My Effortless Brilliance: Women’s Mumblecore
This chapter investigates women’s infiltration of mumblecore, an indie subgenre associated with auteurs such as Andrew Bujalski, Mark and Jay Duplass and Joe Swanberg, for feminist ends. In representing relationships among twenty-something millennials, mumblecore’s cheap, lo-fi digital aesthetic and anti-mainstream values of ‘authenticity’ are congenial to indie female practitioners such as Lynn Shelton, So Yong Kim and Desiree Akhavan. Rather than simple appropriations of a ‘male’ genre, their work represents a ‘reframing’ not only of mumblecore but indie cinema generally, which mumblecore has recently epitomised. In films with a feminist focus on female aspirations and insecurities but that also accommodate queer and racial perspectives, these practitioners transpose the mumblecore ‘ethos’ to accommodate otherwise marginalised subjectivities and experiences.