Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema

by Sophie Mayer

Feminist filmmakers are hitting the headlines. The last decade has the first Best Director Academy Award won by a woman; female filmmakers reviving, or starting, careers via analogue and digital television; women filmmakers emerging from Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Pakistan, South Korea, Paraguay, Peru, Burkina Faso, Kenya and The Cree Nation; a bold emergent trans cinema; feminist porn screened at public festivals; Sweden's A-Markt for films that pass the Bechdel Test; and Pussy Riot's online videos sending shockwaves around the world. A new generation of feminist filmmakers, curators and critics is not only influencing contemporary debates on gender and sexuality, but starting to change cinema itself, calling for a film world that is intersectional, sustainable, family-friendly and far-reaching. Political Animals argues that, forty years since Laura Mulvey's seminal essay 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' identified the urgent need for a feminist counter-cinema, this promise seems to be on the point of fulfilment.
Forty years of a transnational, trans-generational cinema has given rise to conversations between the work of now well-established filmmakers such as Abigail Child, Sally Potter and Agnes Varda, twenty-first century auteurs including Kelly Reichardt and Lucretia Martel, and emerging directors such as Sandrine Bonnaire, Shonali Bose, Zeina Daccache, and Hana Makhmalbaf. A new and diverse generation of British independent filmmakers such as Franny Armstrong, Andrea Arnold, Amma Asante, Clio Barnard, Tina Gharavi, Sally El Hoseini, Carol Morley, Samantha Morton, Penny Woolcock, and Campbell X join a worldwide dialogue between filmmakers and viewers hungry for a new and informed point of view. Lovely, vigorous and brave, the new feminist cinema is a political animal that refuses to be domesticated by the persistence of everyday sexism, striking out boldly to claim the public sphere as its own.

Genres: Film, Feminism, Nonfiction, Womens

272 pages, Paperback

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.