Building a Feminocentric Canon - by Tom Knoblauch (Hardcover)

About the Book

As the digital age ruptures all norms for traditional cinema, rendering everything into content and bringing logics of legitimacy, authenticity, and authorship.

Book Synopsis

In Building a Feminocentric Canon: Céline Sciamma and the Dawn of Post-Auterism, Tom Knoblauch positions Céline Sciamma as not just an important voice within contemporary cinema but also as the standard-bearer and skeleton key for a new vision of authorship and a reimagined feminocentric canon of tomorrow.

As the digital age has ruptured traditional cinematic norms and complicated logics of legitimacy and authorship, Knoblauch focuses instead on the promise of new conventions, contending that these seismic shifts call for a broader reevaluation of the current canon. Cinema's future, he asserts, will exist in a space that is both post-cinema and post-auteur, eschewing what has often been an exclusionary politics of genius that has dominated the medium since the French New Wave.

In envisioning a new system of valuation for authentic expression that incorporates historically marginalized voices, Knoblauch embraces the new, uneven ground we find ourselves on to demonstrate how Sciamma's influential filmography is well positioned to serve as the basis for a revitalized canon that offers a bold challenge to the status quo. This canon need not be viewed as radical rejection of tradition, but instead as a horizon upon which fresh, innovative traditions can be formed.

Review Quotes

Knoblauch's book carves out a timely path for the creation of new theoretical frameworks to celebrate audio-visual practitioners at a moment when critiques of traditional, male-dominated auteurism are becoming increasingly mainstream, and concepts such as feminist cinema and the female gaze are gaining ever-greater currency. Coupled with the fragmentation of a 'post-cinematic' production landscape in the streaming era, the need for a 'post-auteurist' lens is urgently established and its possible contours lucidly sketched in these pages, which nimbly avoid downplaying the project's complexities. Building a Feminocentric Canonstakes a claim to being a significant reference point not so much for aficionados of Sciamma, its emblematic example, as for the broader and expanding field of feminist film and television authorship studies, and beyond.
Mary Harrod, Professor of French and Screen Studies, University of Warwick, UK

About the Author

Tom Knoblauch is a cultural scholar, internationally award-winning filmmaker, broadcaster, and voiceover artist, USA.