{"id":284,"date":"2011-08-29T12:46:47","date_gmt":"2011-08-29T10:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=284"},"modified":"2011-08-29T12:46:47","modified_gmt":"2011-08-29T10:46:47","slug":"whatever-happened-to-feminist-cinema-on-bigelow-and-bier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2011\/08\/29\/whatever-happened-to-feminist-cinema-on-bigelow-and-bier\/","title":{"rendered":"WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FEMINIST CINEMA? (ON BIGELOW AND BIER)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m reading Teresa De Lauretis already ancient collection Technologies of Gender<\/em> (1987!) and I stumble onto her post-Mulvey cry for a truly feminist cinema. By this she means, as it is well-known, not just a cinema by, about and for women, dealing with issues concerning women, but a cinema using specifically female narrative and aesthetic codes in opposition to the predominant male ones of (commercial) cinema. She enthuses about Yvonne Rainer, so I check IMDB and I find two spectator comments for her The Man Who Envied Women<\/em> (1985): a man proclaims this is a \u201cVery funny movie, if you like feminist deconstruction\u201d and rates it 10\/10; a woman (?) who saw this in her feminist class and claims to be an experimental film buff claims that feminist cinema died because \u201ctheir mantra included removing pleasure from movies.\u201d He was writing in 2010, she in 2005.<\/p>\n

Barcelona hosts every year an international festival devoted to women\u2019s films (http:\/\/www.mostrafilmsdones.cat\/<\/a>), soon to reach its 20th edition. I\u2019ve never attended it, as I don\u2019t feel comfortable with this kind of positive discrimination (see my previous post). I know I\u2019m very wrong to be so prejudiced and I should be open to what women directors have to offer, flooded as we are by the painful trash spawned by male-oriented Hollywood films. Yet, again, in the style of what I wrote in my previous post: I look forward to either a film festival openly about (heterosexual) men, or more inclusive film festivals in which all identities are balanced. Keep on dreaming\u2026<\/p>\n

De Lauretis set me thinking about the ONLY TWO women directors who have won an Oscar: Kathryn Bigelow (in 2010 for the Iraq war film The Hurt Locker<\/em>) and Susanne Bier (in 2011 for the film about school bullying In a Better World<\/em>). Bigelow, currently making a film about Bin Laden that has been re-written to fit his assassination, was brutally criticized by some feminists (even though she won against ex-husband James Cameron, nominated for mega-hit Avatar<\/em>!). The criticism had much to do with Bigelow\u2019s being specialized in action films about male characters; also with the alleged criticism that she makes films not just like a man but as<\/em> a man. After Bigelow\u2019s win, some expected more nominations for women directors and there were complaints that, instead, there were none this year. Oddly enough, this complaint completely missed Susanne Bier\u2019s success; her film, get this, won the Oscar for best foreign-language film. Had you noticed?<\/p>\n

Surf the net and you\u2019ll find that Bier, an ex-Lars Von Trier\u2019s prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and a former Dogme 95 member, has stirred no comments with her triumph, except in Denmark, where she is praised, logically, as a quality Danish<\/em> director. I\u2019m puzzled by this, very much. Could it be that Bier\u2019s films (I love After the Wedding<\/em>, Brothers<\/em> and Things We Lost in the Fire<\/em>) are too \u2018feminine\u2019 to threaten anyone? To me, both Bigelow and Bier make films as<\/em> women, addressing everyone and contributing a female gaze on both men and women \u2013 now that I think about it, they\u2019re particularly good at dealing with men<\/em>. Why has one elicited so much controversy but not the other? It\u2019s not just that Bigelow was attacked but that Bier\u2019s triumph has not really been celebrated as a triumph for women<\/em> directors all over the world\u2026 no idea why not. <\/p>\n

Could it be that, almost 25 years after De Lauretis\u2019s book, we\u2019re still confused about the obligation for feminist cinema of being experimental or avant-garde? See a list of 50 best female film directors at IMDB (http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/list\/7YULN6kSrTo\/<\/a>) and judge for yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m reading Teresa De Lauretis already ancient collection Technologies of Gender (1987!) and I stumble onto her post-Mulvey cry for a truly feminist cinema. By this she means, as it is well-known, not just a cinema by, about and for women, dealing with issues concerning women, but a cinema using specifically female narrative and aesthetic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies","tag-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}