Women’s epistolary cinema: exploring female alterities: epistolary films and epistolary essay films

ABSTRACT

This article aims to analyse female authorship in the materialisations of contemporary epistolary cinema, focusing on epistolary films and epistolary essay films. The works of various filmmakers are essential to understand the evolution of this enunciation device and the exploration of female alterities materialised through it. Women filmmakers' epistolary practices delve into the exploration of intimate space, authorial vindication, epistolary materiality, intersubjectivity and cinematic thinking to create diverse experiences of female alterity, developing this postmodern paradigm inherent in the epistolary device. Since Chantal Akerman started the practice of the epistolary film with News from Home (1977, other women filmmakers have developed this cinematic form. The reading of a personal correspondence allows the exploration of female intimate alterities—Measures of Distance (1988), Punto impropio (2015), A Minha Avó Trelotótó (2018). Besides, the epistolary film is fictionalised, displacing it to the intellectual space—From Hetty to Nancy (1997), Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009). Other people’s real correspondence is also instrumentalised to create their recreations and representations, vindicating female alterities both socially and personally—Letter #69 (2016), The Dreamed Ones (2016). Finally, women filmmakers addressed the cinematic form of the essay film—Letters from Panduranga (2015), Correspôndencias (2016).

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s cinema
• epistolary film
• essay film
• alterity
• cinematic enunciation

View correction statement:

Correction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez

Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez is a Film Studies researcher at the Institut ACTE, Paris 1 University Panthéon-Sorbonne, where she carries out the research project EDEF - Enunciative Devices of the European Francophone Essay Film, awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. She received her PhD in the doctoral program Literature and Visual Arts: Comparative Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. She previously completed a degree in film direction at ECAM Film School in Madrid and worked as a film critic for the magazine Cahiers du cinéma – España. Also member of the international and interdisciplinary research group La Europa de la escritura (UCM), her research interests are in the filmic writings of the self and the relationships between literature and cinema. Monterrubio Ibáñez is the author of De un cine epistolar (Shangrila, 2018) and editor of Epistolary Enunciation in Contemporary Cinema (Área Abierta, 2019). She has also published several articles on the essay film, the autofiction film or the cinematic diary. E-mail: [email protected]