Women Directors in 'Global' Art Cinema: Negotiating Feminism And
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Women Directors in ‘Global’ Art Cinema: Negotiating Feminism and Representation Despoina Mantziari PhD Thesis University of East Anglia School of Film, Television and Media Studies March 2014 “This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution.” Women Directors in Global Art Cinema: Negotiating Feminism and Aesthetics The thesis explores the cultural field of global art cinema as a potential space for the inscription of female authorship and feminist issues. Despite their active involvement in filmmaking, traditionally women directors have not been centralised in scholarship on art cinema. Filmmakers such as Germaine Dulac, Agnès Varda and Sally Potter, for instance, have produced significant cinematic oeuvres but due to the field's continuing phallocentricity, they have not enjoyed the critical acclaim of their male peers. Feminist scholarship has focused mainly on the study of Hollywood and although some scholars have foregrounded the work of female filmmakers in non-Hollywood contexts, the relationship between art cinema and women filmmakers has not been adequately explored. The thesis addresses this gap by focusing on art cinema. It argues that art cinema maintains a precarious balance between two contradictory positions; as a route into filmmaking for women directors allowing for political expressivity, with its emphasis on artistic freedom which creates a space for non-dominant and potentially subversive representations and themes, and as another hostile universe given its more elitist and auteurist orientation. The thesis adopts a case study approach, looking at a number of contemporary art films from diverse socio-political contexts. It thus provides a comprehensive account of how women are positioned within art cinema as subjects and as filmmakers. The thesis uses a social historical approach in looking at the texts as well as the contexts these texts operate within. In analysing how female directors voice feminist concerns through a negotiation of political and artistic preoccupations, the thesis aims to reclaim art cinema as a cultural field that brings the marginal closer to the mainstream and thus functions for feminism as the site of productive ideological dialogue. List of Contents 1. Acknowledgments 2. Introduction 1-30 3. Chapter 1: What Is Art Cinema? 31-63 4. Chapter 2: Cherchez la Femme: Female Representations in Art Cinema 64-116 5. Chapter 3: Female-Authored Films within Film Movements: Adopting Aesthetic Trends to Revolutionise Gendered Perspectives 117-153 6. Chapter 4: The Meta-cinematic Film: The Auteure, Feminism and Self-Reflexivity 154-185 7. Chapter 5: Social Realist Films: Negotiating Feminism between Reality and Fiction 186-222 8. Chapter 6: The Cross-over Film: Investigating Feminist Concerns through Generic Ambiguity 223-262 9. Conclusion 263-273 10. Bibliography 274-285 11. Filmography 286-294 Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor, Professor Yvonne Tasker, for her guidance and support throughout these last 3 years, and also to my secondary supervisor Dr Melanie Williams for her valuable contribution. I am also grateful to Dr Nicola Rehling (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) for introducing me as an undergrad student to the wonderful field of Film Studies. Last but not least, I am grateful to all my friends for being there for me through the good times and the bad. Without the intellectual and psychological assistance of all of the above this project would not have come this far. I dedicate this work to my parents, Georgios Mantziaris and Sofia Tsitaki, and to my sister, Stella Mantziari, for supporting me all my life and always pushing me to do better. Mantziari 1 Introduction Upon starting research for my thesis the first thing that became apparent during informal conversations both within film studies but also outside academia was how difficult they found naming more than a couple of women directors. It was surprising how even the most well known and highly visible figures such as Jodie Foster, Kathryn Bigelow, Barbara Streisand, Jane Campion and Sofia Coppola were sometimes absent from my interlocutors' responses. More often than I would like to admit I was faced with a long pause and a shrug of resignation. Similarly, when people would find out that I was doing a PhD in a “cool” discipline such as film studies, I would often be faced with the much-dreaded question: “who is your favourite director?” or “which is your favourite film?” And I say much dreaded question because on the one hand I find it impossible to have a definite singular answer on the subject and on the other, if pressured I would answer Sally Potter and Yes (2004) to which most people would assume a blank expression and say that they had not