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Textbook Ebook Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television 1St Edition Digdem Sezen All Chapter PDF
Textbook Ebook Female Agencies and Subjectivities in Film and Television 1St Edition Digdem Sezen All Chapter PDF
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Acknowledgments
Editors would like to give their sincere thanks to Kenan Behzat Sharpe,
whose outstanding abilities in copy-editing and proofreading were crucial
for the readability of this volume.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Diğdem Sezen, Feride Çiçekoğlu, Aslı Tunç, and Ebru
Thwaites Diken
vii
viii Contents
Index295
Notes on Contributors
Nilüfer Neslihan Arslan was born in New York, USA, in 1989. She
studied Urban and Regional Planning in the Faculty of Architecture at
Istanbul Technical University and for six months at Trento University,
Italy, through the Erasmus Program. She completed her MA degree in
Film Studies at Bahçeşehir University. Her MA thesis is focused on map-
ping the multicultural components of Jim Jarmusch’s early films. After
working for film programming companies and film festivals, she is cur-
rently a Research Assistant at the Department of Film and Television,
Istanbul Bilgi University and a Ph.D. student at Media and
Communication Studies, Galatasaray University.
Luca Barattoni (Ph.D. University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill) is
Associate Professor of Italian and World Cinema at Clemson University.
Among his publications: Jewish Identities in Latin American Cinema.
Special Issue for Post-Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, 2019
(with Patricia Nuriel); “Edipo Re e lo statuto del soggetto” in Fulvio
Orsitto and Federico Pacchioni, eds. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Prospettive
Americane. Pesaro: Metauro, 2015; Italian Post-Neorealist Cinema,
Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012; “Bergsonian themes and the human
condition in Pirandello’s Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinema Operator”
Forum Italicum, 2011.
Feride Çiçekoğlu is a professor and director of the master program in
film and television at Istanbul Bilgi University. She holds a Ph.D. in archi-
tecture from the University of Pennsylvania. The military junta of 1980 in
Turkey interrupted her teaching career. She spent four years as a
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
political prisoner after which she adapted her first novella about a child in
the prison for the screen and resumed her academic career with film. She
has edited and written in collections on digital culture, gender, urbanism,
and film. Most recently, she has co-edited The Dubious Case of a Failed
Coup: Militarism, Masculinities, and 15 July in Turkey (2019).
Şirin Fulya Erensoy completed her Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies at
Bahçeşehir University in 2017. Her thesis explores the films of the New
French Extremity and their use of the body as a site where social anxieties
are played out. Şirin conducts research on short film production in Turkey
and video activism as an alternative media practice. She is currently a guest
lecturer at Kadir Has University and Istanbul Bilgi University. Şirin has
worked as a producer and advisor for international documentaries shooting
in Istanbul. She is also the editor and the anchor of the weekly news bul-
letin This Week in Turkey on Medyascope TV.
Deborah Hardt is a Lecturer in the Cinema and Media Studies
Department at Izmir University of Economics. She holds an M.A. in
Media Studies from The New School in New York and is a Ph.D. candi-
date in Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate
School in Saas-Fee Switzerland.
Mihaela P. Harper is Assistant Professor in the Cultures, Civilizations
and Ideas Program at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Her research
spans comparative literature and cultural studies with a focus on the ethical
and political dimensions of contemporary visual and literary texts. Her
work appears in a variety of journals, including Symplokē, the Journal
of Modern Literature, and the Slavonic and East European Review, as well
as in the edited volumes Crime Fiction as World Literature (2017) and
Simulation in Media and Culture: Believing the Hype (2011). She is the
co-editor of Bulgarian Literature as World Literature (2020).
