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Conformity, Process and Deviation: Digital Arts as 'Outsider' |
Maureen Kendal (London Metropolitan University)
Women’s Film Production as Outsider and Disruptive
This paper investigates cinematic language of narrative produced by women film makers, that works alongside but is outside Hollywood cinematic convention; that disrupts normative storytelling, by offering a gaze towards and from within women’s experience - female, feminine and Feminist.
This reference to women’s film production from Laura Mulvey, Sally Potter, Jane Campion, Lady Gaga, to Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’, investigates: Where was, is and where will be the Gaze? Who is doing the looking and who will have the last laugh? Lena Dunham directly addresses her audience with self-referential tragic-comic commentary. Further layers of Commentria are being created across audiences’ threaded chat using social media. Does this distributed conversation influence the way we frame, select and edit the flow of moving images from our mini iCamera-iPhone twitching in the palm of our hands?
Female language is not only evident in film, but is part of the wider context of Art, produced by Women - be it through words, psychoanalytical cultural theory and/or artistic practices. Practices can be mainstream or in opposition or parallel the dominant and monolithic; others are hidden, obscured or shadowed within the shelter of the domestic.
Women’s Cinematic Language can offer a disruptive alternative vocabulary and grammar: - cyclical camerawork, interior monologue, metaphoric immersion into texture and natural world, dress as ornament and pattern, gender as elaboration - excess - decoration. Stories tell of isolated hardship and exploitation - others of strength found in female comradeship, or are highly charged emotive or even mystical.
Will mobile camera devices in the palm of our hands enable us as storytellers to use disruptive cinematic language to innovate transformative narratives? How will this new form and content become integrated as user-generated media content?
Biography
Maureen Kendal, BSc, BA, MSc, PGLTHE, FRSA, MBCS
is a creative producer and writer; university academic since 1998, currently at Faculty of Life Sciences and Computing, London Metropolitan University, teaching Computer Animation, Games and Effects.