Women Filmmakers and Postfeminism in the Age of Multimedia Reproduction: A Virtual Archive for Women's Cinema

My subject is part of a long-term research project that I am developing in collaboration with filmmaker Guylaine Dionne. The study explores the relation of women fiction filmmakers to gender-specific issues within an international context and a timeframe (the 1980s and onward) marked by two parallel phenomena: the decline of feminism as a political praxis and a personal standpoint, and the emergence of digital and online media within the film industry. Our purpose is to identify the varied and competing discourses and practices associated with the contentious concept of "women's cinema" within the borderless yet highly unequal scope of global media, trying to verify whether digital and online forms of film production and distribution offer women filmmakers a different platform for their films. In return, we intend to deploy new media technologies to disseminate information and promote critical awareness about the role of women filmmakers—paraphrasing the title of Walter Benjamin's famous essay—"in the age of multimedia reproducibility."

The final product will be a multimedia platform including an itinerant film-and-video installation and an interactive website, which will constitute an in-progress archive on women's contributions to filmmaking. This virtual archive has a twofold purpose: on the one hand, it will help disseminate the work of female film directors who have been active within the area of fiction filmmaking through alternative channels and formats of exhibition; on the other hand, it will provide an arena for reformulating the concept of women's cinema within the new framework of digital culture.

The focus of this project is on a group of high-profiled female film directors presently active from an international context of film production and distribution, including Suzana Amaral, Francesca Archibugi, Susanne Bier, Kathryn Bigelow, Jane Campion, Isabel Coixet, Sofia Coppola, Claire Denis, Dorris Dörrie, Clara Law, Samira Makhmalbaf, Lucrecia Martel, Mira Nair, and María Novaro, to name a few. Our case studies also include less-established women filmmakers, such as those whose films rarely circulate within international circuits (a case in point, Cuban filmmaker Rebéca Chavez), as well as the youngest generation of women filmmakers, who tend to work within a multimedia context of production. In addressing these filmmakers' work, we will ask prominent feminist film scholars who specialize in contemporary women's cinema (such as Kay Armatage, Alison Butler, Annette Föster, Susan Hayward, Annette Khun, Flavia Laviosa, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Gina Marchetti, Ivone Margulies, Patricia Mellencamp, Suzana Pick, Sarah Projansky, Brigitte Rollet, and Geneviève Sellier), as well as film directors, curators, and programmers of international film festivals and archives (among others, Jackie Buet, director of the Créteil Film Festival; Raúl Padilla López, director of Guadalajara's film festival; Drake Stutesman, co-chair of the Women's Film Preservation Fund at the New York Women in Film and Television (NYWIFT) organization; Kim Tomadjoglou, AFI Collection Curator and professional preservation consultant) to answer a series of questions, and to dialogue with some of the filmmakers via video conference or video letters on topics relevant to the project's focus.

Our virtual archive will compile clips and short films by these filmmakers, informed by on-camera commentaries, testimonies, and discussions about those clips provided by the filmmakers themselves, as well as by film scholars who have written about them, or film curators who have presented or preserved these filmmakers' films. During the second phase of our research, we will complement this material by asking our interviewees to partake in virtual dialogues among themselves, developed through video or Skype conferences, blog- and website-based chats, and video letters.

Overall, the multimedia platform is conceived as an alternative to the networks of distribution and reception within which women's fiction films typically circulate. For most female film directors considered in this project (with the exception of some case studies, such as Bigelow, Dörrie, or Nair), those are mainly art-house film theaters, art- or niche-film festivals, film archives, and film institutions. New media technologies will allow us not only to bring to a...