Me Broni Ba. Akosuma Adoma Owusu.
01/24/2011
Structured as a collection of essays on the intersections between gender and non-fiction film, the book goes on sale on February 22.
The sixth volume of the Punto de Vista Collection, an English / Spanish bilingual edition, will be devoted to the history of feminist films and the discussions generated around it. Structured as a collection of essays on the intersections between gender and non-fiction film, the book goes on sale on February 22. Punto de Vista widens with this volume a collection that aims to fill the existing editorial gap in documentary filmmaking, and which has already published pioneering titles as Signal Fires: The cinema of Jem cohen (2010), The afterlife of images (2009), Ermanno Olmi. Six meetings and other times (2008), The thinking form. Addressing essay-film (2007), or The cinema of a thousand years. A look at the history and aesthetics of Japanese documentary film (1945-2005) (2006).
Since its second wave, in the 70's, feminism and film have been deeply intertwined. If feminism was the theory, the documentary quickly became the practice: testifying the emerging women's movement, rescuing the forgotten history of women, expressing their own subjectivity, and reporting, individually and socially, locally and globally, the insidious effects of patriarchal domination.
The feminist documentary was born, therefore, with the aim of making history and changing the course of history. After centuries of being the object of the (male) gaze, the woman finally became the subject of the gaze. And, through her camera, she defied the thematic, formal and practical conventions of documentary.
The book collects essays that reflect the many complex relationships between the personal (the body, domesticity, intimacy, memory) and the political (nation-states, public space, media and history.) Structured in four sections, it traces a journey through the history of feminist film (Looking back) and focuses on key concerns such as ways to articulate the view (Ways of seeing), the first person as a privileged form of (self) expression through reassembly video or home movies (I am a camera), and the deconstruction of the social and political meanings that flow through the female body (Writing the body).
In short, these essays demand and update -including gender identity and other parameters such as nationality, race, political affiliation or class- "the primordial vocation of the documentary as a will to intervene political discourse on the real and as a meeting point between filmmakers and audiences so that together, we can think the real policies and how they affect us from a personal standpoint”.
