Chick Strand

Born Mildred D. Totman in Northern California she was given the nickname "Chick" by her father. Her father, Russel Totman, was a bank teller in the Bay Area. Her mother, Eleanor Totman, was a homemaker in Berkeley, CA. Strand described her family as "working people" who had lived in California for hundreds of years. She married her first husband, Paul Anderson Strand, in 1957, and they had one son, film editor Eric Strand, best known for his work on Donnie Darko. Chick Strand studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and was interested in photography and collages due to taking a photography course early on in life before becoming involved in filmmaking. Strand met her second husband, Neon Park, an artist, in the early 1960s in Berkeley. They were collaborators in art and life for over 30 years, dividing their time between Los Angeles and San Miguel de Allende, a small town in Mexico. Neon Park died from ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in 1993. Though Chick Strand often incorporated female characters and narratives in her film, she denies being a part of the Women's Movement. Instead, she posits that her work is more about human experience in general, and not necessarily explicitly about female experience. ==Career==

Chick Strand's work during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s influenced the subsequent era of subjectivity and ethnographic film in the 1990s. The films that she produced during the 1960s and 1970s reflected the cultural and political atmosphere of the United States during that time, resulting in the films expressing liberal and radical overtones evidenced in the exploratory nature of her films. Strand used images in film to project her belief of cultural relativity and the importance of context. Strand said most filmmakers involved "considered Canyon Cinema and the Cinematheque as sort of one thing but doing different things," Chick Strand made her first film at age 34. Mosori Monika (1969) is a documentary about colonialism in Venezuela, told from the points of view of an elderly Warao woman, a Franciscan nun and the filmmaker herself. Other films on Latin America include Cosas de mi Vida (1976), Guacamole (1976) and Mujer de Milfuegos (Woman of a Thousand Fires) (1976). Soft Fiction (1979) is a short film that includes various personal narratives, told from the points of view of five women, mostly about their sexual and sensual experiences. == Style and themes ==

Chick Strand is best known for her unique use of camera and film editing techniques to portray metaphorical meaning through image. Strand often used camera techniques such as image overlapping and superimposed images in her films. Sound and image are relied upon to convey meaning through Strand's films. Strand used film as an ethnographic method for investigating the lived experiences of various communities. She believed that traditional anthropological research methods of ethnography could be fused with art through filmmaking. Her work explores notions of objective reality, philosophical questions of theory of mind, and the barrier between theories of mind and scientific reality. Themes of gender and sexuality are frequent topics of her work. Strand released the film Soft Fiction (1979) during the second wave of feminism which included narratives and histories of women who experienced rape, incest, drug addiction, and vulnerability. Strand used her position as filmmaker to explore notions of femininity and the male gaze that often dominates popular cinema and films. She attempted to deconstruct unequal power relations and structures through her work with experimental film. ==Preservation==

Her films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate. An early promotional film for Sears, made with Pat O'Neill and Neon Park, is held along with her complete body of work in the collection of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of Strand's films, including Cartoon Le Mousse, Eric and the Monsters, and Fever Dream. In 1996, Strand won the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute to honor independent avant-garde and experimental filmmaking. In 2011, Fake Fruit Factory was selected to the U.S. National Film Registry. == Legacy ==

Chick Strand's aesthetic style, editing techniques and ethnographic approach to films about women are of interest to film scholars and are considered to have been "ahead of the time" Strand was working in. Her work has been reappraised by film scholars and continues to be studied for its influence in women's experimental cinema. In 2023, a profile of Strand was featured in the New York Times Overlooked section, celebrating the impact of historical figures whose deaths went previously unreported by the newspaper. ==Filmography==