Latest update January 14, 2018
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| GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (remix remixed 2013) by Laura Mulvey |
Happy International Women's Day! Two of the questions Film Studies For Free's author gets asked a lot—as a female video essayist, curator and editor/publisher—are:
- "Why are there so few female video essayists working on film and screen media topics?"
- And: "Can you please recommend some female video essayists?"
Indeed, the answer to both questions is: please take a look at the below list - to which FSFF will keep adding as further names (and sample works) come to light or are recommended. If you would like to recommend a video or a video maker to add to the list, please leave a comment below. Thank you!
If you enjoy cultural interventions of the "there have always been many more than you think!" variety, here's a great one for International Women's Day, also listed below: Kelly Gallagher's The Herstory of the Female Filmmaker. Also, please, please, please check out Another Gaze's totally brilliant and beautiful interview with Laura Mulvey, with some of the most amazing insights about her work.
UPDATE (March 27, 2017): At the latest issue of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, see the related new piece by FSFF's author: “Looking at To-Be-Looked-at-ness: Feminist Videographic Criticism."
UPDATE (March 27, 2017): At the latest issue of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, see the related new piece by FSFF's author: “Looking at To-Be-Looked-at-ness: Feminist Videographic Criticism."
Female Video Essayists of Note in Alphabetical order by surname
- Elif Akçalı
- Sample work: Ceylan's Women: Looking | Being Looked At
- Cristina Álvarez López
- Sample work: Primal Analysis (also Double Lives, Second Chances; Small Gestures and, with Adrian Martin, Almost Singing, Almost Dancing: Chantal Akerman's "Tomorrow We Move")
- Janet Bergstrom
- Sample work: Murnau's 4 Devils: Traces of a Lost Film (also see this interview and this list of work)
- Arielle Bernstein
- Sample work (with Serena Bramble): Electric Sheep: How Female Power Is Limited By Consumer Culture
- Teresa Bosch
- Sample work: Pop Culture and Philosophy, Heisenberg & Heidegger [on Breaking Bad]
- Serena Bramble:
- Ivana Brehas
- Sample work: Consent in Cinema
- Nicole Brenez
- Sample work: Nicole Brenez on La Hora de los Hornos / The Hour of the Furnaces and U samogo sinyego morya / By the Bluest of Seas (1936, Boris Barnet, both with Kevin B. Lee
- Ava Burke
- Vicki Callahan
- Sample work: The Just War
- Elaine Castillo
- Sample work: Envoi [on two Wong Kar-wai films] (also Non, je ne crois pas qu’elle va se reproduire [A non-reproduction of a 1959 Emmanuelle Riva interview])
- Anna Catley
- Anita Castillo-Halvorssen
- Sample work: Time on My Side
- Pam Cook
- Sample work: Reading Mildred Pierce as Maternal Melodrama
- Tracy Cox-Stanton:
- Sample work: BELLE DE JOUR PechaKucha (also Belle de Jour Alternative Trailer and Belle de Jour Voiceover Story)
- Sarah Culhane
- Manohla Dargis
- Sample work: Busting Out: Caged Heat and the Women-in-Prison Film
- Monica Delgado
- Candice Drouet
- Sample work: Fargo : A VideoEssay (also Wes Anderson's References, To the Right and Diary Of A Taxi Driver)
- Lindsay Ellis
- Gwendolyn Audrey Foster
- Sample work: Dreaming of Monica Vitti
- Dawn Fratini
- Sample work: Busting Out: Caged Heat and the Women-in-Prison Film
- Allison de Fren
- Sample work: Fembot in a Red Dress (Also: Ex Machina: Questioning the Human Machine and The Mechanical Bride ON DEMAND)
- Julia C. de la Fuente
- Chloé Galibert-Laîné
- Sample work: Why Framing Matters (also Peeping Ruth, Brazil and the Red Light 1968 and The Human, the Machine and Spike Jonze)
- Kelly Gallagher
- Sample work: The Herstory of the Female Filmmaker
- Catherine Grant
- Sample work: Un/Contained: A Video Essay on Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (and Dissolves of Passion and Interplay)