heard of her or the film. Of course, having studied film for a couple of years before embarking on my PhD I was very much aware that women filmmakers are not only a tiny percentage of the whole but they are also less visible and marginalised within a male-dominated industry. This becomes most obvious when one looks at the history of the Academy and other festival awards. These are not only important in the way they celebrate and acknowledge the contribution of filmmakers within the global cultural sphere, but also in the way they render visible and promote the careers of those who manage to garner such awards. Through a quick search on the Internet, I discovered that when it comes to women directors, the figures are rather depressing. The Academy Awards were instituted in 1929 and since then only four women have been nominated for the Best Director category: Lina Wertmüller in 1976, Jane Campion in 1993, Sofia Coppola in 2003 and finally Kathryn Bigelow in 2009, who was the first ever female director to win the Mantziari 2 award. This is an outrageously small number if one thinks of the amount of women who have worked within Hollywood and generally within American cinema. Yet at the same time it is no wonder that women have been systematically excluded from a traditionally white, male, heterosexist Academy where any female and/or feminine attributes are deemed inferior. Having said that, it is worth noting that there is another category in which female directors seem to have more visibility, namely the Best Foreign Language Film category. This category was first implemented in 1956 although between 1947-1955 there were Special Honorary Awards given to some foreign films. This award is somewhat controversial in terms of the restrictive rules for film selection and it appears as a rather condescending gesture on the part of the Academy towards non-Anglophone cinematic production. This all-encompassing award is given for excellence in world cinema, which is a complicated term in itself. However, what I would like to point out in connection to women's visibility within award ceremonies is that this particular category seems more open to the inclusion of women among its nominees. The first nomination appears in 1959 for Danish director Astrid Henning-Jensen and her film Paw. Following a 17-year gap, there are the nominations of Lina Wertmüller (1976), Diane Kurys (1983), María Luisa Bemberg (1984), Agnieszka Holland and Coline Serreau (1985), Mira Nair (1988) and the first award to be won by a woman director as recently as 1995 by Marleen Gorris competing against two other women directors, Nana Dzhordzhadze and Berit Nesheim. The award was again given to a woman director in 2002 (Caroline Link) and most recently to Danish director Susanne Bier, a director whose work I explore in one of my case studies. The difference between the more 'mainstream', All-American awards of the Academy and this 'other' category is quite important for the argument I will be making throughout this thesis. Mainstream high-budget filmmaking, as exemplified most notably by Hollywood Mantziari 3 and its studio structure, has been and still remains rather reluctant to include women directors within its ranks. In contrast, when looking at other national contexts the situation is a lot more varied, and especially in the case of, for instance, France, Germany and Denmark there is a significant number of women working within both the mainstream and the independent sector of filmmaking and getting at least some recognition for their work. This is reflected also in the fact that their films get selected to represent their countries' cinematic excellence at the Oscars. Of course this is a positive contrast compared to Hollywood but the situation offers little cause for celebration since, as said earlier, this category, with its significant marking of 'otherness', seems to be able to contain more comfortably the gendered 'other' of an-'other' industry. Therefore it seems that the American filmmaking industry, especially as represented by its annual ceremony, is particularly unwelcome to women, a point that has been reiterated by several feminist film scholars. For instance, this is expressed by Yvonne Tasker who observes that “the position of women filmmakers is typically both marginal and precarious” (213) adding that there is the “crucial question of the visibility of women filmmakers to be addressed” (“Vision” 214). My thesis explores precisely this crucial issue and one of the main objectives is to foreground the role and importance women directors hold within contemporary global art cinema. Not only, I argue, are they contributing significantly to this artistic cultural sphere but they also help enrich cultural representations by offering alternative viewpoints, which are informed by their variable national, racial, gender and social class identity.