Heavenly Delights

With 'Nina's Heavenly Delights' coming up, I saw 'Brick Lane' last week. I think they make interesting companion pieces, since they draw on some similar themes but treat them very differently I think. Both have been shot with typically small budgets for British films - 'Brick Lane' cost only £3.2 million, but the producers comment (in Q&A) is that every single penny is up on the screen. The cinematography in both is breathtaking given the budget; Robbie Ryan, who did Andrea Arnold's fantastic 'Red Road', shot 'Brick Lane' as well.

At the heart of both films is an intense (and for some controversial) drama. Brick Lane relies (rightly) on the strength of Tannishtha Chatterjee's ability to convey emotions with very little dialogue - translating the inner world existence of this immigrant woman, powerfully, from the book to the screen.

I found it reminded me of others of our films - The Namesake, for its powerful realisation of dramatising a woman's journey to a new identity in a new country (although these are interesting to compare for their different treatments of the issue of racism) and something of the intensity Ahoo's resistance in 'The Day I became a Woman'.

Top Tens

After Roy mentioned the excellent Senses of Cinema site, I thought I would just throw in this out of interest. It's quite old now, but shows an attempt to compile a top ten of women's films and women directors. It uses contributions from a number of random contributors.

The problem of women being excluded from various 'canons' of work has been a thorny issue for a long time. I'm not convinced by the idea of trying to create an alternative version, though.

I think it is quite worthy in trying to raise the profile of women's work, but does highlight (as it says) the problem that the work is so disparate, there's not a lot of merit in trying to relate it all together or compare it. I suppose it's what Hollywood top tens have been doing to male directors for decades -- so some equality there? http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/top_tens/womens.html

The Day I Became A Woman

I hope everyone enjoyed last night's screening. I had forgotten that the 35mm print didn't have the same quality of subtitling as the DVD. For instance, it didn't translate the titles of the three stories -- which corresponded to the three central characters. In the first story, the little girl is called 'Hava', which is a version of 'Eve', the 'first woman'. In the second story, the young woman is called 'Ahoo' and this is also the Farsi word for 'deer' -- which are shown twice darting across the landscape as the husband shouts out. In the third story, the old woman is called 'Houra', which (presumably as a deliberate irony) means 'nymph'. The English language script is on the Makhmalbaf website on the film's own page.

The excellent web essay by Adrian Danks on the Makhmalbaf Film House that I quoted in my introduction is on the Senses of Cinema website. There is also an earlier posting on this blog about the Makhmalbafs.

The colonial narrative

I sense some tension in the group around whether or not we can take melodrama seriously. This is a pity since it is an important issue when considering films made by western filmmakers about stories set in African countries. Chocolat creates a familiar colonial narrative about the relationship between a white woman (the coloniser) and a black man (the colonised). This is the basis for the colonial melodrama which focuses on the emotionally explosive mix of sex and race. Interestingly, it more often features a white woman and black man than a black woman and white man -- perhaps because the former is more threatening to the colonial/settler family. I'm not suggesting that Claire Denis sets out to make a colonial melodrama, but she consciously chooses its narrative and works to oppose it stylistically from what I saw in the extracts. In the films I have seen by African filmmakers, the colonial relationship is not dealt with as an emotional relationship -- the colonists are simply there as representatives of oppression. There are several African films (mostly made by men, I've only seen one film by an African woman) which focus on the women as central characters and these are often careful to explore the status of women within distinct local communities.

Kim Longinotto attempts not to impose her sense of narrative on the events she records, even if she has to select and edit from her material. The melodrama that I found inherent in the court proceedings seemed to me to come from the performances of both the lawyers and their clients. Longinotto's feel for the universal human stories she witnessed is certainly impressive, but I wonder how much her film was still an outsider's view. I thought that the Denis and Longinotto extracts were very useful in posing questions about how women are presented in 'African stories'.

If anyone is interested in the kinds of films which circulate in West Africa as part of Nollywood, there is an interesting UK centre for 'Nollywood Studies' which offers a number of fascinating links.

Women and Documentary: Kim Longinotto

Divorce Iranian Style can be found at the Channel 4 On Demand site. Go here to play the film.

You may not have heard of Longinotto. She has been making documentaries for a number of years, building up a body of work that addresses controversial, even harrowing, topics: female circumcision in The Day I will Never Forget (2002), the difficulties of divorce within the Iranian system in Divorce Iranian Style (1998) or tackling domestic abuse in Cameroon in Sisters-in-Law (2005). Her latest documentary, Hold me Tight, Let me Go (2007), returns home, examining the relationship between staff and pupils in a school for traumatised children in Oxford.

