Documentary Film and Gender

Abstract

The relation between documentary films and images and concerns about gender issues is a multilayered one, and as complex as the very debate about how to define what a documentary film is. Speaking about gender and documentary means engaging with questions of aesthetics and politics, of social movements and of power imbalances, of the politics of representation, of the relation between reality and language, truth and objectivity, facts and fiction, of processes of signification and their effects on social reality and lived experiences. Gender is engaged in documentary films, or more broadly, in “factual filming forms” (which include other non‐fictional formats, videos, TV items, media that mix fictional and documentary techniques, etc.) at, at least, five levels: content, filmmaker, audience and reception, production and distribution, and questions of politics and aesthetics. Feminism and gender studies have been greatly concerned with the politics and ethics of images. In the decades between the 1960s and the 1980s, the relation between feminism(s) and documentary film was officially established, and interrupted soon thereafter. The years between the late 1970s and the late 1990s witnessed a gap between theoretical investigations and documentary film practice. It is only since the late 1990s that feminist critiques and reflections on documentary forms have found a new impetus.