Crossway Journal, “Réalisatrices de films et séries françaises et francophones / French and Francophone Film and Series Women Directors”

Échéance des propositions : 30 septembre 2022

Call for papers (version française plus bas) :

In a 2019 issue of Libération, Laure Murat published a tribune entitled “Alice Guy’s Invisible Film” where she explained the erasure of this woman pioneer from cinema – and not just French cinema. The “7th Art Unknown Lady,” as a January 2022 Arte.tv documentary called her, was only recently re-discovered although Alice Guy was a modern woman for her time – her film The Consequences of Feminism dates back to 1906. Despite the publication of her autobiography in 1976 she was forgotten and the spotlight shone on the Lumière brothers and on Georges Méliès. French cinema featured only two women, Germaine Dulac (who made films from 1915 to 1934) and Jacqueline Audry (from 1943 to 1973) until the breakthrough of Agnès Varda, poorly named “New Wave’s grandmother,” and the advent of “May 1968” and of the cultural and feminist revolution in the 1970s. If French cinema counts about 25% women directors – that is, directors who define themselves as women, not just cis women – they are now legions making films in all genres. Books are written on them (in 1990, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’ To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema examined films by Germaine Dulac, Marie Epstein, and Agnès Varda) ; women directors are the focus of special issues (such as September 2012 Les Cahiers du cinéma, « Où sont les femmes ? ») and documentaries (such as Cineast(e)s (2013), where Mathieu Busson and Julie Gayet interviewed 21 of them on the relevance of gender in filmmaking and on the problems they had to face and still face as women in the industry). Francophone women directors, who came to filmmaking more recently in non-Western countries, were also solicited; in 2005, Janis L. Pallister and Ruth A. Hottell updated their 1997 guide, Francophone Women Film Directors, then in 2011 they published Noteworthy Francophone Women Directors: A Sequel on the production of almost 300 women directors in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Latin America, and Quebec. With the ever-growing number of series, partly due to the increasing number of platforms, another venue – with idiosyncratic conventions – opened to filmmakers, like Julie Delpy with On the Verge.

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