Feminist Film Studies

One of the more controversial films of 2006 was the highly anticipated The Da Vinci Code, based on Dan Brown’s best-selling novel. Most criticism focused on the historical and religious problems in both the novel and subsequent film, leading some to claim that the storyline represented a type of radical feminism in its presumed secret marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene that led to “the greatest cover-up in history,” and ultimately the suppression of "the divine feminine" in the Catholic Church. Using insights derived from feminist theology and myth, this study examines this claim through a close analysis of both novel and film, focusing both on the mythic narrative and individual characters. It concludes that The Da Vinci Code does not present a feminist mythic narrative, but instead presents another version of the heroic quest myth that functions to reaffirm masculine power, under the guise of a faux feminism. Ultimately both novel and film fail to develop a truly transformative rhetoric but instead reinforce traditional beliefs about gender in the culture

Reviewed at: https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/10.1386/jciaw_00130_5

“In this penetrating volume, Terri Ginsberg provides us with an example of film scholarship at its most radical. Giving fresh and detailed attention to the Palestine solidarity films of two Arab women directors, Ginsberg challenges us to rethink some of our most basic political assumptions, calling into question multiple disciplines, fields of inquiry, and epistemological frameworks. This book does not just describe decolonization; it partakes in it.”
—Greg Burris, Associate Professor of Media Studies, American University of Beirut; author of THE PALESTINIAN IDEA: FILM, MEDIA, AND THE RADICAL IMAGINATION

This book places long overdue focus on the Palestine solidarity films of two important Arab women directors whose cinematic works have never received due attention within the scholarly literature or the cultural public sphere. Through an analysis that situates these largely overlooked films within the matrix of an anti-Zionist critique of cinematic ontology, this book offers a materialist feminist appreciation of their political aesthetics while critiquing the ideological enabling conditions of their academic absenting. The study of these daring films fosters a much-needed, sustained understanding of the meaning and significance of Palestine solidarity filmmaking for and within the Arab world.

This article explores the production history and textual relations of Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973), an exploitation film starring Pam Grier about a black female vigilante which briefly topped Variety’s chart of highest grossing films in America. The relative simplicity of Coffy’s production context—a bottom-line exploitation picture from American International Pictures written and directed by white male hired-hand Jack Hill—combined with the heightened images of sex and race in the film’s textual representation, offers a revealing site for exploring the encoding processes of filmic identity politics.

Scholarly unease about the film’s representational politics has given rise to readings that rely heavily on “oppositional gazes” to account for Coffy’s popularity and appeal. This article, by contrast, examines the film’s positional producers, considering, the generic, commercial, and creative determinants of the film production. In turn, it examines how these determinants fed into the representation of the Coffy heroine, focusing on her class status, fighting heroism, and sexuality. I argue that, through her collaboration with Jack Hill, Pam Grier had more agency in the shaping of her own emerging screen image than has previously been acknowledged. By combining established ideas from feminist and black film studies with cultural industries approaches, I argue that compelling narratives like Coffy, about individuals from oppressed groups, are often informed and energized by the unequal, high-stakes conditions of their own determination.

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In defiance of the alleged "death of romantic comedy," After "Happily Ever After": Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age edited by Maria San Filippo attests to rom-com’s continuing vitality in new modes and forms that reimagine and rejuvenate the genre in ideologically, artistically, and commercially innovative ways. No longer the idyllic fairy tale, today’s romantic comedies ponder the realities and complexities of intimacy, fortifying the genre’s gift for imagining human connection through love and laughter.

