Cinema Against the Age: Feminism and Contemporary Documentary (original) (raw)
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Feminism, documentary film and visual anthropology are the three domains that this study connects. The multifaceted relation between these three fields can be summarised as revolving around the debates on reality, truth, representation of the Other, knowledge production and power. Domitilla Olivieri’s dissertation explores such intricate interrelations through the analysis of three films: Kim Longinotto’s Sisters in Law (2005), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Ursula Biemann’s Europlex (2003). To different extents, and in multiple and overlapping ways, these films address the issue of representation(s) of non-Western, and especially female subjects, the relation between sign and reality and the power dynamics implicit in documentary filmmaking. The dissertation shows that the relation between reality and the documentary sign can be understood as one of ‘haunting’. Haunting here refers to the specific indexical quality of the relation between sign and object, the manner in which the object affects or determines the sign (Peirce 1958, 8.177), or the way in which “the world presses on” the cinematic sign (Comolli 1999, 40). Borrowing and expanding upon Mary Ann Doane’s definition of the indexical sign as one that is “haunted by its object” (Doane 2007b, 134), Olivieri presents several examples in which the filmed reality inhabits, intrudes upon, and makes itself continually present in the filmic documentary sign. As the particular focus of this research is on anthropological feminist documentaries, Olivieri considers them as films haunted by reality and regarding feminist issues to do with the politics of the Other and processes of Othering. These films are, to borrow Trinh’s concept, “inappropriate/d” (Trinh 1986, 9). They cross labels and categorisation; explore and perform borders; let themselves be haunted by reality without falling flat into the hegemonic pitfalls of realism; they imagine and represent invisible realities while pointing attention to the power of vision and visuality; they escape rigid definitions while providing the space to redefine meanings and realities; and while these films are determined by the social world, they can also be “transformative of that same world” (Gaines 2007, 19). These are the potential effects of such “inappropriate/d” films, as well as the possibilities opened by a critical perspective that inhabits the space between feminist theories, documentary studies and visual anthropology. Ultimately this is what this research investigates and performs. Exploring the interconnections between the politics and aesthetics of documentary, this study emphasises what audio-visual representations can do, highlights the links between documentary practices and the processes of knowledge production and, finally, the critical and transformative promise that resides in the encounters between feminism and documentary.
Feminist Films between Theory and Practice
Feminist film theorists continue to question the minimized image of women on the screen. They do so by analyzing the relationship between films, the ideological and dominating position of men, the audience's perception, and women's reactions. Although feminism now operates within the postmodernist era, highlighting the plurality of culture in general and arts in particular, feminist film theory continues to adhere to its Marxist and psychoanalytic roots. In practice, however, today feminist filmmakers choose the avant-garde method of filmmaking. Nevertheless, both the ideological background and the avant-garde alternative are limited in reaching women consuming films, and thus fail to adequately challenge the negative representations of women worldwide.
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 2016
Feminist film theory came into being in the early 1970s with the aim of understanding cinema as a cultural practice that represents and reproduces myths about women and femininity. Theoretical approaches were developed to critically discuss the sign and image of woman in film as well as open up issues of female spectatorship. Feminist film theory criticized on the one hand classical cinema for its stereotyped representation of women, and discussed on the other hand possibilities for a women's cinema that allowed for representations of female subjectivity and female desire. The feminist wave in film studies was prompted by the emergence of women's film festivals. Feminist film studies in general had a wider, often more sociological approach in studying female audiences and the position of women in the film industry, ranging from actresses, producers, and technicians to directors.