A signature style is the intensity of the "performances" she obtains from her subjects. In Divorce Iranian Style, we follow a number of women through the cruel bureaucracy of a Tehran divorce court. Women seeking separation from unhappy or abusive relationships, demonstrate several, separate acts of resistance and "individual" solidarity, since they, somehow, separately stand together in the same battle. They have few rights under the law, but their emotion and determination is used to powerful effect. What emerges, I think, is the humanness (but constrained humanity) of those there, both men and women. The women's spirit is undaunted.

Longinotto's style in this is neither obtrusive or absent. In Divorce, the filmmakers are often applied to for opinions, both by the women and by the judge. However, she tends to use a self-effacing style of camerawork, avoiding a variety of shots, she tends to use the middle distance to show all the interactions whilst keeping us at a spectator's distance. Commentators have spoken of her "restrained gaze" that can still "radiate such warmth" (www.redpepper.org). Longinotto also states that her aim is not to lead with argument; instead, to allow viewers to find their own way through the material.

In interviews, Longinotto cames across as being incredibly humanistic and focussed on the subject matter. She makes an interesting comparison with fiction narratives: "I like it when documentary has the same constraints as fiction, when it doesn't have to give you a lesson or teach you what to think it's just an emotional experience." (imdb.com)

Longinotto won Screen International magazine's British documentary competition at Britdoc (UK documentary festival), with Hold me Tight, Let me Go. Sisters-in-Law, from which we will watch extracts, won the 'Prix de Art et Essai' at Cannes Film Festival. Stunning that no significant attention was paid by our prize-obsessed media.

Sisters-in-Law and Divorce Iranian Style are very similar in structure, following three/four stranded narratives. My final quote could apply to both: "Longinotto's deeply humane, but quietly unsensational portait of African women struggling for self-determination defies received notions about ... women."
(www.moviesgoa.org)

The name game

I blogged my reactions to The Namesake when I first saw it in May this year. You can check out the blog here. On a second viewing it worked just as well, but I got even more from it. I've softened a little on Kal Penn's performance, but I'm now an even bigger fan of Tabu and Irrfan Khan (the star of Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart, despite Angelina Jolie's top billing).

This time I was more conscious of how clever the script is with the references to names and naming and also the extent to which Mira Nair pays hommage to Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak (and makes Bengali jokes). The central question is, I think, how the film creates a delicious tension between its focus on Ashima as against the father-son relationship. I'm still not sure who is at the centre of the story. What does anyone else think?

Beau Travail - by women about men

Tonight we discussed the history, the institutional context of women within the film industry. We looked at the idea of the woman's picture, whether it is possible to identify particular themes and content that could indicate a film is targeted for a female audience. We wondered whether it is useful to employ some of the cine-psychoanalytical approaches that would argue for a gendered gaze - in particular, whether it makes a difference that a man or woman are behind the camera (as director/cinematographer) or are part of the writing.

Thinking about the clip 'Beau Travail' - is it helpful to consider it as reflecting the gender of the filmmaker? Using the ideas we collected around 'The Piano', I would argue there is an amusingly ironic play of the private/domestic (stereotypically female) activities with our ideas of the French foreign legion. The soldiers' beautiful bodies are on display, but are domesticated - we see their private, ordinary interactions (as the Russian soldier learns French through naming the washing). This is juxtaposed with Rahel, a local girl, hanging out her own washing - more brightly coloured, less uniform. Has Claire Denis taken an archetypal male domain and somehow made it feminine?

Is it equally relevant that Denis spent her first ten years in West Africa (where her father was serving as an administrator in the French colonial services)? Her first feature 'Chocolat' drew directly on this experience and 'Beau Travail' continues this engagement withh French postcolonial identity.

Some of us talked about the sensory experience of these films, for example, the strong emphasis on touch in 'The Piano' - as it starts with that x-ray shot of her fingers. Denis, for me, is visually really striking - creating sensations of that world just through the light and colour on display. Some women film critics have argued for touch to be a particularly appealing to female audiences and filmmakers. Do you agree?

Some of this, and our discussion, focussed on the form (camera shots etc) rather than the content. But what do you see as the most relevant questions to ask - about form, about the content of the films or about the context of the filmmaker?

