FEMINIST FILMMAKERS

Directora de 'La belle saison'.

"I am a feminist at heart but not a militant".

Autora de 'Retrato de una mujer en llamas', 'Tomboy', y Girlhood'.



"Cuando te etiquetan como feminista o como ‘cine de mujer’, puede ser deplorable si pensamos que eso es algo pequeño, porque el imaginario queer y feminista es positivo, subversivo. Son reservorios de ficción, de poesía, y por eso prefiero que me etiqueten como mujer que como una cineasta más".

Sally Potter is a proud, self-identified feminist. ... However, she is hesitant to describe her movies — which include “Orlando,” “Ginger & Rosa,” “The Tango Lesson,” and “Yes” — as feminist in and of themselves.

Although Akerman is often grouped within feminist and queer thinking, the filmmaker has articulated her distance from an essentialist feminism.[11] Akerman resists labels relating to her identity like "female", "Jewish" and "lesbian", choosing instead to immerse herself in the identity of being a daughter; Akerman has stated that she sees film as a "generative field of freedom from the boundaries of identity".[8] The filmmaker has advocated for multiplicity of expression, explaining that "when people say there is a feminist film language, it is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves".[11] The filmmaker asserted that there are as many cinematic languages as there are individuals.[8]

Writer and scholar Ivone Marguiles notes that Akerman's resistance to be categorized is in response to the rigidity of cinema's earlier essentialist realism and "indicates an awareness of the project of a transhistorical and transcultural feminist aesthetics of the cinema".[11]

Akerman works with the feminist motto of the personal being political, complicating it by an investigation of representational links between private and public.[11] In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman's most well-known film, the main protagonist does not supply a transparent, accurate representation of a fixed social reality.[11] Throughout the film, the housewife and prostitute Jeanne is revealed to be a construct, with multiple historical, social, and cinematic resonances.[11]

Akerman engages with realist representations, a form which is historically grounded to act as a feminist gesture and simultaneously as an "irritant" to fixed categories of "woman".