PCMS October: Patricia White
Patricia White, Swarthmore College
"'To Each Her Own Cinema': World Cinema and the Woman Cineaste"
Respondent: Meta Mazaj, University of Pennsylvania
Monday, October 20, 2008
5:30 PM
Swarthmore College
Science Center 102
What does it take for a woman director to be recognized as a "cineaste"? In
2007 the Cannes Film Festival celebrated its 60th anniversary by asking
thirty-three auteurs to make three-minute films. To Each His Own Cinema
lives up to its (English) title in its inclusion of only one woman director,
Jane Campion.
This talk looks at the reputation-making function of international
festivals, analyzing the politics of authorship in through textual readings
and reception and programming discourses. Although Campion remains the only
female winner of Cannes' Palme d'Or, a younger generation of international
women filmmakers has been awarded there in recent years: Lucrecia Martel
(Argentina); Samira Makmalbaf (Iran), and Naomi Kawase (Japan), and
co-financing relationships support their work. Through attention to films
that figure female singularity and solidarity, this chapter explores the
constraints and possibilities of a cosmopolitan women's cinema within
current formational of "world cinema."
Patricia White heads Swarthmore's Film and Media Studies program and teaches
courses in film, American popular culture, cultural and critical theory, and
women and media. She has published Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and
Lesbian Representability and, with Timothy Corrigan, the textbook The Film
Experience and the anthology Critical Voices in Film Theory. She is
currently working on a book to be entitled Feminist Independents: Women's
Filmmaking Local and Global.
Meta Mazaj is a Lecturer in Cinema Studies at Penn. She received her Ph.D.
in English from Temple University, with a specialization in film studies and
critical theory. Her book, National and Cynicism in Post 1990s Balkan Cinema
(VDM Verlag, 2008) examines the relationship between film and nationalism in
contemporary Balkan cinema. She is currently working on a book about
contemporary world cinema, and editing a volume on New Slovenian Cinema. Her
teaching and research interests include film theory and history, film and
nationalism, film and philosophy, and world cinema. Her recent courses
include: Film History, Film Methods and Analysis, Contemporary International
Film, Cinema of the Balkans, Cinema and Popular Memory, Poets of Cinema.
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