It has often been observed that the rom-com’s "happily ever after" trope enables the genre to avoid addressing the challenges of coupled life. This volume’s contributors confront how recent rom-coms contend with a "post-romantic age" of romantic disillusionment and seismically shifting emotional and relational bonds. Fifteen chapters contemplate the resurgence of the "radical romantic comedy" and uncoupling comedy, new approaches in genre hybridity and serial narrative, and how recent rom-coms deal with divisive topical issues and contemporary sexual mores from reproductive politics and marriage equality to hook-up culture and technology-enabled sex. Rom-coms remain underappreciated and underexamined—and still largely defined within Hollywood’s parameters of culturally normative coupling and its persistent marginalization of racial and sexual minorities. Making the case for taking romantic comedy seriously, this volume employs critical perspectives drawn from feminist, queer, postcolonial, and race studies to critique the genre’s homogeneity and social and sexual conservatism, recognizing innovative works inclusive of LGBTQ people, people of color, and the differently aged and abled.

Encompassing a rich range of screen media from the last decade, After "Happily Ever After" celebrates works that disrupt and subvert rom-com fantasy and formula so as to open audience’s eyes along with our hearts. This volume is intended for all readers with an interest in film, media, and gender studies.

This article explores Stephen Daldry's The Hours (US/UK, 2002) as a feminist and queer meditation on the dilemma of marriage. An important queer-authored crossover film in the tradition of the family melodrama and the woman's film, The Hours offers a considered return to the iconic cultural form of the white middle-class nuclear family in a context where norms of heterosexual family and conjugal life are at once firmly entrenched and widely contested. Largely overlooked in film criticism, The Hours is characterized by its baroque and generative temporality and intertextuality that contribute to a nuanced meditation on women's experience of conjugal and family life. While much of the literature on melodrama draws on psychoanalysis and theories of spatiality, this article develops three distinct yet interrelated temporal and affective readings: Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Virginia Woolf's modernist “moment of being”; the performativity of gender and kinship (Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick); and theories of queer time and affect (Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Lauren Berlant). These readings probe The Hours's return to mediated cultural ideals of white conjugal and family life across time through the prism of feminist and queer cultural production and critique. Daldry's film is treated as a dense and fascinating work in itself, but it is also read against a small but influential cycle of recent queer-authored melodramas: Far from Heaven (dir. Todd Haynes, US, 2002), Savage Grace (dir. Tom Kalin, Spain/US/France, 2007), and A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford, US, 2009). Released at a historical conjuncture when queer debates about marriage and conjugal life are deeply polarized, these works share an ambivalent and stylized fascination with the white bourgeois family melodrama that is at once problematic and generative. I situate the film at the crossroads of two complementary and sometimes contradictory genealogies: the “thinking woman's film,” engaged with female subjectivity and authorship belonging to an influential white liberal feminist genealogy, and the genealogy of queer, white male – authored melodrama.

Lisa Ben's “Cinema Ramblings” in the 1940s underground publication Vice Versa mark some of the first media reviews to focus on homosexual themes, representations, and subtexts from a self-proclaimed lesbian perspective. While still largely unknown, the critical lenses and stylistic methods she employed set a precedent for the kind of radical queer media criticism that reviewers engage in today. Her writings deconstruct heteronormative frameworks by redefining the borders of the “normal” and the “natural”; look to the margins of media texts, often placing more focus on secondary figures than on main characters; rely on intertextual understandings that read films against their adaptation sources; and actively participate in a form of “subtexting,” or, as she puts it, “playing up” suggestive representations. Ben's film reviews present an important and relevant counterframe to cinematic deliberations on the instability of sexual and social relations. This counterframe existed among other counterpublic discourses available at the time and enables a queer reading of 1930s and ’40s film representations such as Children of Loneliness (1934), Club des femmes (1936), and Turnabout (1940). Drawing from reviews and essays published in Vice Versa, I propose a way of reading media representations of transgressive sexuality and gender—an analytic and a vocabulary—that predates queer theory as an institutionalized concern.

