Search results for ""Author Anna Backman Rogers""

This book examines crisis, transition and metamorphosis in American independent cinema. By examining six films, all of which conform to the notion of 'indiewood' (King 2005) from a formal perspective, this book argues that American 'indie' cinema is not one merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema that draws upon an American cinematic heritage that explores various rites of passage (the teen movie, the road movie, the western), these films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis. This cinema of crisis offers surprisingly subversive and critical images that both engage with and undermine modes of cliched representation and thought by exploring notions of ambiguity and opacity. Case studies include: The Virgin Suicides, Elephant, Dead Man, Last Days, Somewhere and Broken Flowers; engages with and develops on recent scholarship on American independent film from a formal perspective and situates analysis of indie film within the context of American generic cinematic (and historical) traditions.

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Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars explore the pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices.

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Examines the politics of female authorship in relation to contemporary documentary practicesThis book, like its twin volume 'Female Authorship and the Documentary Image', centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender.'Female Agency and Documentary Strategies' centres on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity, and includes interviews with Hong Kong based activist filmmaker and scholar Vivian Wenli Lin and Spanish documentarist Mercedes Alvarez.ContributorsAnna Backman Rogers, University of GothenburgLinda C. Ehrlich, Writer, Teacher, EditorKerreen Ely-Harper, Creative Media Researcher and Filmmaker Kristopher Fallon, University of California, DavisCadence Kinsey, University of YorkCarla Maia, Centro Universitario UNALidia Meras, Film Historian and ResearcherAnna Misiak, Falmouth UniversityKim Munro, Filmmaker, Artist and Teacher Kate Nash, University of LeedsJohn A. Riley, Woosong UniversityMonica Titton, University of Applied Arts and at the Academy of Fine Arts in ViennaBoel Ulfsdotter, Independent Scholar Gail Vanstone, York University, Toronto

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Peter Weir's haunting and allusive Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), set in 1900, tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls and their teacher on a trip to a local geological formation. The film is widely hailed as a classic of new Australian cinema, seen as exemplary of a peculiarly Australian style of heritage filmmaking. Anna Backman Rogers' study considers Picnic from feminist, psychoanalytic and decolonialising perspectives, exploring its setting in a colonised Australian bushland in which the Aboriginal people are a spectral presence in a landscape stolen from them in pursuit of the white man's 'terra nullius'. She delves into the film's production history, addressing director Weir's influences and preoccupations at the time of its making, its reception and its lasting impact on visual culture more broadly. Rogers addresses the film's treatment of the young schoolgirls and their teachers, seemingly, as embodiments of an archetype of the ‘eternal feminine’, as objects of the male gaze, and in terms of ideas about female hysteria as a protest against gender norms. She argues that Picnic is, in fact, highly subversive: a film that requires its viewers to read its seductive surfaces against the grain of the image in order to uncover its psychological depths.

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Female Agency and Documentary Strategies centres on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth.

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This two volume set investigates the theoretical and practical framework that informs scholarship on documentary film that has hitherto neglected questions of gender and female authorship. It examines a wide array of documentary phenomena through global and transnational case studies and interviews. It also place a special emphasis on the nature of both individual and collective filmmaking and the ways in which these dynamics inform documentary work.

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This collection brings together an exciting group of established and emerging scholars to consider the history of feminist film theory and new developments in the field and in film culture itself. Opening the field up to urgent questions and covering such topics as new experimental film, the digital image, consumerism, activism, and pornography, Feminisms will be essential reading for scholars of both film and feminism.

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