The latest collection spotlight for Lilly Library at Bishop’s House features books and movies by women filmmakers. Come visit us on East Campus to browse our spotlighted books and DVDs or request them from Duke Libraries’ online catalog:
BOOKS
Sisters in the Life
Yvonne Welbon and Alexandra Juhasz, Editors. Duke University Press, 2018.
From experimental shorts and web series to Hollywood blockbusters and feminist porn, the work of African American lesbian filmmakers has made a powerful contribution to film history. But despite its importance, this work has gone largely unacknowledged by cinema historians and cultural critics. Assembling a range of interviews, essays, and conversations, Sisters in the Life tells a full story of African American lesbian media-making spanning three decades.
Women Filmmakers in Mexico: the Country of Which We Dream
Elissa Rashkin. University of Texas Press, c2001.
Women filmmakers in Mexico were rare until the 1980s and 1990s, when women began to direct feature films in unprecedented numbers. Their films have won acclaim at home and abroad, and the filmmakers have become key figures in contemporary Mexican cinema. In this book, Elissa Rashkin documents how and why women filmmakers have achieved these successes, as she explores how the women’s movement, film studies programs, governmental film policy, and the transformation of the intellectual sector since the 1960s have all affected women’s filmmaking in Mexico.
Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary Film
Shilyh Warren. University of Illinois Press, 2019.
Revolutionary thinking around gender and race merged with new film technologies to usher in a wave of women’s documentaries in the 1970s. Driven by the various promises of second-wave feminism, activist filmmakers believed authentic stories about women would bring more people into an imminent revolution. Yet their films soon faded into obscurity. Duke alum, Shilyh Warren, reopens this understudied period and links it to a neglected era of women’s filmmaking that took place from 1920 to 1940, another key period of thinking around documentary, race, and gender.
Visitation: the Conjure Work of Black Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema
Jennifer DeClue. Duke University Press, 2022.
Jennifer DeClue shows how Black feminist avant-garde filmmakers draw from historical archives in order to visualize and reckon with violence suffered by Black women in the United States. DeClue argues that these filmmakers–including Kara Walker, Kara Lynch, Tourmaline, and Ja’Tovia Gary–create spaces of mourning and reckoning rather than voyeurism and pornotropy. Through their use of editing, performance, and cinematic experimentation, these filmmakers intervene in the production of Blackness and activate new ways of seeing Black women and telling their stories.
FILMS
Rafiki by Wanuri Kahiu (DVD and streaming)
Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye (DVD and streaming)
Nina’s Heavenly Delights by Pratibha Parmar (DVD)
Saving Face by Alice Wu (DVD and streaming)
Circumstance by Maryam Keshavarz (DVD and streaming)
Past Lives by Celine Song (DVD and streaming)
Queen and Slim by Melina Matsoukas (DVD and streaming)
Songs My Brothers Taught Me by Chloe Zhao (DVD and streaming)
The Woman King by Gina Prince-Bythewood (DVD and streaming)
Huesera by Michelle Garza Cervera (DVD)
Wadjda by Haifaa al-Mansour (DVD and streaming)
Real Women Have Curves by Patricia Cardozo (DVD and streaming)
We have thousands of other films to discover in our online catalog— check it out!
