Profession: Documentarist: Underground Documentary Making in Iran

Using Profession: Documentarist and its diary-style format as a case study, this essay revolves around the practices, aesthetics and narrative interests of contemporary female documentarists in Iran. Exploring the professional barriers involved in documentary film making in the country today, the author discusses female authorship also in relation to the hard censorship laws, the menace of political retaliations as well as gender discrimination. The extent to which these women documentarists are forced to perform their work as a form of underground activism have widespread repercussions on their practice, and merges the personal with the political.

‘Reflecting Through Images’: The Documentaries of Mercedes Álvarez

The author studies Mercedes Álvarez’ hybrid form of the essay film format, and her outright attempt to preserve the collective memory of certain places, through her films. According to the author, Álvarez is ‘conscious of the flow of the diary as one means of revealing a woman’s voice and interior life’. The poignant female gaze and consistency of her work, from a both cinematographic and narrative point of view, indicates that Álvarez fully represents the female auteur.

Interview: ‘Visualising Our Voices’ – Hong Kong Scholar and Film Director Vivian Wenli Lin in Conversation with Boel Ulfsdotter

This interview revolves around Vivian Wenli Lin’s use of participatory arts-based methods in order to encourage and teach women in marginalised communities to empower themselves by making documentary film. Lin also talks about the development of a ‘cine-feminist’ framework which in many ways extend feminist film studies by introducing ‘rare materials of women’s self-representations’. These films thus give way to documentary narratives of overlooked groups of women, and results in a documentary practice that is framed by social politics and activism.

Other Women: Thinking Class and Gender in Contemporary Brazilian Documentary Film

Focusing on the relational dimension of some selected works, this essay proposes to consider the subject matter as films with women rather than films of women. The main effort is to understand something that takes place in-between spaces – before and after the camera, but also between viewer and film – and critically reflect on the aesthetic, ethical and political potential that a cinema marked by different women’s perspectives can bring to light. The author concludes that instead of reflecting a certain proximity between women, most films by contemporary female documentarists in Brazil, are suffering from the impact of the difference in social station between the director and the women being filmed.

‘Scriptrix Narrans’: Digital Documentary Storytelling’s Radical Potential

Drawing on Agnès Varda’s feminised cinécriture, in tandem with works by the video-artist cum activist Sharon Daniel, the author studies Indigenous people’s voice making in different cultural media. In finding the auteur’s unique gaze missing in Inuit filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s work the author instead talks of an unbounded form of storytelling through the interactive documentary format and scriptrix narrans. This method, typical of female authorship, melds the filmed-filmer and the viewer, devoting less attention to the individual auteur.

The Pencil of Identity: Instagram as Inadvertent (Female) Autobiography

The author charts the development of self-portraits from the painted canvas to Instagram’s selfies. Revolving around autobiography as a multifaceted genre over the centuries, the author claims that the desire for greater visibility further enhances our wishes to leave our mark on history, and in society. It also brings to light a new type of arbitrary documentary discourse based on self-performance and self-branding.

From Visceral Style to Discourse of Resistance: Reading Alka Sadat’s Afghan Documentaries on Violence Against Women

This essay explores the director’s documentary tactics of granting the voice to the oppressed women through a number of visual and textual distancing strategies. It also shows that Sadat’s films offer multi-layered analyses of reasons behind violence against women in the country along with the lamentable powerlessness of Afghan women’s rights activist. The author concludes, that Sadat at the same time manages to convey the complexity of the gender situation in her country in order to” resist the Eurocentric approaches that essentialise Afghan culture”.

Record Keeping: Family Memories on Film – Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige and Wisdom Gone Wild

In this essay, the author proposes to demonstrate how Rea Tajiri in History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashig (USA, 1991) moves through three stages in her filmmaking process; (1) embodiment (2) distillation and (3) re-representation. These processes (as distinct from the commercial stages of producing a film) can be seen to parallel the narrative and trauma theory models of transformation from incoherence to coherence through the reconstruction of the autobiographical memory narrative. The author concludes that “Tajiri’s work demonstrates that the documentary film format can be a space for working through transgenerational trauma, difficult and forgotten histories.”

Documenting Georgia in Transition: The Films of Salomé Jashi and Nino Kirtadze

‘If visual culture is central in not only creating, but maintaining the imagined community of a nation, what happens when the community is newly emerged, and a collective imagination has not yet solidified?´ As an answer to that question, this essay analyses the ways in which Georgian women documentary makers have conceptualised Georgia as a country in the midst of a multifaceted transition through the work of two key filmmakers. The author situates their work in their socio-political and cultural context by discussing the competing narratives of post-Soviet Georgia from different perspectives and time periods.

‘Not Because My Heart is Gone; Simply the Other Side’: Francesca Woodman’s Relational and Ephemeral Subjectivity at the Limit of the Image

The work of Francesca Woodman has commonly been read in light of her depression and tragic suicide at the age of just twentytwo as the figuration of (or rehearsal for) an act of disappearance. This essay aligns itself with the scholarship of Claire Raymond (2010) who argues through Kant’s notion of the sublime that, in actual fact, Woodman stages a precise dissection of what it means to be both the subject and object of her own gaze. Drawing on feminist theories of spectatorship and photography, this chapter demonstrates how Woodman engages with visual tropes in order to ‘image’ the fragile and liminal moment of a young girl becoming-woman. As such, the author argues, that Woodman addresses directly the manifold ways in which gender norms are brought to bear on the female body through the mechanics of the gaze.