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While women directors continue to be a minority in most national and transnational film contexts, there are those among them who rank among the most innovative and inventive of filmmakers. Filmmaking by women becomes an important route to exploring what lies outside of and beyond the stereotype through reflexivity on violence and conflict, and through visual and narrative explorations of migration, exile, subjectivity, history or individual and collective memory. By documenting and interpreting a fascinating corpus of films made by women coming from Latin America, the US, Portugal and Spain, this book proposes research strategies and methodologies that can expand our understanding of socio-cultural and psychic constructions of gender and sexual politics. It critically examines the work of Hispanic and Lusophone female filmmakers. It 'weaves' several 'threads' by working at the intersections between feminist film theory, gender studies and film practices by women in Latin America, the US, Portugal and Spain. The book explores the transcultural connections, as well as the cultural specificities, that can be established between Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American and Latino contexts within and beyond the framework of the nation state. It suggests that the notion of home and of Basque motherland carry potentially different resonances for female directors.
, ranging from literal families to successive ‘waves’ of filmmakers in the history of French cinema. Examining this pervasive network of themes reveals a lot about his social, political, and affective worldview and can help us identify Tavernier in terms of what historian Pierre Nora calls ‘generational consciousness’ ( 1996–98 : 503). Tavernier has been acclaimed by many as the leading French cinéaste of his generation. He is younger than Godard and Truffaut, Resnais, Marker, Varda, and Marcel Ophüls, but older than Luc Besson
Feminism and film in France Although film-making remains male-dominated in France as elsewhere, ‘more women have taken an active part in French cinema than in any other national film industry’ (Kuhn and Radstone 1990 : 163). France claims not only the first woman film director – Alice Guy, whose career began in 1900 – but also the first feminist filmmaker, Germaine Dulac, a
form, a form that lies totally under his control. Ozon shows us a protagonist haunted by his family, caught in the deadlock of wanting them out of the way (for reasons unspecified) and yet being compelled to arrange himself in accordance with their positioning, dead or alive. With Photo de famille, the young filmmaker Ozon manipulates and ‘kills’ his own (amusingly complicit) family in the creation of a violently personal
promoting debate amongst students of film and, of course, to making the point that Besson is a filmmaker whose work merits serious investigation and analysis. Besson’s work, with the exception of his first feature film ( Le Dernier Combat , 1983) which was liked by almost all those engaged in film criticism, has been acclaimed by the popular film journals (such as Première ) and excoriated by the more serious ones (such as
conjugal relations (legitimate vs. informal, hetero-vs. homosexual). Also noticeable along this trajectory is the transition from a cinema of ‘apprenticeship’, whereby fledgling filmmakers take hold of available filmmaking apparatus through their associations and collaborations with male cinéastes (as was the case for Solberg and her immediate successors) to formally schooled, yet stylistically and
of art-movie production. The position of women filmmakers is anomalous in this process. It is perhaps unsurprising that the most powerful auteurs on both continents, whose films are globally distributed (Pedro Almodóvar; the Mexican triad of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro) are all male. Although Spain has, under its current Socialist administration, one of the
influential people, organised by the two Alains, it was distributed in France and Italy where it achieved a cult success. 1 Marienbad was a new milestone in French, if not in world cinema. Along with other young European film-makers at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s – Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut, Bergman, Antonioni et al . – Resnais had begun to experiment with every aspect of the cinema apparatus, exploring new
This essay considers how the boxing story enabled some filmmakers to politicise and individualise a popular film cycle. These mostly left-wing Jewish filmmakers understood that the boxing story offered a particularly viable vehicle for broad social commentary, a vehicle that could also be personalised by evoking a nostalgic vision of a ghetto community.