MARGOT NASH
Sydney Filmmaker, Screenwriter and Photographer
As If Productions
WE AIM TO PLEASE (1976)
A film by Robin Laurie and Margot Nash
13 min Experimental, 16mm Eastman colour negative
As If Productions (Anarcho Surrealist Insurrectionary Feminists)
Synopsis
A film about female sexuality that not only touches the areas of paranoia, fear and doubt, which we as women experience in relation to our bodies and physical self image, but which is also joyful, erotic and funny.
The film is in three sections:
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Setting up the elements: us, the women filmmakers, sexxx the city.
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How it feels: female vulnerability in a violent society that expects women to be the flatterers.
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Breaking the silence: direct action and an attempt at a cinematic definition of female sexuality that is not idealised.
Produced with the Assistance of the Experimental Film Fund.
Graphic: Carol Porter
AWARDS
1978 Jury Prize: L’Homme Regarde L’Homme Film Festival Paris.
FESTIVALS and SCREENINGS
2021 War’Rak/Banksia (After the Fire) Festival, La Mama Melbourne
The Capitol Theatre Melbourne, screening with Brazen Hussies
2017 Sydney Film Festival - Feminism and Film - Personal and Political
2016 FFFlicks Women's Art Register, Long Play Bar & Cinema, Melbourne
2015 Women's Gaze and the Feminist Film Archive, Syd College of the Arts
2014 The Form That Accommodates The Mess. IMA (Institute of Modern Art) Brisbane
2009 Screen Worlds ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image)/NFSA – Gallery and Mediatech permanent exhibition
2008 Australian Perspectives: New and Archival queer shorts ACMI
2004 Resistance: a screen history of Australian counter cultural movements ACMI
1999 The Wild and Wonderful 70’s Chauvel SYDNEY
1996 Valladolid International Film Festival, Australian Cinema 1975-1995, SPAIN, Filmoteca, MADRID
1994 BARCELONA; Women and Film: The Hidden (A) Gender ADELAIDE;
1990 INSIGHT Women’s Film Festival-Canada
1989 OTHER PLEASURES Modern Image Makers Melbourne
1987 SPOLETO FRINGE, Women’s Film Making – Practices and Perspectives, Melbourne
1982 Gay Film Festival LONDON
1981 1st International Feminist Film and Video Conference AMSTERDAM
1979 Bergama Festival of Third Theatre APG presentation, ITALY
Christchurch Women’s Arts Festival, NEW ZEALAND
1978 L’Homme Regarde L’Homme Ethnographic Film festival, PARIS
La Rochelle Avant Garde Film Festival PARIS
World Congress of Sociology FINLAND
Bleaker Street Cinema, New York USA
Travelled to Cannes with a package of Australian films and screened unofficially. Picked up for distribution by French distribution company Impact.
1977 WOMEN WAVES: image/space/creativity, cinematic perspectives by women Sydney Filmmakers Cooperative national tour of short films
1976 PRAM FACTORY, APG Carlton, Melbourne – Launch screening
FURTHER INFORMATION
“WE AIM TO PLEASE is angry, mordantly witty, funny, abrasive, hits you with lyrical paradoxes… it rings bells in the subconscious as well as
the front of the mind.” - Virginia Fraser, Filmnews
"A humorous and erotically charged pastiche of personal fragments of conversation, political statements, powerful images and improvised performance, all edited together to confront conventional ideas about women and their sexuality." - Susan Lambert, Curators Notes ASO
WATCH Clips from the film on Australian Screen Online
"WE AIM TO PLEASE makes us very aware that we are watching a film but also uncomfortable for it alerts us to the cinematic conventions which place us as women in a male defined position, to see (ourselves) from a male perspective.
- Lesley Stern, Independent Feminist Filmmaking in Australia
LISTEN TO: Robin Laurie introduce 'We Aim To Please' at a 'The Form That Accommodates The Mess' a series of film screenings at IMA (Institute of Modern Art) Brisbane November 2014
See: The Form That Accomodates the Mess
READ
Mary Tomsic's 'We Aim To Please: cinematic activism, sex and violence' Dec 6th 2016 http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/we-aim-to-please/
Australian Women's History Network