Nazan Haydari is associate professor of Media Department at Istanbul
Bilgi University, Turkey. Her research interests and publications are on
radio and women, feminist media, intercultural communication and
critical media pedagogy. She holds a Ph.D. in communications from
Ohio University, United States. She is the co-editor of Case Studies
in Intercultural Dialogue by Kendall Hunt. Her recent publications
appear in Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an
Old Medium (edited by Golo Föllmer and Alexander Badenoch), The
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Fig. 2.1 Five sequential shots in The Beaches of Agnès (2008), each
derived from a still photograph, all of which feature Jean-Luc
Godard on the set of Varda’s film-within-a-film Les Fiancés du
Pont Macdonald (1962) 15
Fig. 2.2 Agnès Varda, center frame, in Varda par Agnès (2019)
discussing how her work on the documentary The Gleaners
and I (2000) got her thinking about how the material of her
own films—right down to the reel cases beside her—might
find new life in another form. In the background is one of her
cabane (cabin) installations, this one made from film stock of
her early feature Le Bonheur (1965) and filled with sunflowers,
which are a recurring motif in the film 20
Fig. 3.1 Fatma Fatih trying a moustache in Oyun (2005) 34
Fig. 3.2 Fatma Fatih as Queen Lear (2019) 34
Fig. 15.1 Google Cloud Vision API’s analyses of a close-up of general’s
wife from Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman
(1928)280
Fig. 15.2 Chart of images to be tested with machine vision platforms 282
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Harvey Weinstein, once one of the most powerful film producers and a
titan of Hollywood, probably never anticipated such a disgraceful end to
his career. On a chilly day in a New York City courtroom in March 2020
he looked puzzled and frail on a wheelchair while his final sentence was
read out to him. The jury had found him guilty of two of the five charges
he faced and sentenced him to 23 years in jail for sexual abuse. Six women
who had testified against him were in tears holding one another tight. This
was the kind of cathartic scene that we mostly see in movies.
D. Sezen (*)
Department of Transmedia, Digital Art and Animation,
School of Computing, Engineering & Digital Technologies,
Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK
e-mail: d.sezen@tees.ac.uk
A. Tunç
Department of Media, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey
e-mail: asli.tunc@bilgi.edu.tr
F. Çiçekoğlu • E. Thwaites Diken
Department of Cinema, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey
e-mail: feride.cicekoglu@bilgi.edu.tr; ebru.diken@bilgi.edu.tr
This scene deeply resonated with us during the last stages of editing this
book, the product of a long period of collaboration, the final two years of
which coincided with a worldwide transformation in how female agency
and subjectivity is perceived, especially in film and television. Our editorial
team consists of four women academics in the fields of film, television,
media, and transmedia storytelling, from different generations and back-
̇
grounds. Our paths have crossed at Istanbul Bilgi University over the last
two decades, since the beginning of this century. When we first started out
it was beyond our imagination that the period of our collaboration for
organizing an international conference on Female Agency and Subjectivity
in Film and Television (April 10–13 2019, Istanbul ̇ Bilgi University,
Istanbul) and editing the outcome of the conference in this book would
be marked as a cathartic transformation highlighting our title.
Many things have indeed changed since October 5, 20171 when the
New York Times first broke the story of high-profile actresses accusing
Weinstein of sexual assault. With the help of social media and the #MeToo
hashtag, women all around the world started to share their own experi-
ences of harassment or assault. The floodgates had been thrown open. The
culmination of similar cases fueled a global #MeToo movement and
numerous revelations about many prominent men in media, journalism,
and politics shook those sectors to its core. Accusations were almost iden-
tical: powerful men had used their influence to intimidate and coerce
women into performing sexual acts or enduring sexual harassment against
their will. With the Weinstein case, the mainstream media conveniently
focused on the famous actresses who identified themselves as victims. Yet,
the MeToo movement galvanized complaints in other industries as well,
such as tech companies in Silicon Valley, auto-plants or service sectors like
tourism. Many well-known women in the entertainment sector jumped on
the bandwagon, as in Oprah Winfrey’s speech2 promising young women
“that a new day is on the horizon” at the Golden Globe Awards in 2018.
Time Magazine declared the MeToo Movement and “The Silence
Breakers” its Person of the Year.
#MeToo definitely opened a new chapter in how scriptwriters of films
and TV series began to challenge gender norms and focus on strong
women character representations touching on controversial themes, sto-
ries of the margins, especially by those most vulnerable to sexual vio-
lence—women of color, Indigenous women, queer and trans youth. Those
third-rail subjects not only inspired millions but unsettled them. While the
Weinstein scandal was tarnishing the reputation of famous film and
1 INTRODUCTION 3
cases remain alarmingly high. According to the “We Will Stop Femicide”
Platform, consisting of different women’s rights NGOs, 41% of women
living in Turkey have suffered from sexual assault at least once in their
lives, and 93% of women have experienced some form of sexual harass-
ment.7 Similar to Hollywood, though, the #SenDeAnlat movement was
spearheaded by celebrities such as Sıla Gençoğlu, one of the country’s
most popular female singers, filing a legal complaint against her boyfriend,
actor Ahmet Kural, accusing him of violence and revealing the details on
social media in 2018.
