Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen

by Alison Butler

Women's Cinema provides an introduction to critical debates around women's filmmaking and relates those debates to a variety of cinematic practices. Taking her cue from the groundbreaking theories of Claire Johnston, Alison Butler argues that women's cinema is a minor cinema that exists inside other cinemas, inflecting and contesting the codes and systems of the major cinematic traditions from within. Using canonical directors and less established names, ranging from Chantal Akerman to Moufida Tlatli, as examples, Butler argues that women's cinema is unified in spite of its diversity by the ways in which it reworks cinematic conventions.

Genres: Nonfiction, Ebooks

144 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2002

About the author

Alison Butler is a social and cultural historian currently pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship in the department of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland, examining how contemporary developments in science affected the evolution of Victorian occultism. This program of research will explore how occultists attempted to make their field more “scientific” in response to the rise of scientific naturalism and how the resulting refashioned form of occultism proved to be more conducive to association with the emerging science of the mind, psychology.

Butler previously was lecturer at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada, and has received fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Rothermere Foundation.

Reviews

[Amene · Rating 3 out of 5]

کتابی روان،ساده و همه فهم .به طور خلاصه و مختصر درباره‌ی فمینیسم و سینمای زنان میگه.

[Briana]

**This is unrated because it's a textbook.**

I started to realize that I watched a lot of movies by men and I became fascinated with the way that women were being portrayed on screen. While Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen by Alison Butler could be a bit repetitive in a lot of parts, I appreciated the new information that I gained here. I don't know why, but I didn't think that women started making movies at the same time as film was invented. These early female auteurs mentioned here gave me so much hope. What's interesting about film studies is that when it comes to films by marginalized people, women's cinema is probably the hardest to define. There are no aesthetic codes and no national boundaries when it comes to the films women make. Additionally, I think more people should work on knowing the difference between women's cinema and feminist cinema. Just because a woman makes a film doesn't inherently make it feminist... However, since film is still such a male-dominated industry globally, I can see why people think that all women's cinema is feminist cinema.

[Emm · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I had discovered this little gem MONTHS ago! It is an incredibly helpful text that does a great job of situating feminist filmmaking within the various histories of filmmaking and feminist criticism. It also talks about filmmaking as a discursive act--which is exactly the conversation I am hoping to engage in.

[Gregory Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm nearly five months into a year long commitment to watch only pictures directed by women. I wish I had read this back in January. Very insightful both historically and globally. Covers everything from Alice Guy-Blanche to Chantal Akerman to the women filmmakers of the Iranian New Wave and much much more. It's short yet concise, academic yet engaging.