Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822340232 ISBN 13: 9780822340232

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2007

Synopsis

Women’s Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the 1950s and many of whom are still working today. In each essay in this collection, a leading film scholar considers a single filmmaker, supplying biographical information, analyzing various influences on her work, examining the development of her corpus, and interpreting a significant number of individual films. The essays rescue the work of critically neglected but influential women filmmakers for teaching, further study, and, hopefully, restoration and preservation. Just as importantly, they enrich the understanding of feminism in cinema and expand the terrain of film history, particularly the history of the American avant-garde.

The contributors examine the work of Marie Menken, Joyce Wieland, Gunvor Nelson, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Rubin, Amy Greenfield, Barbara Hammer, Chick Strand, Marjorie Keller, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich, and Cheryl Dunye. The essays highlight the diversity in these filmmakers’ forms and methods, covering topics such as how Menken used film as a way to rethink the transition from abstract expressionism to Pop Art in the 1950s and 1960s, how Rubin both objectified the body and investigated the filmic apparatus that enabled that objectification in her film Christmas on Earth (1963), and how Dunye uses film to explore her own identity as a black lesbian artist. At the same time, the essays reveal commonalities, including a tendency toward documentary rather than fiction and a commitment to nonhierarchical, collaborative production practices. The volume’s final essay focuses explicitly on teaching women’s experimental films, addressing logistical concerns (how to acquire the films and secure proper viewing spaces) and extending the range of the book by suggesting alternative films for classroom use.

Contributors. Paul Arthur, Robin Blaetz, Noël Carroll, Janet Cutler, Mary Ann Doane, Robert A. Haller, Chris Holmlund, Chuck Kleinhans, Scott MacDonald, Kathleen McHugh, Ara Osterweil, Maria Pramaggiore, Melissa Ragona, Kathryn Ramey, M. M. Serra, Maureen Turim, William C. Wees

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"This definitive volume on U.S. women's experimental cinema fills a significant and long-lamented gap within film studies, and in feminist film studies in particular. Together, these essays offer us a richly nuanced picture not only of women's experimental film but of avant-garde filmmaking in general from the 1940s to the present."--Sharon Willis, author of "High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film"

About the Author:

Robin Blaetz is Associate Professor and Chair of the Film Studies Program at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0822340232
• ISBN 13: 9780822340232
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 432
• Editor: Blaetz Robin