“The Daughter of Fu Manchu”

Courses regarding race, gender, and representation are not easy to teach under any circumstances, but even more so in predominantly White classrooms in the post 9/11 United States, where the masses have been fed a diet of xenophobic, anti-Asian propaganda inculcating an “us” versus “them” mentality. This article analyzes the discourse of empire, a metaphor that has been used time after time to construct a mythical and menacing Other. In contrast, the portrait of Asian women in cinema and television news as traditional, veiled, and inhabiting a separate sphere adds to this representation of Asian cultures as premodern and irrevocably opposed to the West, much as portrayed in Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” theory. The author illustrates this transnational feminist critique with a documentary used in Women’s Studies classes, Deborah Gee’s landmark film Slaying the Dragon (1988).

The gendered film worker: Women in cinema collective, intimate publics and the politics of labour

Although Indian cinema studies as a discipline has long been involved in various theoretical elaborations of film production, not until recently has it engaged with the question of the gendered nature of film work. In this piece, I attempt to develop a framework centred around the politics of labour to provide a useful case to highlight how thoughtful engagement with these categories provides immense value for both contemporary film scholarship and feminist histories of media. In trying to situate Women in Cinema Collective, the first collective of women film workers to be formed in India, in the larger history of labour politics and women workers collectives of the recent past, I try to disaggregate a larger episteme of women’s work that emerges across the flexible labour economies of the neo-liberal present. Through examining the Women in Cinema Collective’s social media campaigns, advocacy work, petitioning and legal counselling, I argue that Women in Cinema Collective emerges as a tenuous collective whose work moves across the porous boundaries of a new social movement, workers collective and an autonomous women’s group.

Notes on Penthesilea: The marks of a past of female heroism

The goal of this paper is to construct an image map that will allow us to understand archetypes characteristics that accompany heroic representations of women in cinema. We will begin with the myth of Penthesilea, an Amazon queen whose tragic loss of feminine power will then guide us in the search for new archetypal deflections. We believe the archetype of Penthesilea signifies new leak points in representation of power as connected to the feminine. To prove that will be one of the main goals of this paper. We insist on highlighting that the images associated with the description of this character are allied to a structure linked with a kind of force and power commonly related to the male. Penthesilea bears the mark of an essentially solar/diurnal heroism, in which love will configure as an additional item that makes the characters confront each other violently. The result of this analysis will be a visual trajectory from a moment in the past that connects to contemporary representations of feminine heroism.

Paris/Europe Image as a Modernization Place in Turkish Cinema

The representation of women in cinema varies from time to time depending on the transformation of women in society. Turkish cinema has conveyed the transformations of women's representation in Turkish films to the audience in accordance with the concepts of urbanization, migration, modernity, and Westernization in daily life. This chapter explores the imagery of Paris and Europe as modernizing places in Turkish cinema.

Mental Illness and Women in Cinema

The representation of mental illness and individuals suffering from a specific mental illness in films is a phenomenon encountered since the first years of cinema. Mental diseases in many film genres such as horror, science fiction, comedy, and crime are used as scary, laughing, or drama elements. The representations of various psychopathologies in the films give an idea about these disorders to the ordinary viewer. However, these representations can accurately describe the reality and also have the risk of being defective and incomplete. It is seen that people who have mental disorders in cinema are generally presented in the way that ‘dangerous, violent, unpredictable characters' within the frame of limited and distorted patterns. It is possible to say that these cliché representations differ according to gender. Female characters with mental disorders are described as ‘beautiful and troubled women' in cinema. Related films were taken as an example in this study and it is aimed examine the representation of female characters with mental disorders in these films.

African Women in Film, the Moving Image, and Screen Culture

While African women in film have distinct histories and trajectories, at the same time they have common goals and objectives. Hence, “African women in film” is a concept, an idea, with a shared story and path. While there has always been the hope of creating national cinemas, even the very notion of African cinema(s) in the plural has been pan-African since its early history. And women have taken part in the formation of an African cinema infrastructure from the beginning. The emergence of an “African women in cinema movement” developed from this larger picture. The boundaries of women’s work extend to the global African diaspora. Language, geography, and colonial legacies add to the complexity of African cinema history. Women have drawn from the richness that this multiplicity offers, contributing on local, national, continental, and global levels as practitioners, activists, cultural producers, and stakeholders.

Harlan County, USA and the Documentary Form: A Forty-year Retrospective

This chapter revisits E. Ann Kaplan’s “Harlan County USA: The Documentary Form,” which appeared in the journal Jump Cut in 1977 and remains one of the few in-depth articles devoted to Kopple’s early career. This chapter reassesses the film’s significance in terms of the documentary genre, labor films, and women in cinema. It considers Kaplan’s initial review of the film in light of vogue of semiology and psychoanalytic approaches to cinema in the 1970s, including issues of representation and notions of “the real” in documentary. Finally, it considers why Harlan County USA in particular and Kopple’s career in general remain so important to documentary cinema.