Ever since the publication of Laura Mulvey´s "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975) very few concepts have been as widely contested by feminist scholars as the idea of the patriarchal gaze. Mulvey's thesis was that women on screen are the object of the male gaze, an idea supported by traditional psychoanalytic binarisms that associate man with subjective, active desire and woman with passive lack, negating the possibility of female desire and spectatorship as such. According to both Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane (1982), the “over-proximity” of the woman to her own image negates the distance required for the voyeuristic and fetishist pleasures found in cinema. However, this account of the scopophilic gaze does not consider the position of the quintessential desiring female subject: the lesbian, that “privileged site of enquiry” for feminist film  theory that is both subject and object of desire. It was not until 1991 that Teresa de Lauretis started to locate the coordinates for this desiring (lesbian) subject within film studies beyond the traditional opposition object/subject. In her essay “Film and the Visible,” based on Sheila McLaughlin ́s "She Must Be Seeing Things" (1987), she draws on Jean Laplanche and Bertrand Pontalis ́ notion of fantasy as a setting of desire in order to describe how the lesbian spectator might find pleasure adopting any of the roles available in the cinematic fantasy, “looking on, outside the fantasy scenario and nonethe-less involved.” (1991, p.96). With these ideas in mind, I will argue whether "Blue is the Warmest Color" (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013) constitutes a mise-en-scène of lesbian fantasy, or whether it imposes a privileged voyeurism in consonance with Mulvey ́s account of the dominant male gaze, becoming a text contaminated by the director ́s own fantasies of lesbian sex, a “commercial”, aestheticized portrait of lesbianism fitting into what Monique Wittig called “the straight mind” (1992).

This article brings together essays on revenge by philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Levinas with the raperevenge film genre through a detailed reading of French director Coralie Fargeat's first feature film Revenge (2017). It also links the film's presentation of rape and violence to the #MeToo movement and how it played out in France under the #BalanceTonPorc hashtag and suggests that the leading protagonist of Revenge Jen (Mathilda Lutz) may be considered as an example of the twenty-first century version of horror's "Final Girl" first theorized by Carol Clover in the 1980s.

In this subsequent essay on the film Blue Velvet I say, 'I am standing on my own ground when I say feminist teachers who have kept quiet and/or normalised the cinematic sexual assault of young men have according to their very own standards betrayed humanity.'

New feminism is a continuation of earlier feminisms but differs slightly as it emphasizes on the idea that woman is an individual with an equal worth as man while accepting the natural sexual differences. Indian Films have always portrayed women in the stereotypical roles of passive, submissive and dependent objects of visual pleasure. British Feminist Film Theorist Laura Mulvey, in her essay titled 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', talks about the Male Gaze and how women are presented as the object of voyeurism, which means 'to-belooked-at-ness' objects. This paper attempts to look at the changes brought in the representation of woman from the stereotypical pleasurable object to the emancipated lead actor who overcame the male gaze and became an independent and strong woman. The paper observes this change of representation in Gouri Shinde's film "English Vinglish". The film is about an Indian woman who overcomes the patriarchal obstacles and becomes successful and independent. The focus is also on the contemporary Indian female directors. Unlike most of the male directors, these female directors break away from showing the woman as passive and pleasurable objects. They represent their emancipation through independent women characters who are not dependent on men.

The Analysis of Blake Gaines as a Female Hero in San Andreas (2015) Film. A Thesis: English Language and Literature Department. Adab and Humanities Faculty. State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta, 2016. This study focuses on the character analysis of the main female character—Blake Gaines—and the female hero characteristics that main female character has in San Andreas (2015) film. This research aims to understand how Blake as the main female character described and how Blake as female hero depicted in San Andreas film. Qualitative method and feminist film critics are used in this study. It is found that the character Blake Gaines is depicted as a female hero with friendly, trustworthy, smart, brave, and dominant characteristics in this film. However, the film cannot entirely escape from the stereotypical characteristic of a woman. The woman’s dependency over man is still reflected from Blake as a main female character. This film also confirms that it is difficult for women to be entirely independent, no matter how strong she is, she is still a woman who needs a man.

Questions and experiences regarding the Ethics of representing "others", especially women's and moderate's voices in art and film, from the perspective and professional life of a feminist artivist mamactivist.

