Global Art Cinema and Transnational Feminist Authorship
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Published 31 January 2027
About this book
Considers women directors’ involvement in art cinema and how their work has contributed to the articulation of transnational feminisms
- Reveals art cinema to be a fascinating area for the study of transnational feminisms that emerge through the negotiation of cultural dynamics across national and global industrial frameworks
- Offers a fresh understanding of contemporary women’s filmmaking in relation to male-dominated canons of film history, both national and global
- Includes detailed analyses of ten films selected from each director’s oeuvre to highlight their socio-historical engagement with major art cinema trends
- Advocates a critical perspective for the study of women’s authorship beyond the case studies developed in the book
- Organisation of the chapters into thematically linked yet self-standing units encourages active reading for teaching and research
Through a historically integrated scrutiny of film authorship, this book examines how women directors have achieved success by negotiating art cinema’s tension between elitism and political subversiveness.
Focusing on a specific film from each of the chosen directors, the book explores how art cinema enables women directors’ mobility and creative experimentation in a post-national cultural landscape. It therefore allows the reader to evaluate the cumulative effect of female-authored films in enhancing transnational feminist discourses that expose and challenge power hierarchies worldwide.
Reviews
This is a much needed, timely, and intellectually inspiring manuscript. It makes a persuasive case for rethinking art cinema as a transnational space of feminist negotiation. The author’s ability to move between close textual analysis, industrial critique, and historiographical reflection is impressive. The manuscript will contribute meaningfully to ongoing conversations the evolving role of women auteurs within global film culture.
Table of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Feminism in Art Cinema
Section I. The Female Auteur on Screen: meta-cinematic experimentations.
1. Crossing Physical and Imaginary Borders: The Female Auteur in Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997).
2. Sex and Violence: Catherine Breillat’s Self-Reflexive Performance of Authorship in Sex Is Comedy (2002).
Section II. Social Realism: Documenting Subjection and Subjectivity.
3. ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’: Social Realism and the Narrative of Female Imprisonment in Samira Makhmalbaf’s Sib/The Apple (1998)
4. ‘It’s not What You Think’: ‘Anti-social’ Realism in Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank (2009)
Section III: Women Filmmakers’ Work within Film Movements
5. The Politics of Ambiguity: Susanne Bier, Dogma Realism and the Discourse of Feminist Elision
6. Speaking Nearby: Lucrecia Martel’s Postcolonial Feminist Authorship in New Argentine Cinema
Section IV. Cross-over Art Films: Women Filmmakers Experimenting with Mainstream Genre
7. Kelly Reichardt Re-imagines the period Western: Meek’s Cutoff (2010) and First Cow (2019)
8. ‘The Look of Love’: A Feminist Exploration of the Erotic Thriller in Jane Campion's In the Cut (2003)
Afterword
Bibliography
Filmography
Notes