Pen Pictures of Directors (3): China

The Soong Sisters (Hong Kong 1997)

As far as I am aware, no films from Chinese women are available on DVD in the UK (it would be great to be proved wrong!). The two films that we may be able to see an extract from are both Hong Kong imports from Yes Asia. The service is good and the DVDs are not expensive. These two films are on good quality DVDs, but they can vary.

The experienced director Ann Hui (born 1947) is a key figure in Hong Kong Cinema. Born to a Chinese father and Japanese mother in Manchuria, she moved to Macao and then Hong Kong as a child and later spent two years at the London International Film School. She began work in Hong Kong television and then became part of the Hong Kong New Wave Cinema making prize-winning films such as Boat People (1982) one of a trilogy of 'Vietnam films'. More recently she has directed and acted in films with more of a populist feel. Jade Goddess of Mercy (2003) is an interesting film adapted from a popular novel. The young Chinese filmstar and pop star Vicki Zhou (Wei Zhao) plays a young policewoman working on a drug squad and juggling the job, a baby and a marriage under strain.

Mabel Cheung (born 1950) has had a similar career structure. She was born in Guangdong, Southern China, moved to Hong Kong, studied drama in the UK and joined Hong Kong television. After film school in New York, she began directing features in 1985. Her 1997 film The Soong Sisters is a biopic of the three sisters who each married one of the leaders of the Chinese Republic in the early 20th Century (one married Sun Yat-Sen, one a banker and Finance Minister and one Chiang Kai-Shek) and who played an important role in Chinese public life up until the 1980s. The film also celebrated the best acting talents in Hong Kong Cinema with Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh playing alongside Vivian Wu (better known in American films and television).

There are several other Chinese women directors currently active and some of them are referenced on this website describing an event at the Hong Kong International Film Festival.

Earlier this year, as part of the China 07 Festival, Cecile Tang (Shu Shuen Tong)'s 1970 film The Arch was screened at the National Media Museum and we blogged a report on our sister blog.

2 Days in Paris

Julie Delpy and Adam Goldberg in 2 Days in Paris


I rather enjoyed Julie Delpy's film. It's a kind of romantic comedy with elements of screwball and (very mild) grossout contemporary comedy that features a French woman and an American man who live together in New York and are visiting Paris on the way back from a holiday in Venice.

It is almost biographical in the sense that Delpy is an actor who has been out of France for some time. She had previously co-scripted the second film she made with Ethan Hawke for Richard Linklater, Before Sunset (2004). That film covered the brief meeting of an American man and a French woman who had met before (in 1995's Before Sunrise). In the new film, a similar scenario is played for laughs and Delpy directs and even writes some of the music.

Overall, I took this to be an American-style comedy, but with a French script that was more intelligent than American 30-something comedies and less whiny than Woody Allen. Allen is a reference point since the American man is half-Jewish and played by a Jewish-looking actor who in the film is mistaken for an Arab. I mention this because the film plays with the character's sense of Jewish denial (and a stereotypical French response) and because it is indicative of the kind of material in the film which seems to have upset many of the IMDB commentators, both French and American. But as one of the other users notes, these kinds of jokes are made in all cosmopolitan cities. So, get over it, I suppose.

I think it is depressing when Delpy gets criticised for being egoistic. She has produced intelligent, adult (i.e. grown-up) comedy. That's pretty rare in my view.

As to the difficulties of finding finance for a film like this, Julie Delpy must have some clout, but I noted that it was a French/German co-production, which possibly explains the brief cameo appearance of Daniel Bruehl.

Pen Pictures of directors (2): Iran

The Makhmalbaf Film House

The remarkable family of filmmakers known as the Makhmalbaf Film House (the website is well worth visiting) comprises Mohsen, Marziyeh, Samira, Maysam and Hana. Mohsen spent four and a half years as a teenage militant in the Shah's prison until his release in 1979. This self-educated man has since devoted himself to alleviating the 'cultural poverty' of Iran with books and films which have often fallen foul of the censors. In 1996 he retired from the Iranian 'film industry' and opened a film school in which he taught, amongst others, his own three children and his second wife, Marziyeh. The family have subsequently produced several award-winning films.

Samira is the eldest daughter and has had the most stellar career so far. In 1998, aged 21, she took her film The Apple to Cannes and many other festivals where she won prizes. In 2000 Blackboards won her the Jury Prize at Cannes and a nomination for the Palme d'Or. She contributed to 11'09"01 -- September 11 (2002) and in 2003 directed At 5 in the Afternoon. She is currently working on Two-Legged Horse for 2008 release -- despite a bomb attack on the production in Afghanistan.

