Feminist film theory is a theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory influenced by Second Wave Feminism and brought about around the 1970s in the United States. With the advancements in film throughout the years feminist film theory has developed and changed to analyse the current ways of film and also go back to analyse films past. Feminists have many approaches to cinema analysis, regarding the film elements analyzed and their theoretical underpinnings.
Annie M. Sprinkle is an American certified sexologist, performance artist, former sex worker, and advocate for sex work and health care. Sprinkle has worked as a prostitute, sex educator, feminist stripper, pornographic film actress, and sex film producer and director. In 1996, she became the first porn star to get a doctoral degree, earning a PhD in human sexuality from the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco. Identifying as ecosexual, Sprinkle is best known for her self-help style of pornography, teaching individuals about pleasure, and for her conventional pornographic film Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle (1981). Through the production of content, Sprinkle has contributed to feminist pornography and the larger social movement of feminism; she is also known for contributing to the rise of the post-porn movement and lesbian pornography. Sprinkle, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, married her long-time partner Beth Stephens in Canada on January 14, 2007.
Last Tango in Paris is a 1972 erotic drama film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. The film stars Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider and Jean-Pierre Léaud, and portrays a recently widowed American who begins an anonymous sexual relationship with a young Parisian woman.
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.
Chantal Anne Akerman was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York.
Marjane Satrapi is a French-Iranian graphic novelist, cartoonist, illustrator, film director, and children's book author. Her best-known works include the graphic novel Persepolis and its film adaptation, the graphic novel Chicken with Plums, and the Marie Curie biopic Radioactive.
Saul Landau was an American journalist, filmmaker and commentator. He was also a professor emeritus at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he taught history and digital media.
Paris Is Burning is a 1990 documentary film directed by Jennie Livingston. Filmed in the mid-to-late 1980s, it chronicles the ball culture of New York City and the African-American, Latino, gay, and transgender communities involved in it.
Women's cinema primarily describes cinematic works directed by women filmmakers. The works themselves do not have to be stories specifically about women and the target audience can be varied.
Kim Longinotto is a British documentary film maker, well-known for making films that highlight the plight of female victims of oppression or discrimination. Longinotto has made more than 20 films, usually featuring inspiring women and girls at their core. Her subjects have included female genital mutilation in Kenya, women standing up to rapists in India, and the story of Salma, an Indian Muslim woman who smuggled poetry out to the world while locked up by her family for decades.
Chick flick is a slang term, sometimes used pejoratively, for the film genre catered specifically to women's interests, and is marketed toward women demographics. They generally tend to appeal more to a younger female audience and deal mainly with love and romance. Although many types of films may be directed toward a female audience, the term "chick flick" is typically used only in reference to films that contain personal drama and emotion or themes that are relationship-based. Chick flicks often are released en masse around Valentine's Day. Feminists such as Gloria Steinem have objected to terms such as "chick flick" and the related genre term "chick lit", and a film critic has called it derogatory.
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Lisa Schwarzbaum is an American film critic. She joined Entertainment Weekly as a film critic in the 1990s and remained there until February 2013.
The woman's film is a film genre which includes women-centered narratives, female protagonists and is designed to appeal to a female audience. Woman's films usually portray "women's concerns" such as problems revolving around domestic life, the family, motherhood, self-sacrifice, and romance. These films were produced from the silent era through the 1950s and early 1960s, but were most popular in the 1930s and 1940s, reaching their zenith during World War II. Although Hollywood continued to make films characterized by some of the elements of the traditional woman's film in the second half of the 20th century, the term itself disappeared in the 1960s. The work of directors George Cukor, Douglas Sirk, Max Ophüls, and Josef von Sternberg has been associated with the woman's film genre. Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck were some of the genre's most prolific stars.
From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies is a 1974 book by feminist film critic Molly Haskell. It was one of the first books to chronicle women's images in film. Along with Marjorie Rosen's Popcorn Venus and Joan Mellen's Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film, it typifies the first feminist expeditions into film history and criticism, adopting the "image of woman" approach. Haskell compared the portrayal of women on-screen to real life women off-screen to determine if the representation of women in Hollywood cinema was accurate. Later developments in feminist film theory have partially rejected Haskell's and Rosen's approach as rudimentary.
Carrie Rickey is a feminist American art and film critic. Rickey is the film critic at The Philadelphia Inquirer and often contributes to The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Village Voice.
Michelle Parkerson is an American filmmaker and academic. She is an assistant professor in Film and Media Arts at Temple University and has been an independent film/video maker since the 1980s, focusing particularly on feminist, LGBT, and political activism and issues.
The Athena Film Festival is an annual film festival held at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City. The festival takes place in February and focuses on films celebrating women and leadership. In addition to showing films, the festival hosts filmmaker workshops, master classes and panels on a variety of topics relevant to women in the film industry. The Athena Film Festival was co-founded by Kathryn Kolbert, Founding Director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College and Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Women and Hollywood initiative and the festival's Artistic Director.
Women are involved in the film industry in all roles, including as film directors, actresses, cinematographers, film producers, film critics, and other film industry professions, though women have been underrepresented in creative positions.
Introduction to the Enemy is a 1974 American documentary film about Vietnam, filmed and directed by Haskell Wexler. Shot in the spring of 1974 and released before the end of the year, the film examines the human costs of the Vietnam War. The camera follows American actress Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, already known in their home country for antiwar activism, as they make inquiries regarding the war's effects and legacy among Vietnamese people from all walks of life.
