And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory

And The Mirror Cracked explores the politics and pleasures of contemporary feminist cinema. Tracing the productive ways in which feminist directors create alternative film forms, Anneke Smelik highlights cinematic issues which are central to feminist films: authorship, point of view, metaphor, montage, and the excessive image. In a continuous mirror game between theory and cinema, this study explains how these cinematic techniques are used to represent female subjectivity positively and affirmatively. Among the films considered are A Question of Silence, Bagdad Café, and Sweetie and the Virgin Machine.