Marziyeh Meshkini (pictured above) has worked as assistant director for Mohsen and Samira and has directed two features herself. The Day I Grew Up To Be a Woman (2000) will be shown on the course. Stray Dog (2004) is another product of the Makhmalbaf Film House move to projects in Afghanistan after 2001.

Maysam has so far made one film -- a documentary about the filming by his sister of Blackboards.

Hana is Samira's young sister. Although only 19, she has already made a short film (when she was 9) and a documentary The Joy of Madness (when she was 14) about her sister's experience on At 5 in the Afternoon. She has also published a book of poems.

As is evident from these brief descriptions, the Makhmalbafs all work on each other's films and they are able to finance their productions through the Film House and its partnerships with production companies outside Iran (often in France).

Pen Pictures of directors (1): India

Some directors who will feature on the course, who you may wish to investigate:

Deepa Mehta
This Canadian director was born in Amritsar in the Punjab and emigrated after getting her degree in philosophy from Delhi University. She started directing aged 40 in Canada and she is best known internationally for her trilogy of films set in India. This ‘elemental trilogy’ deals with issues relevant to women in Indian society. Fire (1996) looks at a marriage in which a young woman discovers that her husband has married her for convenience and she is drawn into a relationship with her sister-in-law.

Earth (1998) concerns the fate of families caught up in the struggles over Indian partition in 1947 in a story seen from the perspective of a young girl and Water (2005) focuses on the fate of a child bride who is widowed and forced to live in a house with other widows in 1930s Benares. An important aspect of Deepa Mehta’s work is her casting of Shabana Azmi, one of Indian Cinema’s leading female stars, who has herself undertaken several campaigns on feminist issues. Another star, Nandita Das appeared in the first two films of the trilogy and would have joined Shabana Azmi if production on Water had not been halted by the disruption caused by Hindu fundamentalist protestors. For more about Water, read the brief review on our associate blog.

Mira Nair
Born in Orissa, Mira Nair also went to North America to train as a documentary filmmaker, basing herself in the US. She began directing in her early twenties, but first came to international attention with Salaam Bombay in 1988, a documentary-drama about streetchildren in Bombay, funded by public and private investors in India, Channel 4 in the UK and a French production company. In 1991 she made Mississippi Masala, about an inter-racial affair between the daughter of East African Indian immigrants (played by Sarita Choudhury) and an African-American man in the Southern US (played by Denzil Washington). After some less successful films, she finally had a major hit with Monsoon Wedding in 2001, which married the conventions of very different forms of cinema – the loose visual style of European and American Independent Cinema with the intensity of Indian Parallel Cinema and the exuberance of Bollywood.

In 2004 Reese Witherspoon starred in Mira Nair’s adaptation of Vanity Fair, which perhaps didn’t get the big audiences it deserved, and in 2006 she directed The Namesake which we will be screening on the course. Again, there is a a brief review of this film on our associate blog.

Although Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta have similar backgrounds and are both 'diaspora filmmakers' returning to India to make films, the films themselves look and feel quite different. Deepa Mehta's films might seem to be more concerned with 'issues' and her Indian films have something of the qualities of Indian 'Parallel Cinema', the socially conscious 'alternative cinema' of the 1970s-80s. This makes Water, with its use of music by A. R. Rahman, the leading composer of Indian popular cinema, particularly interesting as a development. By contrast, Mira Nair seems less concerned with specific issues and more concerned with characters, often, but not always, women. If Mira Nair is a more 'popular' director, it is because she chooses to work in ways more associated with popular genre cinema -- particularly genres associated with female audiences, such as romance, family saga, melodrama etc.

Both directors have consistently worked with women in prominent production roles. Not surprisingly, women are very often writers, editors and production designers -- but none of the films mentioned above are photographed by women. Lydia Dean Pilcher has been Mira Nair's producer on most of her films.

Sherrybaby

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Sherry Swanson in Sherrybaby

Sherrybaby is just one of three films made by women being shown at the National Media Museum this week (the other two are both costume films/romances, Lady Chatterley and Copying Beethoven). The obvious question to ask of any film written and directed by a woman is whether the story, characterisation or treatment is in some way distinctive because of the gender of its principal creator. In the case of Laurie Collyer's film, the aesthetics are fairly conventional, but a case could be made for a story which focuses on a mother-daughter relationship and has at its centre a woman whose relationships with men have so far generally been either abusive or based upon some form of exchange value rather than genuine feeling.

