In using this space for a comment on the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival, it may seem unfair to focus on one film to the exclusion of all the others. But what if fairness is the essential concern of the film in question, itself a counterforce to exclusion?
The subversive wit of local artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s documentary !Women Art Revolution is apparent very early on, when the film uses man-on-the-street interviews for a pop quiz on women in the museum. As Hershman Leeson asks us all in her narration, “Can anyone name three women artists?”
The uneasy implication here is that name-recognition alone should be considered the highest achievement of aesthetic accomplishment. There are of course plenty of exceptional male artists whose names we don’t know either. And for that matter, plenty of female artists whose work isn’t necessarily exceptional.

Ana Mendieta, “Documentation of an untitled work”, 1972. c. The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York.
Importantly, though, there is also the sense that if we could name a great female artist of whom Hershman Leeson herself hasn’t heard, she’d be delighted, and grateful for the discovery. In the meantime, she has plenty of women to name — those who individually and collectively pushed the American art scene, beginning in the 1960s, to grapple with and get past male dominance. !Women Art Revolution is Hershman Leeson’s own personal survey of feminist art history — a “secret” history, as she calls it, and the one in which she herself came of age. By her own account, she’s been working on this project for 40 years.