I explore three major examples :
A group exhibition of women artists, in which the places of honor and prestige were given to... men.
A solo photography exhibition project on motherhood in which I purposely and intentionally use my subjective voice as a conscious act of rebellion. Because a woman who shows and tells the truth about her subjective experience of mothering was (and still is) quite revolutionary.
The money and media power manipulations going on behind the scenes of an award winning documentary film about women's voices in areas of conflict. Specifically Women's voices regarding the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

Renewed and updated by Author -2016.
Originally Commissioned and Published in 2009 by Maarav (Ambush), one of Israels' leading art and culture online magazines, under the double title "Whose voice is it anyway?" and "Any Woman in the Director's chair?"
(link) http://www.maarav.org.il/english/2009/07/any-woman-in-the-directors-room/

In  2007,  after  watching  "Elizabethtown"  (2005),  film  critic  Nathan  Rabin  coined  the  term  "Manic Pixie  Dream  Girl"  in  order  to  describe  a  nascent  filmic  female  trope  as  «that  bubbly,  shallow  cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations  of  sensitive  writer-directors  to  teach  broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures» (2007). Since then, the concept acquired enormous widespread cultural currency, and the type of female characters responding to the stereotype multiplied, although not a single thorough scrutiny of its gender values has been undertaken from the Academia, perhaps due to the fact that independent («indie») productions – where most of these characters are found – provide their  films  with  a  certain  patina  of  ideological  credibility.  However,  with  her  performance  of  traditional  cute  (Ngai,  2012),  girlish  femininity,  her  vulnerability,  her  neoliberal  sexual  freedom,  and, above all, her being-for-the-Other, the Manic Pixie  Dream  Girl  perhaps  constitutes  the  most  powerful  embodiment  of  postfeminist  ideologies  within independent cinema.  In addition, her carpe diem philosophy  and  her  «hipster»  aesthetics  speak  directly  to  the  idiosyncrasy  of  our  time,  characterized, as Slavoj Zizek (1994) explains, by a social injunction to «Enjoy!»

New feminism is a continuation of earlier feminisms but differs slightly as it emphasizes on the idea that woman is an individual with an equal worth as man while accepting the natural sexual differences. Indian Films have always portrayed women in the stereotypical roles of passive, submissive and dependent objects of visual pleasure. British Feminist Film Theorist Laura Mulvey, in her essay titled 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', talks about the Male Gaze and how women are presented as the object of voyeurism, which means 'to-belooked-at-ness' objects. This paper attempts to look at the changes brought in the representation of woman from the stereotypical pleasurable object to the emancipated lead actor who overcame the male gaze and became an independent and strong woman. The paper observes this change of representation in Gouri Shinde's film "English Vinglish". The film is about an Indian woman who overcomes the patriarchal obstacles and becomes successful and independent. The focus is also on the contemporary Indian female directors. Unlike most of the male directors, these female directors break away from showing the woman as passive and pleasurable objects. They represent their emancipation through independent women characters who are not dependent on men.

The 2015 Hindi drama film Angry Indian Goddesses has been upheld as an example of India's first female "buddy film", promising to treat its subject-female homosocial friendships-with care and nuance. While the film fails to live up to its promise of incisively portraying relationships between its lead characters, it nevertheless presents itself as a site for critically examining the politics of such friendships, which are riven with problems of gender vis-à-vis the largely patriarchal nature of Indian society depicted in the film. This essay attempts to contextualise the narrative arc in Angry Indian Goddesses, and examines the construction of its characters and their interpersonal relationships to draw out a critique of solidarity as advanced by the representation of women's friendships in the film.