My own view is that it is usually more interesting to look at the relationship between the writer/director and her lead actors. In this case, it isn't unreasonable to suggest that Maggie Gyllenhaal must have had great faith in the script and felt comfortable working with Laurie Collyer. At the beginning of the film, Sherry Swanson has just been released from prison after serving time for thefts undertaken to feed a drug habit. The film resembles more familiar European social realist narratives in its detailed depiction of probation and hostel life. In the first half of the film, Sherry has a series of encounters in which she has sex with three different men, partly to get something from them and partly to feed her own desire. The scenes need to be graphic and they are. Just as with Jane Campion and Meg Ryan in In the Cut, Collyer and Gyllenhaal serve up sex that is both more 'real' and matter of fact and in a sense more 'adult' than in most conventional Hollywood treatments.

My only 'problem' with this film, which may be my own problem, is that Maggie Gyllenhaal is just too good an actor and too big a star for the film overall. This is not a criticism of her acting. Rather, for this male viewer, she is just too alive, too 'magnetic' as well as too beautiful and always dominates the frame in what is otherwise a small-scale and restrained film.

The film clearly got a great deal of publicity in the US, even if it didn't play everywhere. The IMDB bulletin boards are crammed with comments, mainly on the sex scenes or on the aspects of dysfunctional family life on display. It is noticeable that few if any comments make any reference to the director. But quite a few do comment on Gyllenhaal -- many in a way which makes me despair about audiences (though, of course, they are in turn criticised by others). Some comments also complain about a lack of 'closure' for the story. I think this does reveal that the narrative drive (a woman who seeks to win back her daughter's affection and to escape from her past) in the film is not something that a mass US audience recognises. Yet I would say that there is a rather conventional ending to the film (which might, as some commentators suggest, be rather abrupt in depicting a change in behaviour).

Interviews with Laurie Collyer on indieWire reveal that she went to film school only after spending several years working in various welfare/care services. This experience is the basis for the story and it's good to see an American film dealing with such issues. However, it says something about film distribution perhaps in that the film may not have achieved the limited profile it has managed without Maggie Gyllenhaal's presence. In the UK, Ken Loach is able to make a film with similar characters, but using less well-known names.

The Journey

Shruiti Menon as Delilah and Suhasini V. Nair as Kiran in Sancharram (The Journey) (India 2004)

In preparation for a Saturday School on Indian Cinema, I came across this film from Kerala in South India, directed by Ligy J. Pullappally. It is partly derived from a real life incident in Kerala when two young women students at university fell in love but were sent back to their parents. The next day, one of the women committed suicide. Recognising elements in the news story that had been in her earlier short film, Ligy Pullappally set out to write a feature-length script which would offer a more positive narrative for lesbian relationships in India involving young women expected to marry according to family customs.

The Journey follows a higher profile film, Fire (1996), directed by the Canadian-based Indian director Deepa Mehta. This film featured major stars of Indian 'parallel cinema', including the central couple, Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das, and received a significant international release as well as raising controversy in India for what were seen in some quarters as attacks on the institution of marriage (the two women are sisters-in-law). By contrast, The Journey is a low budget feature with relatively little international distribution. I rented the film via the Guardian's rental service 'Sofa Cinema' and discovered that it is distributed on DVD in the UK by Millivres Multimedia, a company specialising in gay and lesbian films.

Like Deepa Mehta, Ligy Pullappally was born in India but then moved to North America (Chicago) where she eventually became a 'public interest lawyer'. She used some prize money to allow her to develop her interest in filmmaking and returned to Kerala to make The Journey –– which received support from the the state's film commission. Technically, The Journey is an example of 'diaspora filmmaking'. Gurinder Chadha with Bride and Prejudice and Mira Nair with a string of films (including The Namesake to be screened on this course) are further examples. Trained in the West, these women have each offered different perspectives on Indian culture and on concepts of Indian Cinema.

Although Ligy Pullappally is relatively inexperienced as a filmmaker, The Journey bears comparison with other films made in Kerala as 'independent' or 'art' films. There is a popular film industry in Kerala making comedies and action films in the regional language Malayalam, but the art cinema of Kerala also has a strong reputation in India -- and in the case of director Adoor Gopalakrishnan, around the world. Kerala has the highest education achievement levels in India and a relatively good record on social equality -- as well as vying with Bengal in the North East as a cultural centre. This makes the story of The Journey more poignant. Kerala is also unusual in India in having three distinct religious communities co-existing peacefully (on the whole). In the film, one young woman is a Hindu and the other a Christian -- but both feel the power of tradition.