Amidst this turmoil, our incentive to organize an international confer-
ence on Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television turned out
to be a more timely intervention than any of us could have foreseen. The
passing of Agnès Varda on March 29, 2019 put her on the agenda, even
more than she had been during the previous years, due to her lifelong
devotion to gender equality and her unique vision of filmer en femme. Just
a month before her passing, her final film Varda par Agnès (2019) pre-
miered at Berlin Film Festival. Her joy of life, resilience and intimacy was
celebrated as an alternative to the masculinist policies poisoning the film
industry in that final festival she attended with her daughter and producer,
Rosalie Varda, and her entire crew. The global response to her passing
manifested a deep love and appreciation of not only her work but her life
in general and demonstrated how it was no longer possible to demarcate
the personal lives from the works of artists. The tone of the consensual
global obituary for Varda was starkly different from the controversial one
for Bernardo Bertolucci, who had passed a few months earlier in November
of the previous year. His oeuvre was no longer mentioned with the idol-
ization that usually favored the masculine cinéastes of the twentieth cen-
tury. The sexual harassment in his 1972 film Last Tango in Paris became
part of his legacy. Bertolucci had revealed that during the rape scene in the
film a stick of butter was used as lubricant without informing Maria
Schneider, the actress who was nineteen at the time of the shooting.
Bertolucci argued that it was necessary to humiliate Schneider in order to
make his film. “I wanted her reaction as a girl, not as an actress,” he had
said. “I wanted her to react humiliated.” His passing did not end the criti-
cism and his words were no longer taken as a sign of his genius as a film-
maker but of misogyny, and abuse of power.8
How Bertolucci’s legacy was marked was yet another sign that the myth
of the “masculine singular” was shattered. The process had neither been
sudden nor without an academic background. Geneviève Sellier’s
1 INTRODUCTION 5
Notes
1. Kanto, Jodi; Thowey, Megan. 2017. Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual
Harassment Accusers for Decades. New York Times, October 5. https://
www.nytimes.com/2017/10/05/us/harvey-weinstein-harassment-allega-
tions.html. Accessed 14 April 2020.
2. Elahe, Izadi. 2018. ‘A New Day is on the Horizon’ Read Oprah Winfrey’s
Stirring Golden Globes Speech. Washington Post, July 1. https://www.
washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/
wp/2018/01/07/a-new-day-is-on-the-horizon-read-oprah-winfreys-stir-
ring-golden-globes-speech/. Accessed 14 April 2020.
3. Morris, Regan. 2020. Is #meToo Changing Hollywood? BBC News, March
3. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43219531. Accessed 22
March 2020.
4. Carlsen, Audrey (et al.). 2018. #MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men.
Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women. New York Times, October
23. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-
replacements.html. Accessed 22 March 2020.
5. Berglund, Nina. 2017. Sexual Harassment Complaints Soar. News in
English.no: News and Views from Norway. https://www.newsinenglish.
no/2017/11/17/sexual-harassment-complaints-soar/. Accessed 20
March 2020.
6. Sen, Purna. 2019. What will it take? Promoting cultural change to end sex-
ual harassment? https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publica-
tions/2019/09/discussion-paper-what-will-it-take-
promoting-cultural-change-to-end-sexual-harassment#view. Accessed 20
March 2020.
7. 2020 February report. 2020. We Will End Femicide Platform. http://
kadincinayetlerinidurduracagiz.net/veriler/2897/2020-february-report-
of-we-will-end-femicide-platform. Accessed 21 March 2020.
8. . North, Anna. 2018. The disturbing story behind the rape scene in Bernardo
Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, explained. Vox, November 26. https://
www.vox.com/2018/11/26/18112531/bernardo-bertolucci-maria-
schneider-last-tango-in-paris. Accessed 20 March 2020.
9. Sellier, Genevieve. 2020. Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema.
https://www.dukeupress.edu/masculine-singular/. Accessed 14
April 2020.
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