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.