Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MUSLIMWOMENFILM (Locating the Storyteller: Muslim Women’s Auto/Biographical Cinema from the Islamic World)
Période du rapport: 2020-01-01 au 2021-12-31
Much like their Western counterparts, Muslim women academics, historians, critics, feminists, journalists, and authors from the Islamic world have been instrumental in establishing a distinctly Muslim women’s/feminist identity. Taking on an oppositional and critical stance, they have done this through their context-oriented literature, life-writings and critiques of Islamic cultural constraints, Sharia laws and religious and cultural discrimination against women in their respective Muslim societies. They have questioned their own political, social and gender histories to redefine the sources of their particular oppressions in order to formulate strategies for emancipation and equal rights.
Additionally, they have turned to the film medium to extend their creative and activist intent and representations from their particular socio-historical and contextual perspectives. Muslim women filmmakers are uniquely positioned within their societies to depict, examine and critique their respective personal and collective histories, experiences and subjugation under patriarchal oppression, religious fundamentalism and socio-cultural and political restrictions. However, research on Muslim women’s cinematic contribution to socio-cultural, religious, and political constraints regarding film production remain relatively limited from within the Muslim world itself. Research on Muslim women’s regional, historical, and culture-specific autobiographical cinemas even more so. This project aimed to fill this gap, thus significantly advancing beyond the state of the art in both Western and non-Western film studies.
MUSLIMWOMENFILM has a strong gender-specific focus in that it brings to light the contribution and struggles of Muslim women filmmakers from a vast geographical area and different cultural perspectives, and attracts attention to the condition of Muslim women in local, national, and diasporic contexts.
Data Collection
Work consisted in data mining and processing in view of the categorization and evaluation of a large number of films, resulting in the compilation of a dataset of 290 auto/biographical film titles made by Muslim women filmmakers from Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey from the 1980s to date.
Contextual scholarly study
The study focused on two countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan. It looked at the history of auto/biographical women’s cinemas in these settings; at the impact of fundamentalist regimes on women’s freedoms and rights; at the emergence of women’s resistance through the filmic medium; at films by diasporic filmmakers depicting their home countries. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship (Film Studies; Women’s Studies; Feminist Thought; Postcolonial Studies and Theory; Cultural Studies; Study of Religions), it gave rise to a number of articles, conference papers, and a monograph proposal. Some of the most important outputs are: an article on Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar; an article on Afghani filmmaker Nelofer Pazira; and a book chapter on women’s activist filmmaking against gendered violence in Pakistan. The project symposium, Women’s Auto/biographical Cinemas: The Gendered Story, took place online on 27 and 28 November 2021. It included world-renowned speakers such as South African artist Penny Siopis and documentary film studies specialist Professor Bill Nichols (San Francisco). It focused on discussion of the contribution of global women/feminist filmmakers who have used the film medium to record, archive, and disseminate women’s stories, to share their experiences, build cross-cultural solidarity for change, consciousness-raising, and pedagogical purposes. The symposium was attended by over 50 delegates.
The project proposed novel concepts for a more nuanced and progressive understanding of women’s auto/biographical cinemas. In particular, major findings include the introduction of a new paradigm, that of the (Muslim woman’s) filmmaker as experiential ‘auto/bio-historiographer’, i.e. as a historiographer and counter-historian of her times who is tacitly located within the filmic narrative. Another major contribution consists in an extension of Hamid Naficy’s crucial formulation of ‘accented cinema’, as the often-autobiographical cinema of filmmakers in diaspora or exile, to account for a ‘formulaic accent’ in films by diasporic filmmakers whose depictions of Muslim countries are aimed specifically at appealing to Western audiences.
The dataset produced during the project is a landmark contribution, bringing about for the first time identification and classification of women’s auto/biographical cinemas from the Muslim world. The film data gathered and the categories chosen to describe the films will support further research on: the history of films by Muslim women filmmakers; the history of film in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Turkey; the history of feminist filmmaking; the history and aesthetics of auto/biographical film; the understanding of forms of auto/biographical cinema and related genres including all those listed in the chosen categories.