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Soft Fiction
In this expression of gendered pain, joy, and hardship, experimental filmmaker Chick Strand collaborates with five women who share their experiences through direct, frank stories. Strand’s technique focuses on close-ups of facial expressions and physical gestures, such as hand tension, resulting in a unique documentary of intimacy and sexuality. The elliptical mise en scène offers little context, and the subjects are presented as interlocutors rather than characters.
The stories in Soft Fiction are intensely private and personal. Strand arranges these in compositions that include avant-garde film, documentary, ethnographic cinema, and soft pornography. This way, as Paula Rabinowitz notes in her Ethnographies of Women: Soft Fiction and Feminist Theory, she invites the viewer to question how female pleasures are represented and experienced in a patriarchal culture. Throughout these testimonies, the film considers the identification and representation of womanhood, and the sense of possession and dispossession through consensual and abusive sexuality.
Bio Chick Strand
Mildred “Chick” Strand’s accomplishments as an artist spanned more than three decades. In the early 1960s, with a new anthropology degree in hand, she turned her attention to ethnographic filmmaking. This early work focused on Meso-American cultures explored through the language of the experimental documentary. She also founded Canyon Cinema, which gave rise to the San Francisco Cinematheque. Acting in response to a lack of public venues for independent films, they were part of a wider explosion in American avant-garde film.
Chick Strand focuses her camera on people talking about their own experience, capturing subtle nuances in facial expressions and gestures that are rarely seen in cinema. The title Soft Fiction works on several levels. It evokes the soft line between truth and fiction that characterizes Strand’s own approach to documentary, and suggests the idea of softcore fiction, which is appropriate to the film's erotic content and style. It's rare to find an erotic film with a female perspective dominating both the narrative discourse and the visual and audio rhythms with which the film is structured. Strand continues to celebrate in her brilliant, innovative personal documentaries her theme, the reaffirmation of the tough resilience of the human spirit.
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- This film was #62 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025