You heard me
Kaplan
- Womens independent film has been broad; wide variety of styles and genres – realism to animation, non-narrative abstract film to fiction film, a broad range of subjects, and a wide range of ideological perspectives
- Womens cinema as counter cinema
- Feminist filmmakers must confront within their films accepted representations of reality so as to expose their falseness. Realism as a style is unable to change
- Womens realist films: change of essentialism – female creators of all kinds must avoid claiming a specific female power which could find expression if allowed to be explored freely
- Feminist filmmakers and theorists must work together to have a mutual benefit for both groups
Juhasz
- The womens movement of the early seventies was enmeshed in a politics of representation – this inspired an unprecedented deluge of feminist films, the majority of which were documentaries
- Politically motivated realist documentaries are usually at great pains to show that theirs is a politicized, opinionated vision of some reality
- Seventies feminist documentaries are defined by ‘a realpolitik rather than the politics of representation’.
- Feminist realist documentaries focus attention on the condition of constructing collective identity through representation
Realism
- The term realism comes from a literary and art movement of the nineteenth century which went against the grand tradition of classical idealism and sought to ‘portray life as it really was’. The focus is on ordinary life – the lives of socially deprived and the conditions they bear
- Film as cinema makes absence presence, it puts reality up on the screen – gives a truthful view of the real world
- Two types of realism with regard to film – seamless realism (whose ideological function is to disguise the illusion of realism. Second, aesthetically motivated realism which attempts to use the camera in a non manipulative fashion and considers the purpose of realism in its ability to convey a reading of reality
- Film noir after WWII
