Women's Films

Commissioned programme essay for cineclub The Machine that Kills Bad People screening of WANDA at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, May 2, 2018.

https://www.ica.art/whats-on/machine-kills-bad-people-cry-when-it-happens-wanda

https://www.ica.art/sites/default/files/downloads/ICA%20Wanda_%20Loden_%20lodestone_v2.pdf

For centuries, there has been a process in which masculine power has prevailed. But this is not always the case. It is known that women-dominated societies existed in the past. The masculine power sees the feminine power as a threat to itself and imprisons it in the shadows. The suppression of feminine power did not last forever.

An interstitial political gesture and a palimpsestic record: writing per se in D’est and Là-bas - Where are history and politics when a filmmaker refuses procedures of documental recollection such as archives, off-screen narration, and playacting, and instead contemplates spaces of conflict in Eastern Europe 1993 and in Israel 2006 without getting  involved in them? In order to answer this question, we argue that, by means of a self-writing style (an autobiography built in the memory gaps of the Holocaust), Chantal Akerman’s films D’est and Là-bas reach the political through a crannied route (of affects and cracks) that constructs a palimpsestic picture of history in which past and present are not  sequential.

Resumo: Onde está o histórico e o político quando uma cineasta recusa os procedimentos de rememoração documentais como o arquivo, o testemunho e a encenação, para apenas contemplar espaços de conflito no Leste Europeu de 1993 e em Israel de 2006, sem a eles se imiscuir? Buscando responder tal questão, este artigo produz o argumento de que através da escrita de si – de uma autobiografia instituída nas lacunas da memória sobre o Holocausto – os filmes D’est e Là-bas, de Chantal Akerman, alcançam o político por uma via intersticial – aquela dos afetos e das brechas - e formula uma figura palimpséstica para a história, que não encadeia passado e presente.

Article is freely available at cinephile.ca. Please visit that site and do not request a copy from me.
This article provides an overview of the Fifty Shades of Grey reviews published in the popular press at the time of the film’s release on Valentine’s Day Weekend 2015. Through a careful look at the reviews, I assess which genre references resonated with critics. In my reading of the Fifty Shades criticism, given that the film was neither art, nor porn, nor schlock, the only low genre left for critics to assess it was the “woman’s film.”

Article is available for free in the provided link.

The late Algerian author Assia Djebar had published four novels in French before she famously retreated from writing for ten years. Disillusioned with the creative possibilities of her “step-mother tongue,” yet reluctant to write in the formal Arabic she had come to associate with religious nationalism, Djebar turned briefly to film to unearth the “buried voices” of Algerian women, whose accounts of occupation and independence in vernacular Arabic would reveal a rich alternative archive. These oral testimonies, however, would appear frequently in Djebar’s later novels, subjected once again to the violence of transliteration and translation.

This paper examines Djebar’s return to writing – both her coming back to the practice of writing and her writing back to the texts that have defined Algerian women’s history – in order to interrogate the myriad oppressions that forced her to lose her voice while tracing strategies of resistance to discursive control. Does Djebar, in her efforts to reconcile les cris (cries) with l’écrit (writing), succeed, in the words of Hélène Cixous, in putting Algerian women “into the text – as into the world”? Or does she risk perpetuating the very fallacies she seeks to expose in reproducing these histories?

At a time when the history of colonial violence is elided from debates about integration and immigration, and North African women living in Europe become frequent targets of populist vitriol, we might also ask: is it the writer’s role to give ‘voice’ to these women, and what is the impetus to make them speak? How does this impetus shape racist/imperialist ideologies in the present, and how does Djebar’s work destabilize this economy? Finally, how can we destabilize it by continuing to remember Djebar?

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Israel has known seven wars, seven prominent violent operations and numerous military conflicts. During this period (1948‐2019), 86 Israeli screen stories have engaged with the motif of Israel’s military/wars. However, only two of them were written by women and focused on the female Israeli soldier. The marginal position of screen stories based on Israeli women’s experience in the military presents a unique opportunity to unravel the notions female screenwriters have of women’s conduct in a patriarchal military culture. Our findings suggest that female Israeli screenwriters (a) propose a dual vision for women ‐ on the one hand, they are portrayed as silenced, while on the other they use silence as a coping tactic; (b) represent the hegemonic male as silencing women’s voices even though in some cases women silence hegemonic men; and (c) depict military service as an opportunity for women to unravel their femininity.

A talk given at Hacettepe University, Department of English Language and Literature, on the contemporary impact of the Suffragettes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as well as today in the wake of the release of the film SUFFRAGETTE (2015).  The talk is on SLIDESHARE (with the link below)