On Women's Films looks at contemporary and classic films from emerging and established makers such as Maria Augusta Ramos, Xiaolu Guo, Valérie Massadian, Lynne Ramsay, Lucrecia Martel, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Chantal Akerman, or Claire Denis. The collection is also tuned to the continued provocation of feminist cinema landmarks such as Chick Strand's Soft Fiction; Barbara Loden's Wanda; Valie Export's Invisible Adversaries, Cecilia Mangini's Essere donne. Attentive to minor moments, to the pauses and the charge and forms bodies adopt through cinema, the contributors suggest the capacity of women's films to embrace, shape and question the world.
On Women's Films is a lively and varied collection of essays by senior scholars in the field and emerging talents, demonstrating the continued importance of women's cinema as a strategic formation for women's self-expression. The essays in this volume are energized by engagement between generations of feminists and by the book's broad historical and international perspectives. New scholarship on canonical figures brings their work into contact with contemporary feminist thought, and new figures are added to the tradition of women's cinema. A model of the art of updating without forgoing the gains of the past, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in women's filmmaking.