Impressive in scope, the conference“Media Images and Screen Representations of Nurses” incorporated presentations by nurses, journalists, academic scholars, activists, and major players in the entertainment industry. Their topics ranged from representations of nurses smoking in advertising throughout the 20th century to methods by which nurses can influence and improve upon their often offensive depictions on contemporary television.

“If you actually processed, consciously, all the things that are around you all the time, you’d be nuts,” said renowned experimental filmmaker Leslie Thornton. This quotation, perhaps, explains why her films sometimes induce a feeling of temporary insanity. They force the audience to process, consciously, many of the unnoticed things that surround us all the time.

With co-sponsorship from the Center for the Study of Women, The Crank, UCLA’s grad student run film society, recently hosted a special screening of writer-director Stephanie Rothman’s acclaimed film The Velvet Vampire (1971) with the filmmaker in attendance. Rothman, writer-director of “exploitation” films like The Student Nurses (1970), Terminal Island (1973), and The Working Girls (1974) was one of the most prolific female filmmakers working in Hollywood in the 1970s. During that decade, her films were at the center of feminist debates concerning the most effective way in which women could use film to overturn Hollywood’s often degrading representations. While some argued that the creation of avant-garde and independent films was the key to breaking the influence of the patriarchal system, others contended that women working within the mainstream could dismantle and revise Hollywood representations to reveal and disempower their misogynistic qualities. Scholar Pam Cook wrote that “Rothman’s work was part of this polemic, since her films could be seen as a prime example of feminist subversion from within, using the generic formulae of exploitation cinema in the interest of her own agenda as a woman director.”