Undergraduate Courses (details)

01:175:377:01: 09534

Recent events in national contexts as different as the United States and Iran have evidenced that women continue to be second-class citizens in many parts of the globe. Yet ever since the origins of cinema, and often against all odds, women filmmakers have succeeded in marshaling the power of this mass medium to address a host of pressing issues, often but certainly not limited to the experiences of girls and women, and sometimes with the goal to mobilize viewers. We will study a wide variety of films—fiction, documentary, experimental, and hybrid forms—from a broad range of nations (possibly including Angola; Argentina; Cuba; Colombia; Czechoslovakia; France; India; Japan; Iran; Kenya; South Africa; Tunisia; the UK; and the US). This course will situate individual works and creators within their national and regional contexts, and also address the complexities of intersectionality, as women filmmakers grapple with multiply imbricated vectors of identity. We will deploy but also scrutinize a range of theoretical approaches to cinema, including for example auteurism, which exalts (traditionally male) directors as creative geniuses; "gaze" and other feminist film theory; genre studies; and haptics, which explores the film medium’s engagement with our embodied experiences.