On Women's Films

This collection, which addresses an academic and specialized audience within a transdisciplinary framework of interests in women and gender studies, film and media studies, and cultural theory, will be a precious tool in curricular courses on women and film, gender embodiment, and queer representation in film. It is also an engaging, highly readable book that broadens the definition of women’s film through a wide selection of case studies and approaches. * H-France *
This collection makes an urgent call for including women’s cinema as an essential part of film history and practice. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals. * CHOICE *
This cutting-edge book responds to the extreme diversity of women’s filmmaking in the last decades. Its dazzling essays, with their focus on experimental and politically committed films, on agency and subjection, on shame and love, make compulsive reading. * Emma Wilson, Professor of French, University of Cambridge, UK *
Unapologetically focused on women auteurs, this highly engaging collection of essays contextualizes their work historically and provides lucid, theoretically informed readings of their often provocative films. The editors have boldly applied a feminist corrective that stretches the canons of film history and our understanding of slow cinema. These essays reveal that the tropes of contemplative cinema such as self-inscription, duration, and micro description have deep roots in the history of women’s films around the world and across the generations. * Robin Blaetz, Emily Dickinson Chair in Film Studies, Mount Holyoke College, USA *
On Women’s Films is a lively and varied collection of essays by senior scholars in the field and emerging talents, demonstrating the continued importance of women’s cinema as a strategic formation for women’s self-expression. The essays in this volume are energized by engagement between generations of feminists and by the book’s broad historical and international perspectives. New scholarship on canonical figures brings their work into contact with contemporary feminist thought, and new figures are added to the tradition of women’s cinema. A model of the art of updating without forgoing the gains of the past, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in women’s filmmaking. * Alison Butler, Associate Professor in Film, University of Reading, UK *