SUZIE S. F. YOUNG [ 12 ] Introduction The martial arts film continues a long Chinese literary tradition of fighting women who leap and somersault in perfect, trained weightlessness; unbound from the hearth and the altar, they venture forth to protect, avenge, challenge, and offend. This chapter considers some martial arts heroines of the kungfu […]

While a pro-feminist rereading of a film such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage may be useful for rethinking signification in the film itself, in Argento’s corpus, and, to some extent even in the post-Gothic (Italian) horror film, it becomes much more meaningful if inserted into a social and ideological con­text that helps render […]

The Bird with the Crystal Plumage stakes its claim to seriousness from the out­set by foregrounding important themes, many of which were central to oppo­sitional culture of the 1960s: the domination of nature and man’s (I specify gen­der advisedly) alienation from it; an obsession with possessions or, in the film’s scheme of things, collection; the […]

FRANK BURKE [ 11 ] Introduction It is no secret that Italian cinema is heavily masculine. If we look at middle — to highbrow Italian film (the work best recognized internationally) we find that, until recently, there have been only two women directors of note, Lina Wertmuller and Liliana Cavani, from the immediate postwar period […]

Jeanne Dielman, and Iris The reflection on violence and the spatialization of femininity—of being locked into an image and frozen out of time—was undertaken in two foun­dational films of the feminist canon: Dulac’s 1922 silent French film The Smil­ing Madame Beudet and Maya Deren’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon. While the differences in context and […]

Following the productions of feminist visual culture from the first wave of Western feminism in the 1910s and 1920s through the second and third waves, we are able to see reflected the issues dominating the feminist counter-public sphere at particular moments: bourgeois domestic troubles and the struggle for a public life are present in the […]

SUSAN LORD [ 10 ] Introduction From the first feminist murder fantasy in cinema, Germaine Dulac’s The Smil­ing Madame Beudet (1923), to the ugly realism of Coralie Trinh Thi and Vir — ginie Despentes’s nihilist millennium-closer, Baise-Moi (1999),1 cinema by women, not surprisingly, imagines its violence as vengeance, as a just-cause response to the exploitation […]

A figure collects up the people; a figure embodies shared meanings that inhabit their audiences. (Haraway 1997, 23) The commitment involved in parrhesia is linked to a certain social situation, to a difference of status between the speaker and her audience, to the fact that the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to herself and […]

The space of the museum presupposes a walking tour, an order in which the dio­ramas, exhibits, and panels are viewed and read. Thus it addresses an implied viewer—in narratological terms, a focalizer—whose tour produces the story of knowledge taken in and taken home. (Bal 1996a, 18) Photographs imply viewers; they imply relations between photographers, viewers, […]

This subject of vision, the focalizer, is often used to stage the position of the out­sider as photographer. That position is a condition of the production of the snapshot….This position matters; it is crucial for our understanding of the mode of vision at stake. (Bal 1996b, 142) Photographers, seen and imagined: everyone who took each […]