Edizione critica dell'autobiografia di Alice Guy. Prima donna regista e figura unica nella storia del cinema, Alice Guy (1873-1968) iniziò la sua carriera già nel 1896. Direttrice di produzione alla Gaumont dal 1897 al 1907, poi presidente di una compagnia indipendente creata nel 1910 a New York, fu responsabile della realizzazione di quasi mille film, la maggior parte dei quali da lei stessa diretti. Solo dopo la pubblicazione di questa sua autobiografia, apparsa postuma in Francia nel 1976, sotto il titolo *La fee aux choux Autobiographie d'une pionniere du cinema* Alice Guy ha riconquistato il posto che le spetta tra i grandi registi del cinema muto. Con stile fresco e vivace, il libro ripercorre la vicenda biografica e professionale di questa pioniera, dalla prima regia alla sperimentazione con il cinema sonoro, dall’incontro con il futuro marito Herbert Blaché ai successi e alle delusioni del periodo americano. Questa nuova edizione presenta il testo in una nuova traduzione italiana, con un ampio saggio introduttivo, un ricco apparato di note e documenti d’epoca e l’elenco dei film tuttora disponibili attribuiti all’autrice.

"As a counter to the masculinist heroic quest myth, which dominates critical work in myth, this study develops a new critical framework for analyzing how archetypal images in mythic narratives create a space for women, grounded in the feminist myth of Mary Daly. This framework is applied to the controversial film, "Thelma and Louise."

The study demonstrates that "Thelma and Louise"corresponds to Daly's conception of "spooking, sparking, and spinning," providing a transcendent vision of female freedom. Yet this message is ambiguous, with the ending rupturing the pleasure for many viewers. The paper then concludes with an assessment of the usefulness of this approach to mythic rhetoiric in popular culture."

La mia tesi si interroga sulla posizione della donna rispetto allo sguardo nel cinema e sulla relazione che si stabilisce con la spettatrice. Il mio studio tiene conto di fattori come razza e orientamento sessuale ed esamina materiali eterogenei appartenenti alla Cultura Visuale.
La tesi si struttura in tre parti: la prima parte si concentra sulla donna come oggetto passivo dello sguardo. Mi sono concentrata soprattutto sulla teoria di Laura Mulvey, secondo la quale la donna nel cinema classico è oggetto dello sguardo e la spettatrice è in grado di appropriarsi dello sguardo identificandosi con un personaggio maschile portatore della visione.
La seconda parte tratta di teorie che vedono la donna sullo schermo e la spettatrice come soggetti di uno sguardo attivo. Queste teorie espongono anche modalità di identificazione e di piacere alternative rispetto a quelle postulate da Laura Mulvey.
La terza parte esamina l'influenza di genere, razza e orientamento sessuale sulla produzione cinematografica. Si presentano le strategie che le minoranze attuano nei confronti di rappresentazioni filmiche che non le rappresentano o che le rappresentano in maniera degradante. Si presentano inoltre esempi di auto-rappresentazione con cui le minoranze riescono a ricreare l'immagini di loro stesse e contrapporsi a una cultura che le discrimina e che le rende invisibili.

