Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender, Space and Mobility in Contemporary Cinema

Abstract

While the idea of women who stay at home and men who dominate the streets may seem outdated, binary considerations of gender, space, and power still proliferate in contemporary cinema. This open access book adopts a fluid approach to space designed to accommodate wilful, affirmative, and imaginative perspectives of gender on screen. Through close analysis, or micro-analysis, of Messidor (Alain Tanner, 1979), Vendredi Soir (Claire Denis, 2002), Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2012), and Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004), this book looks for light, textures, rhythms, movement, and sound that give shape to affirmative forms, forms that contribute to rewriting bodies and spaces—such as cars, homes, and city streets—that reject traditional gender and power structures. Wilful women drive this book forward, through movement and pauses, imagination and desire, persistence and dissimulation, eroticism, performance and abjection.