Recent events in national contexts as different as the United States and Iran have evidenced that women continue to be second-class citizens in many parts of the globe. Yet ever since the origins of cinema, and often against all odds, women filmmakers have succeeded in marshaling the power of this mass medium to interrogate women’s position in their societies and mobilize them for political activism, while celebrating their accomplishments and resilience.
In this course we will study the strategies that women have used in diverse geographical, cultural and historical contexts to make compelling films that move audiences, channeling their emotional response and prompting them to envision their place within larger social movements. We will mostly treat directors but will also consider women who have shaped the medium through creative roles that have traditionally been more welcoming to them, such as film editing, as well through performance. In our analyses we will deploy but also scrutinize a range of theoretical approaches to cinema, from auteurism, which exalts (traditionally male) directors as creative geniuses, to haptics, which explores the film medium’s engagement with our embodied experiences.
We will study a wide variety of films—fiction, documentary, experimental, and hybrid forms—from a broad range of nations (such as Argentina; China; Cuba; Czechoslovakia; France; India; Iran; Kenya; Peru; Tunisia; the UK; and the United States). We will situate individual works and creators within their national and regional contexts, scrutinize the recent impact of transnational media producers such as Netflix, and also address the complexities of intersectionality, as women filmmakers grapple with multiply-imbricated vectors of identity.
About Professor Martin-Marquez
Susan Martin-Márquez's research and teaching center on modern Spanish Peninsular cultural studies and Spanish-language film. She teaches courses on world cinema. Her film-related books include Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford UP, 1999), and the collaborative project, Cinema and Everyday Life in 1940s and 1950s Spain: An Oral History (Berghahn Books, forthcoming 2011).
Other scholarly work focuses on questions of coloniality and identity. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (Yale UP, 2008) examines the anxious reformulation of centralist and peripheral national identities resulting from Spaniards' post-Enlightenment rediscovery of their "African inheritance," precisely at a time in which "scientific racism" rose to dominance, and the Spanish nation began investing in new colonial regimes in Africa.
Martin-Márquez's current research focuses on alternative and "third cinema" movements of the 1960s; she has also begun a project on transatlantic and transpacific encounters in Spain's penal colonies in Africa.