Marleen Gorris - (Visionaries: The Work of Women Filmmakers) by Sue Thornham (Paperback)

About the Book

Examines Dutch director Marleen Gorris's cinematic oevre through feminist theories of vulnerability, resistance, time and space.

Book Synopsis

Dutch director Marleen Gorris is known chiefly for two films: A Question of Silence (1982), her fiercely feminist first film, in which three women meet by chance in a women's clothing boutique and ritually murder its male owner; and Antonia's Line (1995), her fourth film and winner of the 1996 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, which traces four generations of Antonia's female 'line' in the matriarchal community she establishes in postwar rural Holland. Both have been extensively discussed, though rarely together, and appear on university syllabuses. Her second Dutch language film, Broken Mirrors (1984), and her five films in English, however, have received far less, and in some cases no critical attention. Using feminist reformulations of ideas of vulnerability and resistance, this first book-length study of her films examines their revisionings of narrative, time and space, and the possibilities they present of other narratives, other subjectivities and other relationships.

Review Quotes

A superb and lucid study of Marleen Gorris, whose work has not yet received the critical attention it deserves! Deftly integrating cultural history, theory and formal analysis, Thornham traces the message of female survival and feminist resistance that runs through Gorris's powerful and inspiring films.-- "Kathleen Karlyn, University of Oregon"

Sue Thornham masterfully illuminates and explores the feminist filmmaking of Marleen Gorris. Through accessible chapters, she persuasively demonstrates how Gorris' films embody a feminist practice of resistance, rooted in a shared sense of vulnerability and a deep commitment to care and community.-- "Anneke Smelik, Professor of Visual Culture, Radboud University Nijmegen"