Women's Cinema

The Contested Screen

Alison Butler

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231851350
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Women's Cinema provides an introduction to critical debates around women's filmmaking and relates those debates to a variety of cinematic practices. Taking her cue from the groundbreaking theories of Claire Johnston, Alison Butler argues that women's cinema is a minor cinema that exists inside other cinemas, inflecting and contesting the codes and systems of the major cinematic traditions from within. Using canonical directors and less established names, ranging from Chantal Akerman to Moufida Tlatli, as examples, Butler argues that women's cinema is unified in spite of its diversity by the ways in which it reworks cinematic conventions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series List
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• list of illustrations
• acknowledgements
• introduction: from counter-cinema to minor cinema
• 1. girls’ own stories: genre and gender in hollywood cinema
• 2. performing authorship: self-inscription in women’s experimental cinema
• 3. the politics of location and dislocation: women’s cinema and cultural identity
• afterword: women’s cinema/transnational cinema
• notes
• bibliography
• index of names