International Conference Cinéfemmes. Women’s Cinema of the 21st Century. From Film d’Autrice to Genre Cinema.
FernUniversität in Hagen (Germany), February 9–11, 2023.
- Keywords
- Women’s cinema; female filmmakers; genre cinema; auteur film; film d’autrice; Eastern and Central European cinema; gender studies; feminism; queer studies; film industry.
- Table of contents
- no
The organisers of the conference Cinéfemmes. Women’s Cinema of the 21st Century. From Film d’Autrice to Genre Cinema / Das Frauenkino des 21. Jahrhunderts – Vom Autorinnenfilm zum Genrekino, Irina Gradinari and Irina Schulzki from the Interdisciplinary Research Group “Gender Politics” based at FernUniversität in Hagen (Germany), share two research interests: both are involved in cinema studies (with a special focus an Eastern European cinema) as well as in gender studies, and these research interests were well reflected in the focus of the conference they organised – scholars from various European countries presented the results of their research on women’s cinema. Even though the conference included talks on US-American, British and French cinema as well, Eastern and Central European cinemas happened to be the primary focus of the conference.
The question of genre and how female directors relate to it was one of the main topics. In her keynote address “Rethinking Agency in the Move from Authorship to Genre”, Christine Gledhill (University of Leeds) pointed out that the transition of women’s cinema from auteurism to genre has been gradual and by no means binary; unlike what is often assumed, female directors might subscribe to certain genre conventions while fully retaining their agency, and the play with genre conventions has become an integral part of their work.
Gledhill’s findings were corroborated in the second keynote address, delivered by Elisabeth Bronfen (University of Zürich), focusing on Jane Campion’s and Chloé Zhao’s creative appropriations of the Western genre. While some critics interpret Zhao’s Nomadland (2020, USA) as a contribution to the road movie genre, Bronfen convincingly argued that the film should instead be viewed as a critical examination of the Western. In her adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel The Power of the Dog (2021, USA), Jane Campion relies on the Western genre, too, but combines it with elements of both melodrama and Psycho Gothic. Usually, a Western is built on a contradiction between heroism, which takes place on the prairie and is associated with masculinity, and domestication associated with the town and femininity. As Bronfen showed, both Zhao and Campion have found a way to subvert this dichotomy without completely abandoning the rules of the genre.
In her talk “Rendering the Father’s Gaze: Jennifer Lynch”, Irina Gradinari showed that Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s films might be understood as a dialogue with her father David Lynch’s work. For instance, Surveillance (2008, USA) which depicts a murder in an American province, can be seen as the daughter’s commentary on David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997, USA) and The Straight Story (1999, USA). However, Chambers Lynch did not just confine herself to commenting on her father’s work in Surveillance but combined elements of different genres, thus using genre conventions creatively for her own ends.
Genre played an important role in several talks focusing on Eastern and Central European cinema. Although Dagmara Rode’s (University of Łódź) talk (“‘Not a Feminist Manifesto’: On the Conflicting Meanings of ‘Feminist Film’ in Polish Film Criticism. A Case Study of the Reception of Maria Sadowska’s Films”), one of three talks dedicated to Polish cinema, dealt primarily with the critical reception of Sadowska’s films, the question of genre came up when Rode quoted Sadowska’s own characterisation of her film Dzień Kobiet / Women’s Day (2013, Poland) as a “feminist Western”. Interestingly, the Polish public tends to classify Sadowska’s films as feminist, while both the director herself and the German public (which Rode contrasts to the Polish audience) view them instead as socially engaged works. The two other talks dealing with Polish women’s cinema, Grażyna Świętochowska’s (University of Gdańsk) contribution on Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s “cinema of excess” and Mathieu Lericq’s (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) talk on Aleksandra Terpińska’s teen movies, addressed very recent phenomena: the latest film they discussed was made in 2022.
Two talks were dedicated to Central European women’s cinema: Jasmina Šepetavc (University of Ljubljana) spoke about the feminist wave of Slovenian female directors after 2002 and Tereza Czesany Dvořáková (Academy of Performing Art Prague/Charles University Prague) reported on the share of women in the Czech film industry from 1992 to 2022. Women’s cinema in both countries shows considerable differences: while in Slovenia the first film directed by a woman was made as recently as 2002 (Maja Weiss’s Varuh meje / The Guardian of the Frontier) and women’s share of Slovenian film production does not exceed 10 percent, the situation in the Czech Republic is quite different as Czesany Dvořáková showed, pointing to the results of research she conducted among Czech female directors: even if women’s cinema might to some extent be regarded as established in the country, most of the female directors complained of “professional loneliness” and lack of networking. In the quantitative results of her study of women’s participation, stagnation was noticeable for the years examined.
