Seminar with Professor Yvonne Tasker from University of East Anglia.

Abstract

Statistical summaries regularly point to the paucity of women occupying the most prominent above the line role in film production, that of director; the percentages have varied little since the turn of the century. Meanwhile feminist film historians have worked productively to uncover the presence of women in earlier decades. Whether in historical work or in contemporary commentary it seems that looking for the female director raises a further question, one which is to do with gender, with cultures of work, the romantic imagery of the artist and the ‘celebrification’ of creativity: what does the woman director look like? This paper explores the picturing of the woman director through frames of gender, culture and history drawing on a new project around British filmmaker Jill Craigie. Connecting these issues to the figure of recovered Chinese-American filmmaker Esther Eng, excavated in Louisa Wei’s film Golden Gate Girls (2013), I ask why feminism has been so intrigued by female filmmakers, how the representation of the woman as director functions as icon and explores the contemporary resonance of the lost/neglected filmmaker.

4^th May, 5:30pm, K3.11, King’s Building, Strand Campus, King’s College London.

Further details available at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/sspp/sga/nas/news-and-events/events/eventrecords/Picturing-women-directors-historical-perspectives-and-contemporary-themes.aspx