The Journey is a very simple story, but it is told with conviction and the setting (in the hills of Northern Kerala) and the characters are well presented. We may well look at an extract from the film on the course. If you want to know more, there is a useful 'official website'.

'Pascale Ferran' - sex and death . . .

I guess a female French director was always going to adapt Lady Chatterley better than an English male -- right? I'm certainly keen since all the reviews I've read emphasise its ability to translate the sensual into the visual. There's a lot of cultural theory to back up the belief (okay, my belief) that women are better at this, than men. Alright, theory written by women, but with capital letters and everything - honest . . .

I watched Beau Travail again last night -- preparing for the course -- and was swamped by its brilliant creation (re-creation?) of sensuous and sensual experiences, just through our eyes. Also, Claire Denis' ability to suggest and communicate characters' inner lives through juxtapositions and interweaving of shots (not anything so structured as a narrative).

Amy Taubin, reviewing Lady Chatterley in Film Comment (Vol 43/3) talks about how Ferran deals with the primal experiences of death (Petit Arrangements avec les morts - sounds great, won at Cannes - but nowhere on distribution or DVD?) and now sex. She praises Ferran's ability to create an equivalent to third person, literary narrative and order the "inchoate feelings and ideas exhibited by the people onscreen". She further concludes that: "Lawrence believed that the mind was the most important organ of sexual experience. Ferran comes closer to proving that theory than he did". Taubin clearly claiming something more than a film the dirty mac brigade. I'm really curious to see if this film can really combine a literary voice, a sense of the inner life of the characters and a vibrant visual sexuality . . . ? But I'm sure we can come up with some examples already?

New Wave Women in France....

Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley comes to Bradford this month -- trailing glory, having won a number of the French film oscars, Cesars, including Best Film (with stiff competition from Indigenes/Days of Glory. An interesting article appeared in The Independent in relation to it 'The French Connection' (Geoffrey McNab). It discussed how the French film industry was doing a better job of revering our living 'auteur' directors than we do, how they were doing a better job of trawling well-known and obscure literary classics (Elizabeth Taylor's Angel)to produce successful films.
Do we agree? It seems to peddle a number of well-established stereotypes, although there is no denying that the French culture industry seems enviable in the way it cherishes a sense of identity and artistry. But are we really that bad by comparison?

I start to admit that maybe our nearest cultural cousins have the edge with the Cahiers du cinéma manifesto outlining 12 objectives for cinema in France. Maybe a little nervous about where Sarkozy is going, it looks to outline objectives for preserving and supporting the operations of the French film industry, stating films are important as 'shaping our views of ourselves and of others'. Amen to that.
Ferran's use of her winning speech to plea for better conditions and commitment to the French film industry - worried about a growing gap between the financing of "rich" (commercial) films and "poor" (art) films as a result of a system "that betrays the heritage of the greatest French filmmakers". French filmmakers seems to acknowledge their debt to history and to cherish French culture in a enviably integrated approach -- or is this sense of history a handicap, rather than an advantage?

What's it all about?

Mira Nair on the shoot of The Namesake (India/US 2006)

In the autumn of 2007, Rona Murray and Roy Stafford will offer an evening class at the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK, with the title 'Women on the other side'. The class will study films directed by women. Four complete films will be screened and these screenings will be open to the public. In the other classes there will be a focus on short extracts from a wide range of films.

All the notes for the course will be posted here and we hope that the evening class students and anyone else who is interested will make comments, ask questions, start new arguments etc. via this blog.

Why the title? In film and media studies, one approach to discussing the representation of social groups (and also ideas and values) is to suggest that there is often a dominant set of representations available that renders anything else as in some way 'other'. A whole range of personal identities is thus seen in negative terms. Although women are more than half the population, cinema has been dominated by men so that women are presented as 'other'. Part of this otherness is concerned with passivity. Women are often in front of the camera, to be looked at, whereas men are behind the camera controlling how women appear. When women become directors and cinematographers they move to the 'other side' -- but does that mean that they automatically resist conventional ways of representing women (and men)? 'Otherness' is also an issue when considering cinema outside Europe and North America. Issues of ethnicity and religion and culture generally create questions of a 'Non-Western' other. The class will focus on women directors who are 'doubly other' because of gender and culture.

Full details of the course which starts on October 2 are available from the National Media Museum website. Preparatory notes will begin to appear on this blog in September.