A new documentary, OUTCRY: Alchemists of Rage, captures Whitney Bradshaw’s powerful photography project, transforming women’s screams from silenced pain into a collective act of resistance.
In OUTCRY: Alchemists of Rage, Clare Major’s powerful direction and classical-violinist-turned-punk-singer Paris Hurley’s (of Object as Subject, an LA-based art punk band) high-octane music frame this riveting 30-minute documentary on Whitney Bradshaw’s ongoing social practice project, OUTCRY.
The short film follows the photographer from her home in Chicago to D.C. for a reproductive freedom march, then to Denver for an OUTCRY exhibition, and on to Dayton, Ohio, for a scream session just prior to voting on Issue 1, which enshrined abortion rights into the Ohio Constitution.
This film is available to stream from March 14 to April 12 in the AMC + “Future of Film: Athena Rising Stars” collection.
The OUTCRY photography series of women screaming (reviewed in Ms. on Nov. 15, 2022) began with five portraits taken the night of the 2018 Women’s March. It now numbers 500 and growing. Major’s well-paced film documents the supportive group scream sessions where portraits are made, demonstrating Bradshaw’s compassionate facilitation skills and commitment to intersectional representation. Bradshaw’s practice is a timely model of feminist leadership, and includes telling her own illuminating stories of victimization and resistance.
Major skillfully captures the OUTCRY series’ rich, deep and nuanced cultural and psychological resonances. In addition to rejecting traditional, hyper-sexualized representations of women’s bodies, Bradshaw also denies the traditional predatory viewer’s pleasure in spectacles of men wielding power to make women scream.
Sadistic abuse of women is so widely normalized in traditional visual culture and popular entertainment, that the current lack of universal political outrage at the known tortures inflicted by abortion care denial and sexual assault suggests just how numbingly familiar patriarchally-staged tropes of women’s victimization have become. In sharp defiance to that systemically brutal and callous perversity, Bradshaw’s sessions allow women to choose for themselves when, how and what to scream, converting an involuntary outburst of agonized helplessness into an intentional expression of power.
The film can be streamed on AMC+ from March 14-April 12.