Abstract

Women’s Cinema is an elastic and slippery term. It can mean film for or by women, cinema with women’s stories at its centre or with powerful female stars and/or significant female protagonists, and encompasses many genres, techniques, aesthetic concerns and approaches. A look at mostly Anglophone feminist film criticism that traces developments in industry and extra-industrial practice, production, and representation from the 1970s on reveals as much (see, for example, Pietropaolo and Testaferri 1995; Jayamanne 1995; Humm 1997; Rich 1998; Chaudhuri 2006; and Hollinger 2012). The stories told, who created them, and how they were distributed and consumed is central to much of their analysis. This writing necessarily cannot capture the full picture and is looking and listening from a particular vantage point, but reflects the complicated, differentiated, and knotty issues that affect industrial and creative practice and its consumption. As access to basic rights (such as education, universal suffrage, economic independence, and so on) is variable from one nation state to another, the particularities of women’s lives and stories told on film concurrently have distinct peaks and troughs that have as much to do with changes in the industry and more equal and distributed access to the means of production as they have with struggles for legal rights.