Capricious Reflection. Feminist Ideas on the Screen

Relations between cinema and feminism, since both phenomena have occupied an important place in Western culture, have been full of contradictions. From the perspective of feminism, cinema is the embodied child of Western patriarchal culture, the embodiment of male thinking. From the perspective of cinema, a woman is a desirable object for filming. Thanks to the intersection of these two views, cinema becomes a platform for feminist debates and their studies, actively formed over decades. Drawing on a wide range of works, Tatyana Kruvko and Valeria Kasyakova analyze the current strategies of interaction between cinema and feminist theories and practices of the 20th-21st centuries. The choice of films is dictated by the basic aspects that feminist criticism invariably addresses: the representation of corporeality, gender politics, power ambitions, identity politics, otherness, posthumanism. Based on the selected films, the authors find reflections of key concepts of feminist theory in cinema and show how film illuminated the internal contradictions of the women's movement.