Department of Theatre and Film

Taken together, the articles in this issue of The Projector invite us to rethink assumptions about women’s role in American independent film – on screen and off....

Christina Lane’s essay, Just Another Girl Outside the Neo-Indie, addresses the difficulties women directors face in the male dominated film industry....

In Jane Campion’s film The Piano (1993), Ada (Holly Hunter), a young widow (and self-proclaimed mute) takes her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin) from their native Scotland to New Zealand during the mid-nineteenth century to marry Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neil), a man to whom her father has promised her hand.... 

In her essay on the difficulty that women have traditionally had working in the independent film industry, Christina Lane observes that “if a woman’s film fails, executives are more likely to attribute it to her gender than if the same fate befalls a male director”....

Laura Mulvey begins her groundbreaking 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by proposing that “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” to such an extent that both the visual and the narrative conventions of Hollywood cinema reproduce and reinforce “the straight, socially-established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle” within patriarchal culture.