The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers

"The Gendered Screen expands the discursive space for scholarly engagement with women filmmakers in a predominantly masculinist terrain. The contributors provide fresh approaches to filmmakers of the canon and give solid first starts to filmmakers who had previously been left out of the picture of Canadian cinema studies." Susan Lord, Film and Media, Queen's University, co-editor with Janine Marchessault of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinemas (2007) and with Annette Burfoot of Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence (WLU Press, 2006)

This book is the first major study of Canadian women filmmakers since the groundbreaking Gendering the Nation (1999). The Gendered Screen updates the subject with discussions of important filmmakers such as Deepa Mehta, Anne Wheeler, Mina Shum, Lynne Stopkewich, Lea Pool, and Patricia Rozema, whose careers have produced major bodies of work. It also introduces critical studies of newer filmmakers such as Andrea Dorfman and Sylvia Hamilton and new-media video artists.

Feminist scholars are re-examining the ways in which authorship, nationality, and gender interconnect. Contributors to this volume emphasize a diverse feminist study of film that is open, inclusive, and self-critical. Issues of hybridity and transnationality as well as race and sexual orientation challenge older forms of discourse on national cinema. Essays address the transnational filmmaker, the queer filmmaker, the feminist filmmaker, the documentarist, and the video artist---just some of the diverse identities of Canadian women filmmakers working in both commercial and art cinema today.

Brenda Austin-Smith is an associate professor in the Department of English, Film and Theatre at the University of Manitoba. She writes about melodrama, Canadian cinema, weeping and cinema memory, Henry James, and adaptations. She is a past president of the Film Studies Association of Canada and sits on the editorial board of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies.
George Melnyk is an associate professor of Canadian studies and film studies in the Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary. He is a cultural historian who specializes in Canadian cinema. Among his film publications are One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (2004) and Great Canadian Film Directors (2007). Most recently he has published The Young, the Restless, and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers (2008) in the Film and Media Studies series at WLU Press.