From popular films like Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) to Chantal Akerman’s avant-garde classic Jeanne Dielman (1975), feminist cinema can provoke discomfort. Ambivalence, stasis, horror, cringe—these and other affects refuse the resolution of feeling good or bad, leaving viewers questioning and disoriented. In Feminism and the Cinema of Experience, Lori Jo Marso examines how filmmakers scramble our senses to open up space for encountering and examining the political conditions of patriarchy, racism, and existential anxiety. Building on Akerman’s cinematic lexicon and Simone de Beauvoir’s phenomenological attention to the lives of girls and women, Marso analyzes film and television by directors ranging from Akerman, Gerwig, Mati Diop, Catherine Breillat, and Joey Soloway to Emerald Fennell, Michaela Coel, Audrey Diwan, Alice Diop, and Julia Ducournau. Through their innovative and intentional uses of camera, sound, editing, and new forms of narrative, these directors use discomfort in order to invite viewers to feel like feminists and to sense the possibility of freedom.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Feeling Like a Feminist
- (With) Chantal Akerman
- (And) Simone de Beauvoir
- (In) the Cinema of Experience
- Chapter Preview
- 1.
Motherwork Camerawork: Ambivalence
- Finding Mothers and Others
- Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)
- From the Other Side (Chantal Akerman, 2002)
- No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
- Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022)
- Camerawork Motherwork
- 2. White Noise: Stasis
- Woman Is a Man-Stringed Instrument
- Blow Up My Town (Chantal Akerman, 1968)
- Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020)
- I May Destroy You (Michaela Coel, 2020)
- Do You Hear What I Hear?
- 3. Genre Trouble: Horror
- What Is Horrible?
- Atlantics (Mati Diop, 2019)
- Happening (Audrey Diwan, 2022)
- Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
- Feeling Horror Like a Feminist
- 4. Epistolary Archive: Cringe
- Real Sex?
- Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999)
- I Love Dick (Joey Soloway, 2016 – 17)
- The Feminist Address
- Coda in Pink: Plasticity
- Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023)
- Postscript: Invitation(s)
- Notes
- Filmography
- References
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- Y
- Z
Login to your account
