Rosanna Maule - Böcker

This book illustrates a distinctive lineage of critical interventions in moving image culture and in the public sphere through the trajectories of a small number of film and video organizations established between the 1970s and the early 1980s in Western Europe and North America mainly by women and still operative today. The six case studies examined (Drac Màgic, Women Make Movies, Groupe Intervention Vidéo, Leeds Animation Workshop, bildwechsel, Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir) have maintained a discrete yet continuing presence within an audiovisual industry and a cultural system dominated by institutionalized and corporate forms of production and distribution. Their longevity – quite a rarity in the independent circuit – makes a strong case for the sustainability of feminist/LGBTQ media activism in the public sphere, in spite of its low-key profile. This volume will be of interest to academicians of history and communication studies, feminist and LGBTQ topics, and gender-related cinematic culture.

This book illustrates a distinctive lineage of critical interventions in moving image culture and in the public sphere through the trajectories of a small number of film and video organizations established between the 1970s and the early 1980s in Western Europe and North America mainly by women and still operative today. The six case studies examined (Drac Màgic, Women Make Movies, Groupe Intervention Vidéo, Leeds Animation Workshop, bildwechsel, Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir) have maintained a discrete yet continuing presence within an audiovisual industry and a cultural system dominated by institutionalized and corporate forms of production and distribution. Their longevity – quite a rarity in the independent circuit – makes a strong case for the sustainability of feminist/LGBTQ media activism in the public sphere, in spite of its low-key profile. This volume will be of interest to academicians of history and communication studies, feminist and LGBTQ topics, and gender-related cinematic culture.

Beyond Auteurism is a comprehensive study of nine film authors from France, Italy and Spain who since the 1980s have blurred the boundaries between art-house and mainstream, and national and transnational film production. Maule examines how the individuals have maintained a dialectical relationship with the authorial tradition of the national cinema to which each belongs. In considering this tradition, Maule seeks to illustrate that the film author is not only the most important symbol of European cinema’s cultural tradition and commitment, but is also a crucial part of Europe’s efforts to develop its cinema within domestic and international film industries. The book studies the work, practices and styles of European film-makers including Luc Besson, Claire Denis, Gabriele Salvatores and Alejandro Amenábar. Beyond Auteurism offers an important contribution to a historicized and contextualized view of film authorship from a theoretical framework that rejects Western-centred and essentialist views of cinematic practices and contexts.

This book examines Duras’s contribution to contemporary cinema. The ‘dark room’ in the collection’s title refers to one of Duras’s metaphors for the writing process, la chambre noire, as the solitary space of literary creation, the place where she struggles to project her ‘internal shadow’ onto the blank page. The dark room is also a metaphor for the film theater and, by extension, for the filmic experience. Duras rejected conventional forms of cinematic address that encourage the spectator to develop a positive identification with the film’s diegesis and narrative. Her films create unusual rapports between image and sound, diegetic and extra-diegetic elements, and textual and intertextual dimensions of cinematic representation. In doing so, they allow the film spectator to establish new connections with the screen.This collection focuses on the aesthetic, conceptual, and political challenges involved in Duras’s innovative approach to cinematic representation, from an interdisciplinar perspective including film and literary theory, psychoanalytic analysis, music theory, gender studies, and post-colonial criticism. The book opens with a theoretical introduction to Duras’s cinematic practice and its peculiar position in contemporary cinema and contemporary film theory and is divided into five parts, each one devoted to a specific aspect of Duras’s films: the interaction between literature and cinema (Part One); the reconfiguration of the cinematic gaze (Part Two) and of the image/sound relation (Part Three); the representation of history and memory (Part Four) and of cultural identity (Part Five).

It discusses women’s cinema 2.0 as a resistant type of cinematic expression and brings attention to the difficulties inherent in raising and expanding visibility for women’s filmic expression within a global sphere dominated by neo-liberalism and post-feminism.