Women S Experimental Cinema Critical Frameworks

Women’s Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the 1950s and many of whom are still working today. In each essay in this collection, a leading film scholar considers a single filmmaker, supplying biographical information, analyzing various influences on her work, examining the development of her corpus, and interpreting a significant number of individual films. The essays rescue the work of critically neglected but influential women filmmakers for teaching, further study, and, hopefully, restoration and preservation. Just as importantly, they enrich the understanding of feminism in cinema and expand the terrain of film history, particularly the history of the American avant-garde. The contributors examine the work of Marie Menken, Joyce Wieland, Gunvor Nelson, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Rubin, Amy Greenfield, Barbara Hammer, Chick Strand, Marjorie Keller, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich, and Cheryl Dunye. The essays highlight the diversity in these filmmakers’ forms and methods, covering topics such as how Menken used film as a way to rethink the transition from abstract expressionism to Pop Art in the 1950s and 1960s, how Rubin both objectified the body and investigated the filmic apparatus that enabled that objectification in her film Christmas on Earth (1963), and how Dunye uses film to explore her own identity as a black lesbian artist. At the same time, the essays reveal commonalities, including a tendency toward documentary rather than fiction and a commitment to nonhierarchical, collaborative production practices. The volume’s final essay focuses explicitly on teaching women’s experimental films, addressing logistical concerns (how to acquire the films and secure proper viewing spaces) and extending the range of the book by suggesting alternative films for classroom use. Contributors. Paul Arthur, Robin Blaetz, Noël Carroll, Janet Cutler, Mary Ann Doane, Robert A. Haller, Chris Holmlund, Chuck Kleinhans, Scott MacDonald, Kathleen McHugh, Ara Osterweil, Maria Pramaggiore, Melissa Ragona, Kathryn Ramey, M. M. Serra, Maureen Turim, William C. Wees

Women and Experimental Filmmaking gathers essays by some of the top scholars in cinema studies dealing with women experimental filmmakers. Tracking the topic across racial, economic, geographic, and even temporal boundaries, Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wexman's selections refiect the deep diversity of methodologies and research. The introduction sets out by addressing the basic difficulties of both historiography and definition before providing a historical overview of how these particular filmmakers have helped shape moviemaking traditions. The essays explore the major theoretical controversies that have arisen around the work of groundbreaking women such as Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Nina Menkes, and Faith Hubley. With the film- makers representations of women's subjectivity ranging across film, video, digital media, ethnography, animation, and collage, Women and Experimental Filmmaking represents the full spectrum of genres, techniques, and modes.

A special issue of Cinéma&Cie which aims at tracing experiences of women's practices at the intersection of cinema and the arts by intertwining a theoretical and historical approach, analyzing cases studies from the mid-twentieth century up to our present moment.

Winner of the the 2021 Best Edited Collection Award from BAFTSS Winner of the 2021 British Fantasy Award in Best Non-Fiction​ ​Finalist for the 2020 Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction Runner-Up for Book of the Year in the 19th Annual Rondo Halton Classic Horror Awards​ “But women were never out there making horror films, that’s why they are not written about – you can’t include what doesn’t exist.” “Women are just not that interested in making horror films.” This is what you get when you are a woman working in horror, whether as a writer, academic, festival programmer, or filmmaker. These assumptions are based on decades of flawed scholarly, critical, and industrial thinking about the genre. Women Make Horror sets right these misconceptions. Women have always made horror. They have always been an audience for the genre, and today, as this book reveals, women academics, critics, and filmmakers alike remain committed to a film genre that offers almost unlimited opportunities for exploring and deconstructing social and cultural constructions of gender, femininity, sexuality, and the body. Women Make Horror explores narrative and experimental cinema; short, anthology, and feature filmmaking; and offers case studies of North American, Latin American, European, East Asian, and Australian filmmakers, films, and festivals. With this book we can transform how we think about women filmmakers and genre.

In detailing the relationship of three women filmmakers' lives and films to the changing institutions of the post-World War II era, Lauren Rabinovitz has created the first feminist social history of the North American avant-garde cinema. At a time when there were few women directors in commercial films, the postwar avant-garde movement offered an opportunity. Rabinovitz argues that avant-garde cinema, open to women because of its marginal status in the art world, included women as filmmakers, organizers, and critics. Focusing on Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, and Joyce Wieland, Rabinovitz illustrates how women used bold physical images to enhance their work and how each provided entrée to her subversive art while remaining culturally acceptable. She combines archival materials with her own interviews to show how the women's labor and films, even their identities as women filmmakers, were produced, disseminated, and understood. With a new preface and an updated bibliography, Points of Resistance simultaneously demonstrates the avant-garde's importance as an organizational network for women filmmakers and the processes by which women remained marginal figures within that network.

Just as punk created a space for bands such as the Slits and Poly Styrene to challenge 1970s norms of femininity, through a transgressive, strident new female-ness, it also provoked experimental feminist film makers to initiate a parallel, lens-based challenge to patriarchal modes of film making. In this book, Rachel Garfield breaks new ground in exploring the rebellious, feminist punk audio-visual culture of the 1970s, tracing its roots and its legacies. In their filmmaking and their performed personae, film and video artists such as Vivienne Dick, Sandra Lahire, Betzy Bromberg, Ruth Novaczek, Sadie Benning, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child and Anne Robinson offered a powerful, deliberately awkward alternative to hegemonic conformist femininity, creating a new “punk audio visual aesthetic”. A vital aspect of our vibrant contemporary digital audio visual culture, Garfield argues, can be traced back to the techniques and forms of these feminist pioneers, who like their musical contemporaries worked in a pre-digital, analogue modality that nevertheless influenced the emergent digital audio visual culture of the 1990s and 2000s.

Research into and around women's participation in cinematic history has enjoyed dynamic growth over the past decade. A broadening of scope and interests encompasses not only different kinds of filmmaking--mainstream fiction, experimental, and documentary--but also practices--publicity, journalism, distribution and exhibition--seldom explored in the past. Cutting-edge and inclusive, Doing Women's Film History ventures into topics in the United States and Europe while also moving beyond to explore the influence of women on the cinemas of India, Chile, Turkey, Russia, and Australia. Contributors grapple with historiographic questions that cover film history from the pioneering era to the present day. Yet the writers also address the very mission of practicing scholarship. Essays explore essential issues like identifying women's participation in their cinema cultures, locating previously unconsidered sources of evidence, developing methodologies and analytical concepts to reveal the impact of gender on film production, distribution and reception, and reframing film history to accommodate new questions and approaches. Contributors include: Kay Armatage, Eylem Atakav, Karina Aveyard, Canan Balan, Cécile Chich, Monica Dall'Asta, Eliza Anna Delveroudi, Jane M. Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Julia Knight, Neepa Majumdar, Michele Leigh, Luke McKernan, Debashree Mukherjee, Giuliana Muscio, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, Rashmi Sawhney, Elizabeth Ramirez Soto, Sarah Street, and Kimberly Tomadjoglou.

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.