Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (international Library Of The Moving Image)
by Sophie Mayer /
2015 / English / EPUB
1.7 MB Download
Female filmmakers are hitting the headlines. The last five years
have witnessed: the first Best Director Academy Award won by a
woman; women filmmakers emerging from Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Iran,
South Korea, Japan, Paraguay, Uruguay, Burkina Faso and Kenya; the
first stirrings of a ‘trans cinema’, with the release of films that
represent transgender characters and their experiences, challenging
our understanding of gender and identity; feminist porn screened at
public festivals; and Pussy Riot’s online documentation of offline
activism sending shockwaves around the world. Political Animals
argues that a new wave of feminist cinema is speaking to a new
audience hungry for intersectional accounts of women in the public
sphere that are missing in the mainstream. It reveals how
innovative production and distribution strategies are responding to
urgent political situations (resulting in colourful guerrilla
aesthetics exemplified in the rough, D.I.Y, online videos made by
Pussy Riot, but equally found in recent documentaries and features
by established filmmakers too) and tunes in to the transnational,
transgenerational conversations that are taking place between
filmmakers such as Sally Potter, Claire Denis, Barbara Hammer,
Mania Akbari, Haifaa al-Mansour, Emily Jacir, Andrea Arnold and
Clio Barnard. Courageous and complex, the new feminist cinema is a
political animal that, while laying claim to the public sphere as
its own, refuses to be domesticated by it.
Female filmmakers are hitting the headlines. The last five years
have witnessed: the first Best Director Academy Award won by a
woman; women filmmakers emerging from Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Iran,
South Korea, Japan, Paraguay, Uruguay, Burkina Faso and Kenya; the
first stirrings of a ‘trans cinema’, with the release of films that
represent transgender characters and their experiences, challenging
our understanding of gender and identity; feminist porn screened at
public festivals; and Pussy Riot’s online documentation of offline
activism sending shockwaves around the world. Political Animals
argues that a new wave of feminist cinema is speaking to a new
audience hungry for intersectional accounts of women in the public
sphere that are missing in the mainstream. It reveals how
innovative production and distribution strategies are responding to
urgent political situations (resulting in colourful guerrilla
aesthetics exemplified in the rough, D.I.Y, online videos made by
Pussy Riot, but equally found in recent documentaries and features
by established filmmakers too) and tunes in to the transnational,
transgenerational conversations that are taking place between
filmmakers such as Sally Potter, Claire Denis, Barbara Hammer,
Mania Akbari, Haifaa al-Mansour, Emily Jacir, Andrea Arnold and
Clio Barnard. Courageous and complex, the new feminist cinema is a
political animal that, while laying claim to the public sphere as
its own, refuses to be domesticated by it.