Female Agency And Documentary Strategies

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender. Female Agency and Documentary Strategies centres on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity, and includes interviews with Hong Kong based activist filmmaker and scholar Vivian Wenli Lin and Spanish documentarist Mercedes Alvarez.

New essays and creative explorations of the friendship, milieu, and writings of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

This volume provides an overview of the landscape of mediated female agencies and subjectivities in the last decade. In three sections, the book covers the films of women directors, television shows featuring women in lead roles, and the representational struggles of women in cultural context, with a special focus on changes in the transformative power of narratives and images across genres and platforms. This collection derives from the editors’ multi-year experiences as scholars and practitioners in the field of film and television. It is an effort that aims to describe and understand female agencies and subjectivities across screen narratives, gather scholars from around the world to generate timely discussions, and inspire fellow researchers and practitioners of film and television.

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and Documentary Strategies, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender. Female Authorship and the Documentary Image engages with the relationship between female documentary filmmakers and the documentary image. With a thematic focus on the documentary image directly, within the more traditional arenas of theory and practice and especially within the context of gaze and author theory, the book also considers more philosophical questions of aesthetics, home and identity within the contexts of female subjectivity, globalisation and trauma. The book also includes a dialogue on two key photographers, Hannah Wilke and Jo Spence, as well as an interview with Taiwanese documentary filmmakers Singing Chen and Wuna Wu.

Woman-Centered Brazilian Cinema highlights the bold, inspiring, and diverse work of female filmmakers—including directors, screenwriters, and producers—and female protagonists in the twenty-first-century Brazilian film industry. This volume examines the diverse production and distribution spaces these filmmakers are working in, including documentary, experimental, and short filmmaking, as well as commercial feature films. An intersectional approach runs throughout the chapters with complex considerations around gender, race, sexuality, and class. The book features a mix of research methods and genres, with macro-level political, economic, and industry-wide views of gender disparities appearing alongside in-depth conversations with contemporary filmmakers Maria Augusta Ramos, Petra Costa, Mari Corrêa, and Paula Sacchetta, focused on micro-level personal experiences. In bringing together original essays and interviews, the volume provides valuable information for students of Brazil in general and of Brazilian film in particular.

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film presents a collection of original essays that explore major issues surrounding the state of current documentary films and their capacity to inspire and effect change. Presents a comprehensive collection of essays relating to all aspects of contemporary documentary films Includes nearly 30 original essays by top documentary film scholars and makers, with each thematic grouping of essays sub-edited by major figures in the field Explores a variety of themes central to contemporary documentary filmmakers and the study of documentary film – the planet, migration, work, sex, virus, religion, war, torture, and surveillance Considers a wide diversity of documentary films that fall outside typical canons, including international and avant-garde documentaries presented in a variety of media

How do people talk about marriage? Who gets to do the talking? When, why, where and how do these things change? From the experiences of women forced to marry as children to those of older women who never married, from investigations of cross-border marriage applications to Christian pastors’ sermons on divorce, from oppositional media discussions of same-sex marriage to pro-marriage equality protest signs: this collection presents research from across the globe addressing the often shifting, context-specific ways that we talk about marriage. Developed from the work of the UK-based Discourses of Marriage Research Group and a two-day conference drawing together scholars interested in talk of marriage and related topics, this interdisciplinary volume brings together linguists, psychologists, and film makers and draws on data from the UK, Germany, Taiwan, the US, Belgium, and Turkey. It is intended both as a survey of some contemporary trends in research on marriage and as a foundation for further research. The chapters in this book, except for chapters 1 and 7, were originally published as a special issue of the journal Critical Discourse Studies. This volume comes with a new introduction.

In the region known as Eastern and East-Central Europe, the framework provided by memory studies became highly valuable for understanding the overload of interpretations and conflicting perspectives on events during the twentieth century. The trauma of two world wars, the development of collective consciousness according to national and ethnic categories, stories of the trampled lands and lives of people, and resistance to the rule of authoritarian and totalitarian terrors—these trajectories left complex layers of identities to unfold. The following volume addresses the issue of identity as a pivot in studies of memory and literature. In this context, it addresses the question of cultural negotiation as it took shape between memory and literature, history and literature, and memory and history, with the help of contemporary authors and their works. The authors take the literature of countries such as Estonia, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, and Russia as the point of departure, and explain its significance in terms of geographical, theoretical, and thematic perspectives.

The Female Gaze in Documentary Film – an International Perspective makes a timely contribution to the recent rise in interest in the status, presence, achievements and issues for women in contemporary screen industries. It examines the works, contributions and participation of female documentary directors globally. The central preoccupation of the book is to consider what might constitute a ‘female gaze’, an inquiry that has had a long history in filmmaking, film theory and women’s art. It fills a gap in the literature which to date has not substantially examined the work of female documentary directors. Moreover, research on sex, gender and the gaze has infrequently been the subject of scholarship on documentary film, particularly in comparison to narrative film or television drama. A distinctive feature of the book is that it is based on interviews with significant female documentarians from Europe, Asia and North America.

The question of whether movies can deliver philosophical content is a leading topic in the cognitive and analytic debate on film. But instead of turning to the well-trodden terrain of narrative and emotional engagement, this is the first time fashion and costume choices are analyzed to demonstrate how movies can be said to be doing philosophy. Considering how fashion and costumes can deliver the epistemic content of a film and act as a guidance to the interpretation of the philosophical content of a film, Laura T. Di Summa examines fashion and costume choices in classical and contemporary films. She discusses a number of cinematic examples, and the costumes and fashion elements within them, illustrating the importance of issues such as the performative side of fashion, the alteration between novelty and repetition, the pivotal role of the body, and the relation between fashion, style, and individual as well as collective identity. Featuring close examinations of 1950s melodramas, Hollywood blockbusters and documentaries such as All That Heaven Allows, Mad Max Fury Road, and McQueen, Di Summa uses an innovative new lens to provide fresh philosophical analysis of films. The result is not only an advancement of our understanding of the aesthetic means through which film can do philosophy, but the first insights into a philosophy of fashion.