Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema

by Sophie Mayer

Female filmmakers are hitting the headlines. The last five years have the first Best Director Academy Award won by a woman; women filmmakers emerging from Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Iran, South Korea, Japan, Paraguay, Uruguay, Burkina Faso and Kenya; the first stirrings of a ‘trans cinema’, with the release of films that represent transgender characters and their experiences, challenging our understanding of gender and identity; feminist porn screened at public festivals; and Pussy Riot’s online documentation of offline activism sending shockwaves around the world.

Political Animals argues that a new wave of feminist cinema is speaking to a new audience hungry for intersectional accounts of women in the public sphere that are missing in the mainstream. It reveals how innovative production and distribution strategies are responding to urgent political situations (resulting in colourful guerrilla aesthetics exemplified in the rough, D.I.Y, online videos made by Pussy Riot, but equally found in recent documentaries and features by established filmmakers too) and tunes in to the transnational, transgenerational conversations that are taking place between filmmakers such as Sally Potter, Claire Denis, Barbara Hammer, Mania Akbari, Haifaa al-Mansour, Emily Jacir, Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard. Courageous and complex, the new feminist cinema is a political animal that, while laying claim to the public sphere as its own, refuses to be domesticated by it

Genres: Film, Feminism, Nonfiction, Womens

272 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 18, 2015

Reviews

[Tia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really appreciate how broad So Mayer reaches with this book, incorporating a truly global and gender-inclusive selection of more than 500 contemporary feminist films. That said, this also makes for a bit of a scattered read in that some films only get a line of analysis, or 3 paragraphs at best. Trying to grab onto a substantive argument or piece of theory becomes a bit like chasing smoke, as things tend more toward cataloguing feminist cinema than close-reading or theorizing. Their effort to think about the feminist potentiality of a lot of films, including very mainstream and typical Hollywood films, means that there is also a lack of acknowledgement of the ways in which some of these films have received criticism from feminists or related groups. That said, this introduced me to a lot of films that are now on my watchlist though and might make a good read for an early undergrad course, but didn’t give me the depth I hoped for at a graduate level, ultimately. And that’s totally ok!

[Lizzie Huxley-Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

One for dipping in and out of as you watch the films! Really great for getting extra context you didn't know about and for building your to be watched pile.