutral — and neither is criticism. To write about film is to take a position. Feminist film culture teaches us that looking closely, feeling deeply, and speaking personally are not indulgences. They are political acts.
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