October 2008: 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

(Directions to Swarthmore campus)

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.