1990'ların yeni dünya düzeninin gündemindeki kavram küreselleşme ve yerel ölçekte güdülen neoliberal ekonomik politikalar uyarınca, 1990'ların Türkiye sineması, Amerikan Majörleri ve ithal filmler tarafından kuşatılır. Aynı dönem, Kültür Bakanlığı, TRT, özel kanallar, Eurimages ve özel sponsorlar gibi bir dizi yeni yapım destek fonuna ve değişen yapımcılık anlayışına tanıklık eder. Dönemin yerel siyasi anlayışı ve global ölçekte tüketim "ürün"lerinin genişleyen kapsamı sonucunda değişen sosyolojik yapı ve tüketim alışkanlıkları, seyir kültürünü de dönüştürmüştür. Tüm bu dinamikler, filmlerin üretilme biçimlerine, sinemasal dile ve anlatıya yansır. 1990'lı yıllar bir diğer yanıyla, ilk filmini çeken on dört yeni kadın yönetmenle, Türkiye sinema tarihinde daha önce görülmemiş bir artışa tanıklık eder. İlk filmleri çevirdikleri yıl itibariyle sıralandığında 1990'lı yıllarda sinemasal alana dahil olan yönetmenler; Füruzan ve Gülsün Karamustafa, Canan Gerede, Tomris Giritlioğlu, Biket İlhan, Seçkin Yasar, Handan İpekçi, Canan Evcimen, Fide Motan, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Sunar Kural Aytuna, Necef Uğurlu ve Jülide Övür'dür. 1990'ların kadın yönetmenlerinin film üretim süreçlerinde 90'ların kültürel üretim dinamiklerinin; sanatçı kimliklerini, dolayısıyla sanata bakış açılarını şekillendiren bileşenlerin; 1990'lı yılları oluşturan ve 1990'lı yılların oluşturduğu tarihsel, toplumsal, politik ve ekonomik unsurların etkili olduğu açıktır. 1990'ların kadın yönetmenleri, bu unsurlar üzerinden siyasallaşmaya başlayan bir söylem alanı var etmişlerdir. Ancak filmlerdeki dişil alanın sorunlu yapısı, 90'lı yıllar kadın sinemacıların üretimlerinde ortak feminist bir dilden yahut feminist bir üretim biçiminden söz edilmesini olanaksız kılmaktadır. Anahtar Kelimeler : Film Prodüksiyon Teorisi, Feminist Film Kuramı,1990'lar Türkiye Sineması, Kadın Yönetmen, Kadın ve Sinema

In line with the concept of globalization imminent to the 1990s new world order, and the local politics; the American Majors and imported films occupy '90s Turkish cinema. The same period witnesses changing practices of production and new production funds from Cultural Ministry, TRT (Turkish Radio & Television Corporation), custom channels, Eurimages and private sponsors. The sociological structure and consumption patterns changed by the local politics and the expanding extent of consumer "goods" on global scale, transform the watching culture as well. All these dynamics reflect on the production practices of the films, their form and substance. On the other hand, 1990s witness an unprecedented increase in the Turkish cinema history, with a number of fourteen new female directors. Ranged according to the release date of their first films, the directors are; Füruzan and Gülsün Karamustafa, Canan Gerede, Tomris Giritlioğlu, Biket İlhan, Seçkin Yasar, Handan İpekçi, Canan Evcimen, Fide Motan, Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Sunar Kural Aytuna, Necef Uğurlu and Jülide Övür. 1990s cultural production dynamics; the components shaping directors' artistic personalities thereby artistic viewpoints; the historic, social, political and economic factors having formed the '90s and the '90s forming these factors are influential for the cinematic production process of '90s female directors. Over these components, the female directors of 1990s start to generate a field of political discourse. Yet the problematic structure of the feminine in the 90s female directors' films makes it impossible to refer to a common feminist discourse or a feminist film production process. Key Words : Film Production Theory, Feminist Film Theory, 1990's Turkish Cinema, Female Director, Women and Cinema

This upper-level film analysis and theory course surveys multiple approaches to feminist film theory. The course traces key concepts and debates in feminist film theory, criticism, and history through screenings and course readings by considering the critical reception, historical context, and sociopolitical implications of representation.

[Note of Attribution: Many thanks to Jackie Arcy who developed the original syllabus concept for the course]

This paper traces the ways in which documentaries with a feminist impulse emerged in the Indian context. Moving forward from the Griersonian mode of documentary making, feminist documentary truly represents the ways in which the personal can become political. During this process, films negotiate with ethics of documentary making, issues of subjectivity and representation, and reflexivity of the filmmaker as a gendered subject.

A short essay about Chantal Akerman's text-image book, My Mother Laughs. Published on The MUFF Society blog in July 2020 (an online community based in Toronto that celebrates womxn and underrepresented groups in film/television). Online at: https://medium.com/the-muff-society/twist-revolt-survive-my-mother-laughs-by-chantal-akerman-a4baeb11a6aa