Women's Cinema – The Contested Screen (Short Cuts)
Alison Butler
Language: English
Pages: 144
ISBN: 1903364272
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Women's Cinema provides an introduction to critical debates around women's filmmaking and relates those debates to a variety of cinematic practices. Taking her cue from the groundbreaking theories of Claire Johnston, Alison Butler argues that women's cinema is a minor cinema that exists inside other cinemas, inflecting and contesting the codes and systems of the major cinematic traditions from within. Using canonical directors and less established names, ranging from Chantal Akerman to Moufida Tlatli, as examples, Butler argues that women's cinema is unified in spite of its diversity by the ways in which it reworks cinematic conventions.
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delicately, as is Anne's ambivalence about motherhood, most noticeably in the scenes dealing with her pregnancy and abortion. Nevertheless, there is nothing in the film that comes close to the hyperrealist minimalism of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), with its obsessively close observation of a woman's gestures in a domestic setting. Like the westerns and road movies Elsaesser discusses, Girlfriends remains rooted in the generic and narrational norms
films deal directly with autobiographical material, and others do so indirectly; in several, she plays a character who resembles herself. However, her deployment of autobiographical reference is diffracted and displaced so that, as Janet Bergstrom says, it 'serves a complex function, one which draws on a woman's lived experience while at the same time complicating the question "who speaks" by dispersing the origin of the enunciation across many positions' (Penley & Bergstrom 1985: 299). In Je,
confronting other aspects of the material processes which produce identities and speaking positions. Most of Hatoum's art deals directly or obliquely with her experience of exile (she was born to a Palestinian family in exile in Lebanon, and has spent most of her adult life in London). The body, as a channel for sensory experience and a reference point in relation to objects and spaces, is often important in her work. The installation Corps etranger (1994) seems the ultimate exploration of female
a man sings, the woman caresses the radio. The film is black and white, with very low key lighting, and the camera, mounted on a crane, glides slowly towards and away from the woman, tracking and panning with a sensuousness that matches its subject. The room's small barred window suggests cloistered privacy rather than imprisonment, its ornate wrought ironwork echoed by a wrought iron bedstead. Binarism is manifested in the relationship between sound and image, male and female. The setting
narrative is the structure within which positionalities of desire and identification are worked out, de Lauretis points out that the only way to renegotiate these is by working 'with and against' it. In the films of Yvonne Rainer, where a growing feminist awareness is accompanied by an increasing narrativity, she argues that narrative produces not only closure, i.e. the false resolutions of hegemonic ideology, but also coherence, i.e. meaning: Narrative and narrativity, because of their capacity
