film, feminist

film, feminist
   Feminist film is situated in ideological opposition to the patriarchal codes and conventions of dominant (or mainstream) cinema. It engages with issues of female identity, subjectivity, desire, sexuality, history and spectatorship, challenging the negative representations of women in film and their marginalization within the film industry itself. Emerging concurrently with an ascendant women’s movement during the early 1970s, the initial symbiosis between feminist film theory and film-making began to rupture by the late 1980s. While some feminist film-makers expressed continued support for a separatist deconstructive or countercinema, others advocated working simultaneously within and against mainstream conventions. They criticized the theoretical density, didacticism and white middle-class composition of feminist film that foreclosed its accessibility among socially, ethnically diverse and more mainstream audiences.
   As a countercinema, feminist film has assimilated influences from socialist documentary and avantgarde film. A cinema vérité style allowed women to convey ‘authentic’ selves and experiences, rendering the personal as political in consciousness-raising films. ‘Women-talking’ documentaries include Women of the Rhondda (London Women’s Film Group, 1972) and Nightcleaners (Berwick Street Collective, 1975), which preceded the Sheffield Film Co-op’s more agitational socialist documentaries A Woman Like You (1976), That’s No Lady (1977) and Jobs For the Girls (1979).
   An avant-gardist experimentalism and aesthetic vigour infused films like Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1978), Light Reading (Lis Rhodes, 1978), The Song of the Shirt (Clayton and Curling, 1979) and Thriller (Sally Potter, 1979). Their work (that of cine-theorist Mulvey in particular) exemplifies an interrelated feminist theory and practice, notably through the attempt to articulate a new ‘feminine’ cinematic syntax which disrupts conventional narrative, image and sound.
   As transitional works, Lezli-Ann Barrett’s An Epic Poem (1982) and Potter’s The Gold Diggers (1983) were followed by Business As Usual (1987) and Orlando (1993) respectively, to demonstrate the viability of feminist concerns within a mainstream context. While 1990s feminist film making col-lapses boundaries between dominant and alternative cinemas, the explosion of black, lesbian and postcolonial theories has stimulated the presence of feminist film-makers in the independent and black workshop sectors. As film-makers of vitality and steadfast vision, their racial, sexual, cultural and diasporic explorations attest to the polyphonic nature of British feminist film making. They include Sankofa’s Maureen Blackwood and Mar-tina Attile, Ngozi Onwurah, Pratibha Parmar and Gurinder Chadha, whose Bhaji on the Beach (1994) signalled the stirrings of a black-Asian female foray into the mainstream.
   Further reading
    Erens, P. (ed.) (1990) Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press (a comprehensive anthology of classic feminist film essays).
   SATINDER CHOHAN

Encyclopedia of contemporary British culture . . 2014.

Игры ⚽ Поможем сделать НИР

Look at other dictionaries:

  • feminist publishing houses —    Feminist presses are not that new: the first, Victoria Press, was founded by Emily Faithfull in 1860. In terms of recent presses, Virago was established in 1978 by Carmen Callil, who had previously worked for several London publishers and who …   Encyclopedia of contemporary British culture

  • film press —    British film press has poor roots in the British film industry. In major film studios such as Elstree, Shepperton, Pinewood Studios and Ealing, communications were mostly confined to genres and stars, while in film distribution, in house… …   Encyclopedia of contemporary British culture

  • feminist theory —    Feminism has made an important difference to British culture throughout the twentieth century as the struggle to change unequal gender relations has taken place in a range of contexts. Although women campaigned for change in the nineteenth… …   Encyclopedia of contemporary British culture

  • feminist theatre —    Theatre, like other branches of the arts and culture over the last thirty years, has progressively reflected the concerns of feminism. Within theatre there has been a spectrum of feminist approaches which involves re readings of established… …   Encyclopedia of contemporary British culture

  • Feminist film theory — is theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory. Feminists have many approaches to cinema analysis, regarding the film elements analysed and their theoretical underpinnings. HistoryThe development of feminist film …   Wikipedia

  • Feminist theory — is the extension of feminism into theoretical, or philosophical, ground. It encompasses work done in a broad variety of disciplines, prominently including the approaches to women s roles and lives and feminist politics in anthropology and… …   Wikipedia

  • Feminist science fiction — is a sub genre of science fiction which tends to deal with women s roles in society. Feminist science fiction poses questions about social issues such as how society constructs gender roles, the role reproduction plays in defining gender and the… …   Wikipedia

  • Feminist literary criticism — is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting edge …   Wikipedia

  • Film canon — is the limited group of movies that serve as the measuring stick for the highest quality in the genre of film. Criticism of canonsThe idea of a film canon has been attacked as elitist. Thus some movie fans and critics prefer to simply compile… …   Wikipedia

  • Film theory — is an academic discipline, closely allied with Marxist critical theory, that aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film s relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and… …   Wikipedia

Share the article and excerpts

Direct link
Do a right-click on the link above
and select “Copy Link”