Russia’s aggressions against Ukraine since the annexation of Crimea 2014 and the full-scale invasion and war it launched in February 2022 played a prominent role in the conference, as a separate panel was dedicated to trauma as portrayed in Ukrainian and Russian war films. Mariia Lihus (National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy / New University of Lisbon) concentrated in her talk “Female Gaze in Ukrainian War Documentary: Reflecting on the Cultural Trauma” on Ukrainian war documentaries, and Irina Schulzki (LMU Munich / FernUniversität in Hagen) spoke about Russian and Ukrainian feature films (“The Occupied Body: Women’s War Films from Ukraine and Russia (2009–2022)”). While Lihus applied Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze and Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma to unpack the female experience of the Russian-Ukrainian war through the lens of Iryna Tsilyk’s documentaries, where she dispels an objectifying frame of female presentation and replaces it with a “feeling seeing” approach of female agency, Schulzki, drawing on Susan Sontag’s study of war photography, Ronit Lentin’s concept of “femina sacra”, Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of “Friedlosigkeit”, as well as Irina Gradinari’s elaboration of “state genre” in relation to genre cinema, demonstrated how the topic of the occupied female body is realised in four recent war films (by Vera Glagoleva, Natalya Vorozhbit, Maria Ignatenko, and Maryna Er Gorbach). Despite their different methodological approaches, both speakers came to astonishingly similar conclusions: if one takes into account the important and undeniable difference that Russian war films directed by women primarily deal with the Second World War, while the Ukrainian films focus on the war in the Donbas since 2014, one can say these films represent “dissent war narratives which undermine the patriarchal memory politics and create counter-narratives and visual language”, to quote Irina Schulzki.
Further talks covered a wide range of topics around women’s cinema, ranging from theoretical questions to the discussion of single films, covering the entire 20th and the 21st century. For instance, Ursula von Keitz (Filmuniversität Babelsberg) spoke about “Gaze and Narration. Subversion and Affirmation in Contemporary Women’s Cinema”, referring to Laura Mulvey’s seminal article on the male gaze. Mulvey asserts that the inequality in relations between men and women in life finds its expression in cinema in a male gaze on the female body, objectifying thus women through the lens of the camera. According to von Keitz, representatives of women's cinema in Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s like Helke Sander and Ulrike Ottinger dissociated themselves from the male-dominated mainstream cinema and its male gaze, posing the question of how the position of female spectators could be taken into account. Von Keitz illustrated the quest for alternative solutions by looking at women’s responses to Joseph Campbell’s concept of “the hero’s journey” which postulates that the protagonist (who was always thought of being male) has to pass certain stages in order to achieve his goals. Female film directors either subscribed to this concept by letting their heroines act according to it (as in Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel, USA, 1990), or, alternatively, used Maureen Murdock’s concept of “the heroine’s journey”: female protagonists first deny the female aspects of their own selves before finally reconciling with it.
Natascha Drubek (University College London) in her talk “Women’s Data. Redefining Roles in Film Production” examined the fact that in the historiography of the early period of film production women remained largely invisible, calling for a “critical fabulation” (Saidiya Hartman) in this field. Drawing on archival evidence from England and Russia, she presented examples of women, many of them wives of the early film pioneers, who seem to have had more important roles than our common attributions of authorship and narratives of early film production suggest. Whereas in the earliest phase they co-produced and co-directed films with their partners, in the early 20th century we find women owners of cinemas and even studios in the Russian Empire.
Lea Wohl von Haselberg (Filmuniversität Babelsberg) proposed in her talk about Die Verliebten / Days to Remember (1987, Germany), a film by the German-Argentinian director Jeanine Meerapfel, a new reading of the central protagonist, a female Yugoslavian migrant worker in Germany: as the protagonist’s German partner is confronted with his country's past and does not address it appropriately, the female protagonist might, if we follow Wohl von Haselberg’s reasoning, be interpreted as a Jewish character, sharing the experience of marginalisation or migration. Yet, apart from the fact that Meerapfel’s film tackles the problem of the German past, Wohl von Haselberg did not present any evidence from the film that might support her theory. Sigrid Nieberle (Technical University of Dortmund) in her comparative analysis of Les Sœurs Brontë / The Brontë Sisters by André Téchiné (1979, France) and To Walk Invisible by Sally Wainwright (2016, UK) asserted that both films are centred on the relationship of the three Brontë sisters with their brother, and both make authorship a central subject. Yet, unlike Téchiné’s film, To Walk Invisible might be characterised as a “feminist contribution to nation building”, as Nieberle asserted.
In her talk “Towards a Media Anthropological View on the Female Body in the Contemporary French Film (Julia Ducournau and Alice Diop)”, Ekaterina Odé (École Normale Supérieure / Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) presented Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2022, France), a drama on the trial of a female PhD student of Senegalese origin who killed her infant child, and Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021, France), a body horror film about a young woman slowly turning into a car-machine. According to Odé, there is an astonishing similarity in these seemingly different films as both address the transformation of the female body during pregnancy in an almost anthropological way: in Saint Omer Rama, a black academic who attends the trial as an observer, is pregnant and experiences the different stages of the trial in her own body, while Alexia, the main protagonist of Ducournau’s Titane, slowly transforms during her pregnancy into a cyborg, with the corporeal changes accompanying pregnancy turning into indices of her becoming a machine.
