Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers, by Katarzyna Paszkiewicz

Abstract

At a time when the issue of authorship—and of the closely related notion of auteurism—can be seen to be waning in some ways in academic film studies, as new concerns and new areas of research continue to come to the fore, and older disciplinary concerns—including auteurism—have fallen out of favour or been subjected to scrutiny, re-evaluation, and reconsideration, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz’s Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers is a welcome arrival and an important contribution to the field. Certainly authorship—and its peculiarities and controversies—remains just as central an aspect of the cinematic medium as it ever was, and the very concept of the auteur director continues to be a vital aspect of how films are financed and produced, marketed and distributed, and received and exhibited, as well as how films are understood, even if this concept has been regularly redefined since it first took hold in cinephile circles in post–Second World War France in the late 1940s and 50s. One of the reasons for holding on to authorship and continuing to develop this aspect of film studies has to do with promoting expanded opportunities for women—especially in leadership and authorship roles—in film industries around the world now, especially in the wake of the international #MeToo movement and the systemic forms of discrimination and abuse it brought to light. Another has to do specifically with scholarship, with continuing to increase our understanding of film history and film theory by devoting more attention to all the women who have made significant contributions to the medium’s development—including directors, producers, writers, editors, and other types of authors—from its earliest days to the present. As Paszkiewicz mentions in her introduction, while certain prominent women directors have been the subjects of thoughtful auteurist monographs (Chantal Akerman, Jane Campion, Claire Denis, and Sally Potter, for instance), vast other contributions remain overlooked and neglected (5).

Keywords

• gender studies
• genre studies
• auteurism