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 3500 words (90%)
Educational aims & objectives
This module aims to provide an understanding of the contributions women film directors have made to film history and film aesthetics. Students will be able to a) recognize key canonical and lesser known filmmakers significant to film history b) engage with the practices and emergences of women’s films globally and in different historical and geographical contexts c) consider industrial, economic and ideological conditions for the facilitation of these filmmaking practices, such as collectives, festivals, funding bodies, as well as consider barriers to entry; d) examine work intersectionally across lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability and mobility and consider the geopolitics of women’s practices; e) be well versed in discourses around female expressivity, feminist aesthetics and female authorship f) address the archival and historiographical complexity of recovering, excavating and negotiating the existing and lost labor of women’s work in film history.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 6 module and in particular will be able to:
- Demonstrate a systematic and thorough understanding of the history of women's filmmaking practices across genres and modes and geographies, as well as account for changing discourses around authorship and feminist aesthetics, and account for film industrial determinants and conditions that have obviated and facilitated their work.
- Articulate sophisticated arguments regarding the place of women's directors contributions to wider film industrial, regulatory, ideological and aesthetic formations and practices.
- Effectively examine and analyse different methodologies and disciplinary approaches to the negotiation of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity in relation authorial expressivity.
- Demonstrate in-depth understanding of and skill at assessing aesthetic traditions and conventions across women's cinema in relation to more contemporary and global film practices and wider film histories and film movements.
- Using the module bibliography and required readings as a starting point, conduct library and archival research engaging with questions of women's film practices, the female director in the archive, labor, performance and identity, histories of feminist movements globally, and individual filmmaker's practices.
- Select, synthesize, and apply diverse theoretical concepts and frameworks from film history, film theory and cultural theory, towards the original analysis of specific film texts situated in their historical contexts.
Teaching pattern
Ten lectures, ten three-hour screenings and ten one-hour seminars.