Geetha Ramanathan Boeken

Feminist Auteurs examines a rich and diverse body of work that has received insufficient attention both in film studies and in feminist theory on film. Looking at individual films within the context of feminist film as a genre, Ramanathan examines film from diverse cultural traditions, while paying close attention to what might be regarded as feminist in different cultural contexts. The films chosen expand our ideas of feminism covering as they do film from Africa, Latin America, Europe, Asia and the US. Full-length interpretations of twenty-four films, both older and contemporary, including Vagabond , India Song , Bhaji on the Beach , Chocolat , and Daughters of the Dust lay out a complete and powerful framework for reading women's film.

A philosopher-filmmaker, Kathleen Collins decisively redefined the parameters of African American film with Losing Ground (1982). This book uses detailed analyses of Collins's films to contextualise her work in the African American, feminist and world film traditions, and it highlights her contribution to each of these canons.

Exploring modernism through a comparative, gendered, and third-world lens, the book critiques traditional scholarly definitions and highlights the influence of women and third-world authors on modernist aesthetics. It challenges the notion of modernist "universals" by examining the works of diverse authors within their cultural contexts, emphasizing realism's role beyond Western confines. By connecting aesthetics with ideology, the author provides a framework for understanding modernity that acknowledges the distinct histories of colonialism and gender, revealing the specificity of modern forms.

Based on scholarly familiarity with the history and study of international modernisms, the book takes the case of Germany, where it is most clearly identified as Expressionism. The analyses here that examine borrowings across the arts – painting, film, and literature – suggest that Expressionism alone is insufficient for an explanation of German modernism. Instead, the book proposes that we should think of modernism as a hydra headed aesthetic phenomenon that includes realism to compose an incomplete modernism. The interarts study focuses on how new modernist visualities, conceived more expansively to include silent film and scripts, locate women in modernity. The readings of silent film in conjunction with the art of Die Brücke find that the figure of the female, and the perspectives used by the artists are influenced by the techniques of silent cinema. The book shows that with each of the twenty texts under consideration, borrowings from other arts influence the woman’s inclusion into the modern world. Detailed analyses of texts, using this intermedial approach, include Kokoschka’s play Murderer, Hope of Women, Urban Gad’s film The Abyss, E. L. Kirchner’s woodcuts and Street Scenes, Elsa Lasker-Schüler’s film script Plum-Pascha, and Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz.