Women's Documentary Across the Globe

Documentary cinema has been traditionally more welcoming to women directors than more commercialized, and thus more heavily policed, fiction film. Women, in turn, were able to create more freely within this cinematic mode, bringing underrepresented perspectives to the fore and advocating for those even more disempowered than themselves. This course focuses on the contributions directors self-identifying as women were able to make to the domain of documentary around the world. It is divided into two modules and follows a loosely chronological structure. Module I, which begins with the birth of documentary cinema in the mid-1920s, reconceptualizes the history of this mode by demonstrating how women directors have been key to its development. In this module, we examine the work of directors such as Esfir Shub, Ruby Grierson, Leni Riefenstahl, Sara Gomèz, Joyce Chopra, Agnès Varda, and Margot Benacerraf. Module II then takes us into the contemporary moment — the first decades of the 2000s, when digital technology prompted a previously unseen expansion of the documentary film mode. We will explore lesser known, yet no less remarkable, works by women documentarians from Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. During both modules, we will actively engage with the rhetorical and aesthetic strategies these filmmakers used to engage with topics of gender, sexuality, family, childbirth, and the objectification of the female body. A framing question for our discussions will be: How were women documentary filmmakers able to either work with, or push back against, gender ideologies to assert their own creativity and unique visions?