Journal Article

Introduction: The Singular Plural of Feminist Film Practice

Mennel, Barbara, Fenner, Angelica

2022

Overview

Key concepts associated with second-wave feminism, including the body, solidarity, and collectivity, are regaining currency and shaping twenty-first-century debates in response to changing social, economic, and technological conditions, as well as developments in the film industry. The editors of the double issue observed that collectives \"emerge in periods of crisis\" and that in the 1970s they \"formed around issues of gender, race, and politics,\" while in the twenty-first century they responded to \"the growing impact of digital media and mobile technologies; new paradigms of relational aesthetics; new configurations of labor and precarity; and the rise of neoliberal politics\" (Camera Obscura Collective 1). Stöckl, in turn, lacked female role models for the characters she sought to bring to life, turning instead to the women of Greek tragedy, a choice that distinguished her work from the social realism that became characteristic of much-but by no means all-cinefeminism in the ensuing decade. The two women's intimate conferral, positioned in tension with the inherited knowledge connoted by the rows of books behind them, suggests an important starting point for gendered solidarity-an argument recent scholarship on this film affirms (Gerhardt, \"On Liberated Women\"; Baer, The Cat).

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Subject: 21st century / Activists / Authorship / Collectivity / Feminism / Motion picture directors & producers / Neoliberalism / Non-binary gender / Political activism / Tragedies / Transgender persons / Women / Womens rights movements