Teaching Women’s Filmmaking

Keynote Lecture

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Making Nearby: On teaching and unlearning women’s filmmaking through the audiovisual essay

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Program

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Video Essays

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Lorena Cervera, “A Film by Cine Mujer: A Video Essay”

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Estrella Sendra Fernández, “Film As Sound Art: Embracing Love through Extradiegetic Sound in Nadine Labaki’s Caramel”

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Libertad Gills, “Walking or Weeping”

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Organizing Committee

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• Feride Çiçekoğlu, Istanbul Bilgi University
• Colleen Kennedy-Karpat, Bilkent University
• Diğdem Sezen, Teesside University
• Şirin Fulya Erensoy, Istanbul Bilgi University
• Ebru Çiğdem Thwaites Diken, Istanbul Bilgi University
• Kate Ince, University of Birmingham
• Nadine Boljkovac, Independent Scholar
• Special Advisor: Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Rutgers University

Call For Submissions

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This virtual conference marks Istanbul Bilgi University’s third annual event dedicated to women and media, following the conference Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television in April 2019, with a book from Palgrave Macmillan published in November 2020 and the March 2020 virtual conference Gender Equality and Sustainability: Agnès Varda’s Sustaining Legacy, with proceedings forthcoming from Bloomsbury (2021): The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy in Cinema and Visual Arts.

This year’s focus blends scholarship with pedagogy. We seek contributions from scholars and teachers around the world that explore strategies, best practices, and past experiences when using films made by women in the classroom and when navigating women’s careers in cinema through teaching and research.

The two-day event will be split between two forms of scholarship: one day will be dedicated to traditional academic papers and roundtables; the other to audiovisual criticism. Individual paper presentations will be limited to 10 minutes. We will also consider pre-constituted, 30-minute roundtable discussions with 3-5 designated participants. Written contributions based on papers and roundtables will be considered for inclusion in published proceedings, whose format will be finalized after the conference.

For the video essay component, our goal is to challenge both established and emerging video essayists to devote their critical energies to audiovisual scholarship on women’s filmmaking. These video essays can focus on any aspect of women’s filmmaking, past or present. The conference presentation will consist of up to 10 minutes for screening the work (an excerpt may be selected if the full video essay exceeds this limit), followed by 10 minutes of commentary from the creator. We will consider audiovisual material that has already circulated online (e.g., posted to video sharing sites), but which was posted no more than two years prior to submission. The submitted work must not have been curated by any academic publications. Formal curation/publication for video essays may be offered after the conference to selected contributions.

The committee is pleased to welcome scholar and audiovisual essayist Catherine Grant as the featured keynote speaker for the two-day conference.

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Possible topics for papers, roundtables, and/or video essays include

• Teachable cinematic moments
• (Un)teachable women’s films
• Theorizing the female gaze
• Women’s cinema and the film studies curriculum
• Women’s cinema and production training
• Gender in the filmmaking & screen studies classroom
• Screenwriting and women’s filmmaking/television
• Genre and women’s filmmaking
• Women as documentary filmmakers
• Women and essay/experimental film
• Women in film/TV history
• Stardom in women’s media
• Gender and sexuality in women’s media
• Women’s filmmaking and national cinema(s)
• Women in transnational screen industries
• Women filmmakers and the canon
• Women’s films and the archive(s)
• Auteurism and women filmmakers
• In memoriam: Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, Barbara Hammer, Penny Marshall, Bilge Olgaç, inter alia

Submission Requirements

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Please direct all inquiries and submissions to Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan (nilufer.arslan@bilgi.edu.tr) no later than February 1, 2021. Participants will be notified of acceptance by March 1, 2021. Presentation scheduling will respect each participant’s time zone to the best of our ability.

• A traditional paper proposal must include a 300-500 word abstract, a bibliography with up to 5 entries, and a brief author bio.
• Roundtable panel proposals must include a ~500 word abstract describing the goal of the panel, a bibliography with up to 10 entries, and bios and contact information for each of the 3-5 participants. Please indicate clearly in the proposal which panelist is the primary correspondent.
• Video essay submissions must propose a work completed no earlier than January 2019. Proposals must include a link to the complete video essay (with password if access is restricted), an abstract, a bibliography/videography that cites the works included in the video essay and related scholarship, as well as a brief creator bio.