The Place of Women’s Filmmaking in an Interdisciplinary Architecture Course

Abstract

This paper explores the rich pedagogical potential of women’s filmmaking for interdisciplinary courses that explore the relations between cinema, architecture, and urbanism. While many courses on this subject tend to focus on white male filmmakers (e.g., Alfred Hitchcock, Jacques Tati, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang), in constructing a new version of this elective, I aimed to extensively incorporate women’s filmmaking to the curriculum, especially opting for exemplary films that provide a rich basis to discuss the construction of gender and cinematic space in relation to one other. The course pays sustained, rigorous attention to women as filmmakers, textual subjects, and spectators while discussing topics including domesticity; borders and movement; screening space and spectatorship; cine-museology; national and transnational spaces; animated worldmaking; and digital realisms. Taking the classroom discussions on The Babadook (dir. Jennifer Kent, Australia, 2014) and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (dir. Ana Lily Amirpour, US, 2015) as its case studies, this paper considers how the use of women’s filmmaking in an interdisciplinary course allows students to explore diverse strategies of cinematic representation that deconstruct and reshape gender in connection to the cinematic fabrications of space.