Using our course as a foundation, analyze a film of your choosing from a feminist and/or womanist perspective. This can be a mainstream film that you find interesting in terms of the ideas presented in our course, or an overtly feminist film. Sometimes a mainstream film has feminist “pretensions” but upon close examination, is not truly feminist at all. Many of the films listed here belong to one of the above categories, sometimes walking a line between the two….
A feminist perspective may:
Analyze power relations within the text (sex/race/class/gender)
Center the woman protagonist, de-center male characters
Suggest bonds of solidarity between women
Tell the story from a woman’s perspective, show a woman’s “daily life,” and give the woman agency
Suggest a “counter-cinema” by altering formal elements of the classical style (unless it isa Hollywood film, and then, “it strains”); these films can be non-linear, repetitive or circular narratives, with little closure. These efforts suggest a feminist aesthetic in terms of form; they might be 1st person, from a woman’s perspective
Identify themes that go against feminine “norms” as resistance to the constrained female role in a patriarchal world: muteness, hysteria, shoplifting, rage, isolation, madness, and so on
Deconstruct masculinity and femininity and show how they are defined in opposition and “disequilibrium” rather than equality
Remember to use examples from the film or source text (if a novel adaptation, for example) to back up your ideas. Can you address how any of the film’s formal elements: camera, lighting, sound, recurring visual imagery, work to help “tell” the story?
Look for outside sources from library databases in addition to course readings. (Academic Search Premier, Proquest, Communication and Mass Media Complete, JStor, and Project Muse might all produce articles of interest).
Does not need to explicitly quote notes however instead reference them and its relevance.
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