Module description
While women have worked in all sectors of film production, this course specifically considers the legacies of women film directors across the history of cinema and into the present. This module will examine the particular challenges that women filmmakers have faced, as well as the unique and innovative contributions they have made to film aesthetics and narrative form. This class will also introduce students to some of the central debates within feminism from the 1970s onwards, in particular feminism's influence on women's independent film production, and with a focus on questions of female authorship. What kind of aesthetic and narrative strategies have women filmmakers used to create alternative fictions and documentations of gender conventions, female pleasure, everyday life and social experience? Analysing the work of female filmmakers who have broken with or resist institutional and aesthetic conventions, and who work primarily on the margins of mainstream industries, this course will address the relationship between film form and ideology. Discussing filmmakers working in various movements and modes of production, from early cinema to Hollywood studio film making to American independent film practice to experimental film,documentary, video, international art cinema and in new hybrid genres, this course will take a retrospective and prospective vantage point on the relationship between different generations of women's films and feminist theories, within the broader cultural contexts of the feminist movement, gay, lesbian, and queer studies, and developments in the fields of race, class and post-colonial studies. We will also look at how the present moment of resistance and contestation of the persistence of patriarchal structures in film industries and social structures has impacted and catalyzed new film practices and debates around the world. Filmmakers to be analysed may include: Chantal Akerman, Sandi Tan, Kathleen Collins, Alice GuyBlache, Lois Weber, Maya Deren, Ida Lupino, Dorothy Arzner, Barbara Loden,Cheryl Dunye, Lynne Ramsay, Kira Muratova, Lucia Puenzo, Granaz Moussavi,and others.
Assessment details
- 500 word blog entry (10%)
- Essay 2500 words (90%)