1

Introduction:

What is “Women’s Cinema”?

1. Introduction to the course


2. Course requirements and assignments

Screening:

The Consequences of Feminism (Alice Guy, 1906), 7 min

Suspense (Lois Weber, 1913), 10 min

La Souriante Madame Beudet (Germaine Dulac, 1923), 38 min

2

Female Pioneers:Erased Presences

a) Mayne, Judith. “The Women at the Keyhole: Women’s Cinema and Feminist Criticism.” New German Critique, no. 23( 1981): 27-43.

b) Alison Butler, “Introduction: From Counter-Cinema to Minor Cinema,” in Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen. Wallflower Press, 2003.

c) GAINES, JANE M. “WHAT HAPPENED TO WOMEN IN THE SILENT U.S. FILM INDUSTRY?” In Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, 16–32. University of Illinois Press, 2018.

d) GAINES, JANE M. “MORE FICTIONS: Did Alice Guy Blaché Make La Fée Aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy)?” In Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, 51–70. University of Illinois Press, 2018.

e) Brasch, Ilka. “Detectives, Traces, and Repetition in The Exploits of Elaine.” In Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940: Operational Detection, 145–82. Amsterdam University Press, 2018. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv7xbs29.7.

f) BEAN, JENNIFER M. “Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema.” In A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by JENNIFER M. BEAN and DIANE NEGRA, 1–26. Duke University Press, 2002.

Website: Women Film Pioneers Project https://wfpp.columbia.edu

Screening:

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (Pamela B. Green, 2018)

“A History of Silence: Cinema of Lois Weber” (8 min)

3

Women’s Picture:

Classic Hollywood and Female Audience

1. Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Pedagogies of the feminine: feminist teaching and women's genres,” Screen, Volume 32, Issue 4, Winter 1991, Pages 364–381.


2. Stacey, Jackie. 2 FROM THE MALE GAZE TO THE FEMALE SPECTATOR, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.


3. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6-18.

Screening:

The Women (George Cukor, 1939), 133 min

4

Women and Modernity:

The “Modern Girls”

1. Zhang, Zhen. “Fighting over the Modern Gril” in An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896-1937, U of Chicago Press, 2005.


2. Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo, 'Imaging Modern Girls in the Japanese Woman’s Film', Nippon Modern: Japanese Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s (Honolulu, HI, 2008; online edn, Hawai'i Scholarship Online, 17 Nov. 2016).

Screening:

Burden of Life(Heinosuke Gosho, 1936), 66 min (clip)

Woman of Tokyo(Yasujiro Ozu,1933), 45 min

5

Women and Modernity:

Female Community

1. González-López, Irene, and Hide Murakawa. ""Film Director Tanaka Kinuyo": The Challenges of Female Authorship." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 62, no. 4 (2023): 130-154.


2. González-López, Irene, and Ashida Mayu. “The First Female Gaze at Post-War Japanese Women: Tanaka Kinuyo, Film Director.” In Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity, edited by Irene González-López and Michael Smith, 104–25. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.


3. Kanno, Yuka. “Panpan Girls, Lesbians and Post-War Women’s Communities: Girls of Dark (1961) as Women’s Cinema.” In Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom and Female Subjectivity, edited by Irene González-López and Michael Smith, 187–203. Edinburgh University Press, 2018.

Screening:

Girls of Dark/Girls of the Night (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1961)

6

Women and Modernity:

From Shojo to Yuri

1. SHAMOON, DEBORAH. “Revolutionary Romance: ‘The Rose of Versailles’ and the Transformation of Shojo Manga.” Mechademia 2 (2007): 3–17.


2. Saito K. Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society. The Journal of Asian Studies. 2014;73(1):143-164. doi:10.1017/S0021911813001708


3. Glenhaber, Mehitabel, An Inner Revolution og The Japanese Women”: The Rose of Versailles as feminist historical fiction.” https://www.animefeminist.com/an-inner-revolution-of-the-japanese-women-the-rose-of-versailles-as-feminist-historical-fiction/


4. TOKU, MASAMI. “Shojo Manga! Girls’ Comics! A Mirror of Girls’ Dreams.” Mechademia 2 (2007): 19–32.

Screening:

Sailor Moon S5 ep14 (ep180) “Calling of the Shining Stars: Enter Haruka and Michiru,” 25 min (clip)

The Rose of VersaillesMovie or Anime Series ep1

7

Body and Genre:

Melodrama’s Global Appeal

1. Williams, Linda. “Melodrama Revised.” Refiguring American Film Genres, 42-88.


2. Kelleter, Frank; Mayer, Ruth (2007):"The Melodramatic Mode Revisited: An Introduction." Melodrama! The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood. Eds. Kelleter, Frank; Krah, Barbara; Mayer, Ruth. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. 7-17. American Studies – A Monograph Series 145.


3. Yuan, Yin. “Third-Space K-Drama: Netflix, Hallyu, and the Melodramatic Mundane.” International Journal of Communication [Online] 17 (2023): 6990+. Gale Academic OneFile (acessed November 16, 2024)

Screening:

TBA

8

Body and Genre:Exploitation

1. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.


2. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, “The Rape-Revenge Film Canon” in Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study, Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2011.

Screening:

Lady Snowblood (Fujita Toshiya, 1973), Female Prisoner #701 (Ito Shunya, 1972),

clip

Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017), 108 min

9

Body and Genre: From Abject to Monstrous Feminine

1. Creed, Barbara, “Alien and the Monstrous-Feminine,” in The Gendered Cyborg, Routledge, 2000.


2. KRISTEVA, JULIA, and Leon S. Roudiez.”POWERS OF HORROR.” In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 213-16. Columbia University Press, 2024.


3. Creed, Barbara, “Vampires, Feminism & Ethnicity: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” in Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema, Routledge, 2022.

Screening:

Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama, 2009)

Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007)

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour)

TBA

10

Body and Genre:Time, Space, and Subjectivity

1. INCE, KATE. “Feminist Phenomenology and the Film World of Agnès Varda.” Hypatia 28, no. 3 (2013): 602–17.


2. Hayward, Susan. “Beyond the Gaze and into Femme-Filmécriture: Agnès Varda’s Sans Toit Ni Loi.” French Film: Texts and Contexts, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2006, pp. 269–280.


3. DePaul, B. A.. “Temporality, Spatiality and Looking in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962).” (2018).

Screening:

Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985), 105 min

11

Posthuman:

Cyborgs to Technosexuality—a Male Fantasy?

1. HARAWAY, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.


2. Saaranen, Linnéa. (2020). The Perfect Woman: Scarlett Johansson as a cyborg in 'Under the Skin' (2013), 'Her' (2013) and 'Ghost in the Shell' (2017).


3. Carl Silvio. “Refiguring the Radical Cyborg in Mamoru Oshii’s ‘Ghost in the Shell.’” Science Fiction Studies 26, no. 1 (1999): 54–72.


4. Molloy, Missy, 'From Cyborg Theory to Posthuman Mothers', Screening the Posthuman (New York, 2023; online edn, Oxford Academic, 22 June 2023.


5. Nilima Chaudhary, “Rewriting Femborgian Narratives: Transgression and Subversion of the Female Cyborg in Her and Ex Machina,” Rupkatha Journal, vol. 16, Issue 1, 2024.


6. Genevieve Liveley, “Changing the Story of Human-Machine Relationships,” Digital Societies, January 25, 2020.

https://reurl.cc/yD13Ay

Screening:

Ghost in the Shell(Mamoru Oshii, 1995)

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (Mamoru Oshii, 2004)

Ghost in the Shell (Rupert Sanders, 2017)

Her (Spike Jonze, 2013)

Ex Machina (Alexander Medawar, 2015)

Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017)

12

Feminist Geopolitics and the Global Flow:International Festivals and the Transnational Address

1. WHITE, PATRICIA. “TO EACH HER OWN CINEMA.: World Cinema and the Woman Cineaste.” In Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, 29–67. Duke University Press, 2015.


2. WHITE, PATRICIA. “IS THE WHOLE WORLD WATCHING?: Fictions of Women’s Human Rights.” In Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms, 169–98. Duke University Press, 2015.


3. Sarah Barrow. (2016) Constraints and possibilities: Lima Film Festival, politics and cultural formation in Peru. New Review of Film and Television Studies 14:1, pages 132-148.

Screening:

Madeinusa (Claudia Llosa, 2006)

Milk of Sorrow (Claudia Llosa, 2009), clip

13

Witches and Games: Women’s Experimental Cinema

1. Keller, Sarah. “Done and Undone: Meshes of the Afternoon and Witch’s Cradle.” In Maya Deren: Incomplete Control, 31–80. Columbia University Press, 2015.


2. WEES. William C. “Peggy’s Playhouse: Contesting the Modernist Paradigm.” In Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks. Ed. Robin Blaetz, Duke University Press, 2007.


3. “Love and Theft: Peggy Ahwesh and Sondera Perry Play Video Games.” Eai.org. https://reurl.cc/6jVz3b


4. Brown, W. (2015) ‘Destroy Visual Pleasure: Cinema, Attention, and the Digital Female Body (Or, Angelina Jolie Is a Cyborg)’, in A. Backman Rogers and L. Mulvey (eds) Feminisms. Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.

Screening:

Meshes of the Afternoon(Maya Deren, 1943), 14 min.

Witch’s Cradle (Maya Deren, 1943), 13 min.

She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh, 2001), 15 min.

14

Witches and Games:

Gamer Trouble

1. Phillips, Amanda. “Of Dickwolves and Killjoys: Feminism and Interpretative Violence in Gaming Communities.” In Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture, 27–65. NYU Press, 2020.


2. Phillips, Amanda. “Gender, Power, and the Gamic Gaze: Re-Viewing Portal and Bayonetta.” In Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture, 99–136. NYU Press, 2020.

Screening:

CTFO (Shannon Sun-Higginson, 2015), 76 min

15

Presentation of Research Project

5-10 min presentation of the final research project.

16

Presentation of Research Project

5-10 min presentation of the final research project.

17

18