On Feminist Films

Stuart Bell is a translator of French literature. He studied Modern Languages at the University of Cambridge where he was later Translator in Residence (2021). His previous publications include Bird Me (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and Yo-yo Heart which was selected by the Poetry Book Society as their 2022 Winter Translation Choice. He also edited the 2021 collection Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience, the inaugural issue of The South London Cultural Review. So Mayer is a writer and activist. Their books include Political Animals, From Rape to Resistance and The Cinema of Sally Potter. Their writing about queer and feminist film features in Sight & Sound, The F-Word, Cléo and Literal, and their essays feature in Roxane Gay’s Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture and At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond. After a decade in academia teaching film studies and creative writing at Cambridge, Queen Mary, King’s College London and others, they work as a bookseller at Burley Fisher Books and with queer feminist film curation collective Club des Femmes. So is a Co-Founder of Raising Films, a campaign and community for parents and carers in film. They tweet at @tr0ublemayer. Louisa Wei is a documentary filmmaker and a member of Hong Kong Director’s Guild since 2018. She is also an award-winning writer and an Associate Professor teaching film related courses in the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. Wei has four documentary features to date: Storm Under the Sun (2009, co-director Xiaolian Peng), Golden Gate Girls (2014), Havana Divas (2019), and A Life in Six Chapters (2022). She also made three TV documentaries, Writing 10000 Miles (2019, RTHK), Wang Shiwei: The Buried Writer (2017), and Cui Jian: Rocking China (2006, Cable TV HK). Emma Wilson is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Corpus Christi College. Her recent books include Love, Mortality, and the Moving Image (2012), The Reclining Nude: Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat, and Nan Goldin (2019) and Portraits: Céline Sciamma (2021). She has previously collaborated on a number of 87press projects including writing an introduction to The Softest Sleep and contributing a chapter to the South London Cultural Review volume 1, Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience. Catherine Grant is a film scholar and video maker, and also works as a guest speaker, research consultant and external examiner. As a researcher and critic, she mostly makes and reflects on audiovisual essays about screen media studies. Grant is former Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and also lectured and researched for several decades at the Universities of Kent, Sussex, and Strathclyde. She is founding author of the Open Access website Film Studies For Free (and its social media accounts) as well as several other scholarly research platforms.

• ABOUT THE EDITOR 1ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES 5EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION 7FRANCE 19 Stuart Bell Agnès Varda’s ambivalent feminism: rereading ‘Plumitif’ in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)UNITED KINGDOM 49 So Mayer ‘Killing Joy is a World-Making Project’: Queer Female Friendships at the End of the World in Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers (1982) and Ginger & Rosa (2012)CHINA 75 Louisa Wei Woman, Are You Human or Demon? – Two Films by Huang ShuqinITALY 117 Emma Wilson Portraits of young girls in Milan: the films of Alina Marazzi