- Liz Greene
- Sample work: Velvet Elephant and The sound of middle aged nostalgia
- Chiara Grizzaffi
- Sample work: Male Cinematic Fantasies, (Un)Mask and A Crowded Apartment (also Intersection, with Catherine Grant and Denise Liege)
- Kristy Guevara-Flanagan
- Sample work: What Happened to Her (not online)
- Irene Gustafson
- Sample work: Facing the Subject (On Observation)
- Stella Holt
- Sample work: Limbs
- Hui Huang
- Sample work: Once
- Amber Jacobs
- Sample work (with Catherine Grant): White [Mater]ia]: A video essay on Todd Haynes's 1995 film [SAFE]
- Ennuri Jo
- Sample work: Water Journeys
- Anne Marie Kelly
- Melanie E.S. Kohnen
- Virginia Kuhn
- Sample work: Images in/of/and Time
- Covadonga G. Lahera
- Sample work: Inflames
- Christina Lane
- Sample work: Carole Lombard and What Remains
- Jennine Laouette
- Sample work: The Mother of All Action Heroines: Rose Sayer (also Who Has the Power? [on Mona Lisa])
- Viola Lasmana
- Grace Lee
- Sample work: 12 Cabins 12 Vacancies: The Haunted Hotel In Cinema
- Margarida Leitão
- Sample work: Gestos do Realismo/Gestures of Realism
- Hannah Leiss
- Sample work: L'eclisse | Lines (and Xiao Wu | Leitmotif)
- Denise Liege
- Sample work: Intersection, with Catherine Grant and Chiara Grizzaffi
- Dana Linssen
- Sample work: Elegy for a Lost Film (with Jan Pieter Ekker and Menno Kooistra)
- Luiza Liz (aka Art Regard)
- Sample work: Alfred Hitchcock and The Art of Pure Cinema (also Wong Kar Wai and Selfhood)
- Susana Medina
- Sample work: Buñuel's Philosophical Toys
- Darline Morales
- Sample work: Touki Dollars
- Kim Morgan
- Lori Morimoto
- Jen Moorman
- Sample work: Busting Out: Caged Heat and the Women-in-Prison Film
- Laura Mulvey
- Sample work: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (remix remixed 2013)
- Jessica McGoff
- Jennifer O'Meara
- Sample work: Hyperacousia: haunting her with sound
- Philana Payton
- Sample work: Remix: A Litany for Survival
- Marina Pérez Trigueros
- Sample work: A Male Eye: John Berger
- Patricia Pisters
- Sample work: Emoticons
- Sara Preciado
- Sample work: La La Land - Movie References
- Jennifer Proctor
- Sample work: A Movie (also A Movie x 2, Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can't Fix preview online, and So's Nephew by Remes (thank to Michael Snow) by Jorrie Penn Croft)
- Kartina Richardson
- Sample work: Badlands (also Race in Film: Paisá)
- Miriam Ross:
- Sample work: Vertical Framing (And Stereotowns)
- Marta Ruggeri
- Caroline Rumley
- Sample work: Give Me a Smile (Also Es sind nicht alle lustig, die tanzen and Nevertheless, she persisted)
- Sarah Salovaara
- Soraya Sélène
- Sample work: Decoding Wong Kar-wai
- Sophia Serrano
- Sample work: Repetition in the Mirrors of Reason
- Louisa Stein
- Sample work: Lulu's Descent (Also You: A Glee/Multivid)
- Kristin Thompson
- Sample work: Elliptical Editing in Vagabond (also Kristin Thompson on La roue and Kristin Thompson on Variety (1925, dir. E.A. Dupont), both with Kevin B. Lee)
- Domietta Torlasco
- Sample work: Philosophy in the Kitchen and House Arrest
- María Vélez-Serna
- Sample work: Joining Up: Scotland, Cinema and the First World War, with David Archibald
- Elsie Walker
- Sample work: Taking Time to Hear: Accented rests in Michael Haneke's cinema, with Jacob T. Swinney)
- Kristen Warner
- Sample work: Imitation of Life Voiceover Story
FSFF also strongly recommends the following essay (including a great video) which pays great attention to the work of a good proportion of the above by Ian Garwood, "The Place of Voiceover in Academic Audiovisual Film and Television Criticism," NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2016. Thanks also to Allison de Fren, Tami Williams, Gabrielle Kelly, Marit Norway, Jason Mittell, H. Perry Horton, Adrian Martin, Adrian Garvey, Glenn Stillar, Michael Mirasol, Steve Elworth, Pablo Useros, Mark Rappaport, Deane Williams and José Sarmiento Hinojosa for their great suggestions.
