Courses > 2006 Spring

Electives

CINE 208 - Women and Film

ARTH 292
401 | TR 9-10:30am

This course offers an introduction to the important and often under-examined role women have played in shaping the development of global cinema. We will survey the span of more than a century in order to emphasize the presence of women in filmmaking practices through the history of cinema. Directors under consideration will include: Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Maya Deren, Leni Riefenstahl, Leontin Sagan, Shirley Clarke, Faith Hubley, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Ulrike Ottinger, Julie Dash, Yvonne Welbon. Structured chronologically, the course will investigate how films made by female directors have shaped, or been omitted from, mainstream narratives of film history. We will consider how effective “gender” and “authorship” are as a categories of analysis; discuss whether certain aesthetic practices reflect, repress, or fail to register traces of gender; ask how the representation of gender on screen is complicated by other aspects of a character’s identity, such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, personal / collective history, and nationality; and grapple with the question of how the work of these women complicates our understanding of the medium of film. We will also explore some of the feminist film scholarship that has so successfully highlighted the need to recover, preserve, support, and analyze the work of these pioneering filmmakers from around the globe.