The German Cinema Book , 2020
In 2001, the feminist director Jutta Brückner wrote that films by women were the product of an often arduous "quest for traces. " 1 Her comment echoed an interview three decades earlier, when Brückner had spoken of film as a means to "reconstruct symbolically" the "disrupted physical integrity" of women in history. 2 The reference in both instances was not only to her own work but in general to filmmaking by women who seek new forms of articulation for feminine subjectivity and experience. Brückner's observations have resonance too for a different cultural practice of retrieval, that of history-writing in respect of women's film. This chapter attempts a reconstruction of key moments in German women's filmmaking, which we explore in particular, but not solely, in its relation to feminism. Like Brückner's film narratives, our history-which for reasons of space is necessarily partial-starts from an assumption of "disrupted integrity, " though not, as for Brückner, in the physical or symbolic body of woman, but in the similarly fractured cinematic body of work by women over twelve decades of German film. It is, moreover, not only Brückner's understanding of film as a medium capable of lending tangible presence to an otherwise invisible or fragmented gendered experience that is useful for this chapter. Her filmmaking method offers further helpful insights for approaches to women's cinema history. Early in her filmmaking career, in films including the experimental documentary Tue recht und scheue niemand (Do right and fear nobody, 1975) and the semi-autobiographical Hungerjahre (Years of Hunger, 1979), Brückner used newsreel inserts, still photographs, voice-over, and found sound to "suggest the complexity of a whole period": in Tue recht, five decades of one woman's mid-twentieth-century petit bourgeois existence; in Hungerjahre, the 1950s as viewed from the perspective of a bulimic adolescent. Brückner's juxtapositions of archive image and sound with memory fragments and fictional narrative revealed female subjectivities in a state of emergence, developing as "the result of a long cultural process" that is "constituted by … history. " 3 Analogously, the history of women's filmmaking-of the moments, then, in which women become the active subjects of cinematic perception as well as social actors in film production and circulation-demands an approach that registers traces of feminine subjectivity and agency as the products of specific conditions of historical emergence: conditions that may at one moment facilitate women's filmmaking and at others suppress female participation in the film industry or cinematic practice. Examples from early film history should serve to illustrate the point. Three women who would later move into production and directing-Henny Porten, Asta Nielsen (see Chapter 5), and Leontine Sagan-began careers in acting at a historical moment in which film performance and stardom belonged to, indeed were significantly shaping an early twentieth-century culture of public visibility for women. In Emilie Altenloh's pioneering sociological study of early cinema audiences, Asta Nielsen in particular figures not merely as an audience magnet for a cross-class community of female fans. 4 Feminist historians including Miriam Hansen, Heide Schlüpmann, and Andrea Haller have also shown how the mass presence of women in the film audience may be understood as part of a broader early twentieth-century challenge to the "dominant organization of public experience" around masculine norms. 5 That challenge was rooted in socio-historical developments including the expansion of women's education, the advance of 31 FEMINISM AND WOMEN'S CINEMA
2020
Experimental cinema, as well as experimental video practices, have always been art forms widely explored by women. Yet, while the field of cinema studies has devoted research — although only recently — to women involved in narrative and commercial films, as directors, actresses, screenwriters and in other roles of cinema industry, the history of women’s experimental audio-visual production is still little explored and would benefit from being retraced and framed in a wider historical and theoretical perspective. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie is therefore aimed at tracing women’s experimental practices at the intersection of cinema and the arts by intertwining a theoretical and historical approach through the analysis of cases studies from the mid-century up to the present time.
The following reflections are an attempt to outline the current situation in film, feminism and Film Studies from a German perspective. The question being raised is twofold, as film reflected within the context of institutionalized research forms the perspective from which the question concerning the significance of film in today's world is perceived and dealt with. As my intent is not so much to determine a specific position but rather to outline the general situation, I would like to discuss the following problems: what is the present situation in Film Studies; which relationships exist between Film Studies and feminist film theory on the one hand and between Film Studies and Media Studies on the other? What can be said about the relationship between film and media, and also about what has become of the special relationship between women and film? An outline of the present situation does not project a picture of the future situation so that, consequently, I will not offer solutions for the problems raised here nor draw any conclusions. This paper must, on the contrary, be considered solely as a contribution to the discussion on these subjects, the moment of a self-reflection of film studies being the central issue.