Synopses & Reviews
Black women filmmakers not only deserve an audience, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster asserts, but it is also imperative that their voices be heard as they struggle against Hollywoods constructions of spectatorship, ownership, and the creative and distribution aspects of filmmaking.
Foster provides a voice for Black and Asian women in the first detailed examination of the works of six contemporary Black and Asian women filmmakers. She also includes a detailed introduction and a chapter entitled "Other Voices," documenting the work of other Black and Asian filmmakers.
Foster analyzes the key films of Zeinabu irene Davis, "one of a growing number of independent Black women filmmakers who are actively constructing [in the words of bell hooks] an oppositional gaze"; British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah and Julie Dash, two filmmakers working with time and space; Pratibha Parmar, a Kenyan/Indian-born British Black filmmaker concerned with issues of representation, identity; cultural displacement, lesbianism, and racial identity; Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese-born artist who revolutionized documentary filmmaking by displacing the "voyeuristic gaze of the ethnographic documentary filmmaker"; and Mira Nair, a Black Indian woman who concentrates on interracial identity.
Review
This book sheds a necessary light on women filmmakers and videographers whose existence and works have been overlooked in previous book-length studies of women filmmakers.”Mark A. Reid, author of Post-Negritude Visual and Literacy Culture
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-168) and index.
About the Author
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster wrote and directed The Women Who Made the Movies, an hour-long documentary on the history of women filmmakers. She teaches in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska and is the author of Women Film Directors: An International Bio-Critical Dictionary.