Irina Denischenko (Georgetown University), in her talk “Divas, Monster & Écriture Feminine: Renata Litvinova”, concentrated on two works by the Russian actress and director Renata Litvinova, the film Posledniaia skazka Rity / Rita’s Last Fairy Tale (2012, Russian Federation) and the theatrical performance Zvezda vashego perioda / The Star of Your Epoch (2021), in both of which the director also played the main characters. As in Odé’s talk, the transformation of women and her bodies was one of the main subjects addressed by Denischenko. Litvinova’s works suggest that every woman is a potential monster due to ageing, and, according to Denischenko, this can be understood as a challenge and danger to binary gender determinations, as Monster theory postulates.
Two events accompanying the academic programme of the conference presented further aspects of women’s cinema: Masha Godovannaya, a PhD-in-practice student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, experimental filmmaker, and queer feminist researcher, presented her theoretical reflection on “queer partisan filmmaking”, followed by the premiere of a 16-minute-film she had finished shortly before the conference. Interestingly, the title of the film – Gender Doltulation – was erroneously generated by Google Translate. According to Godovannaya, “queer partisaning” has to be seen as “a performative mode of queer bonding” and has the task of “celebrating our queer presence in the world”.
In a panel discussion on the visibility of women in the film industry led by Irina Gradinari, Kerstin Polte, a film director, and Heleen Gerritsen, the director of the goEast film festival (Wiesbaden), discussed the challenges female directors are facing in the male-dominated film industry: while some of the hardships confronting women are not restricted to female directors, but common to any filmmaker regardless of gender (for example, to secure funding for the second film in one’s career), others are clearly linked to gender and/or sexual orientation. According to Polte, who gave insights into her professional life, it is hard to convince the industry of the importance of including queer themes into German film and TV projects.
Cinéfemmes not only successfully took stock of the present state of research on women’s cinema, but did much more: it presented the opportunity of exchanging opinions, and it is not by accident that speakers more than once discovered that work done by fellow researchers present at the conference is relevant for their own endeavours. Accordingly, it should not be surprising that especially in the second half of the conference speakers referred to previous talks, reacting to contributions of other speakers. The editors of the conference volume will have the pleasant opportunity of pointing out the synergies, repercussions, and possible interactions between the individual contributions.
The only caveat to note is that the bilingual mode of the conference (English and German) sometimes posed little problems, as most participants who did not come from German-speaking countries did not understand German. Accordingly, only half of the attendees could follow the German-language talks. Even if one welcomes the fact that a conference on cultural and film studies in Germany is carried out partly in German, the question of how to ensure that every talk might be understood by every conference attendee remains to be solved. However, this observation has no impact on the overall assessment of the conference as: a success not only in summing up the present state of research on women’s cinema, but also in giving this research new inspirations and future directions.
Sebastian Cwiklinski
Freie Universität Berlin
sebastian.cwiklinski@web.de
Bio
Sebastian Cwiklinski holds a PhD in Turkish Studies and History. He is currently a part-time lecturer in Turkish studies at Freie Universität Berlin and an MA student in Modern German Literature at FernUniversität in Hagen. His research interests include history and identity politics in the post-Soviet space, in Germany and in Eastern and Central Europe; German, Turkish, and Russian literature and cinema studies.
Filmography
Bigelow, Kathryn. 1990. Blue Steel. Lightning Pictures.
Campion, Jane. 2021. The Power of the Dog. See-Saw Films.
Chambers Lynch, Jennifer. 2008. Surveillance. Lago Film.
Diop, Alice. 2022. Saint Omer. Srab Films.
Ducournau, Julia. 2021. Titane. Kazak Productions.
Godovannaya, Masha. 2023. Dol’tuliatsiia gendera / Gender Doltulation.
Litvinova, Renata. 2012. Posledniaia skazka Rity / Rita’s Last Fairy Tale. Studio Zapredelya.
Lynch, David. 1997. Lost Highway. Ciby 2000.
Lynch, David. 1999. The Straight Story. Ciby 2000.
Meerapfel, Jeanine. 1987. Die Verliebten / Days to Remember. Joachim von Vietinghoff Filmproduktion.
Sadowska, Maria. 2013.Dzień Kobiet / Women’s Day. Munk Studio.
Téchiné, André. 1979. Les Sœurs Brontë / The Brontë Sisters. Actions Films.
Wainwright, Sally. 2016. To Walk Invisible. BBC Cymru Wales.
Weiss, Maja. 2002. Varuh meje / The Guardian of the Frontier. Bela Film.
Zhao, Chloé. 2020. Nomadland. Highwayman.
Suggested Citation
Cwiklinski, Sebastian. 2023. Review: “International Conference Cinéfemmes. Women’s Cinema of the 21st Century. From Film d’Autrice to Genre Cinema. FernUniversität in Hagen (Germany), February 9–11, 2023”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 16. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2023.00016.337.
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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