About the Book
On Women's Films looks at contemporary and classic films from emerging and established makers such as Maria Augusta Ramos, Xiaolu Guo, Valérie Massadian, Lynne Ramsay, Lucrecia Martel, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Chantal Akerman, or Claire Denis. The collection is also tuned to the continued provocation of feminist cinema landmarks such as Chick Strand's Soft Fiction; Barbara Loden's Wanda; Valie Export's Invisible Adversaries, Cecilia Mangini's Essere donne. Attentive to minor moments, to the pauses and the charge and forms bodies adopt through cinema, the contributors suggest the capacity of women's films to embrace, shape and question the world.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: On Women's Films: Moving Thought Across Worlds and Generations
(Ivone Margulies, Hunter College, USA) and (Jeremi Szaniawski, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
Part I - Phrasing (in)Significance
1. Wanda's Slowness: Enduring Insignificance
(Elena Gorfinkel, King's College, London, UK)
2. "And It's So Tiring": Chantal Akerman's Ruminative Economy
(Ivone Margulies, Hunter College, USA)
3. When to Speak and When to be Quiet: The Act of Waiting and the Lonliness of Bodies in Maria Ramos's Films (Andréa França, Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
4: Social Realism, Melodrama and the Mute Text: Rakhshan Bani-Etemad's The May Lady and Under the Skin of the City
(Laura Mulvey, University of London Birbeck, UK)
Part II - Collective Voice and Documentary Poetics
5. Documentary Poetics as a Field of Action: Cecilia Mangini's Essere donne
(Noa Steimatsky, Sarah Lawrence College and NYU, USA)
6. On Talking Heads and Las muertes chiquitas
(Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky, University of Chicago, USA)
7. Agnès Varda and Ydessa: Engaging Personal and Cultural Histories
(Rebecca J. DeRoo, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)
8. Peace and Love, True and False: Agnès Varda in Los Angeles
(Jean Ma, Stanford University, USA)
Part III - Embodied Configurations: Material and Self-Inscription
9. She Carries the Film on Her Naked Body: Environment and Embodied Debt in Claire Denis's Bastards
(Katrin Pesch, Wofford College, USA)
10. Ornaments and Sites of Self-Suspension: Hito Steyerl's Multimedial Essayism
(Nora Gortcheva, Independent Scholar, Germany)
11. Female Material: Invisible Adversaries and the Intermedial
(Jennifer Stob, Texas State University, USA)
12. "Dedicated to the One I Love": Authorship and Adaptation in Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar
(Michael Cramer, Sarah Lawrence College, USA)
Part IV - Subjectivities Across Local, National and Neoliberal Logics
13. She, A Chinese Director?: Xiaolu Guo and Transnational Feminist Authorship
(Patricia White, Swarthmore College, USA)
14. Floating Light and Shadows: Huang Yu-shan's Chronicles of Modern Taiwan
(Zhen Zhang, New York University, USA)
15. On Death and Dying: Malgorzata Szumowska Between Poland and Self
(Izabela Kalinowska, SUNY Stony Brook University, USA)
Part V - Women's Imaginaries, Same-sex Worlds
16. Soft Fictions
(Rebekah Rutkoff, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)
17. Perverse Angle: Feminist Film, Queer Film, Shame
(Liza Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
18. Thinking Like a Holy Girl: A Philosophy of Grandma's Bedroom
(Karen Redrobe, University of Pennsylvania, USA)
19. Once Upon Her Time?: The Cinema of Valérie Massadian, or, Living and Creating at the Periphery of Patriarchy
(Jeremi Szaniawski, Independent Scholar, Belgium)
List of Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Ivone Margulies is Professor in the Film and Media Studies Department at Hunter College, CUNY, USA. She is the author of In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema (2018), Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman's Hyperrealist Everyday (1996), and is the editor of Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (2003).
Jeremi Szaniawski is the co-editor of Directory of World Cinema: Belgium (2014) and The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (2016) and the author of The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov: Figures of Paradox (2014).
Review :
This collection, which addresses an academic and specialized audience within a transdisciplinary framework of interests in women and gender studies, film and media studies, and cultural theory, will be a precious tool in curricular courses on women and film, gender embodiment, and queer representation in film. It is also an engaging, highly readable book that broadens the definition of women's film through a wide selection of case studies and approaches.
This collection makes an urgent call for including women's cinema as an essential part of film history and practice. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals.
This cutting-edge book responds to the extreme diversity of women's filmmaking in the last decades. Its dazzling essays, with their focus on experimental and politically committed films, on agency and subjection, on shame and love, make compulsive reading.
Unapologetically focused on women auteurs, this highly engaging collection of essays contextualizes their work historically and provides lucid, theoretically informed readings of their often provocative films. The editors have boldly applied a feminist corrective that stretches the canons of film history and our understanding of slow cinema. These essays reveal that the tropes of contemplative cinema such as self-inscription, duration, and micro description have deep roots in the history of women's films around the world and across the generations.
On Women's Films is a lively and varied collection of essays by senior scholars in the field and emerging talents, demonstrating the continued importance of women's cinema as a strategic formation for women's self-expression. The essays in this volume are energized by engagement between generations of feminists and by the book's broad historical and international perspectives. New scholarship on canonical figures brings their work into contact with contemporary feminist thought, and new figures are added to the tradition of women's cinema. A model of the art of updating without forgoing the gains of the past, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in women's filmmaking.
