In 2018, I had the opportunity to teach a course on Women Directors to undergraduate students as well as MFA Film and Media Arts students at the graduate level. This course combined undergraduate students, graduate students, and majors and non-majors. Both majors and non-majors within the course received a Diversity credit at the undergraduate level. Faced with this rather unusual classroom dynamic, I began the course by asking students about the women directors they were already familiar with. Most students named directors such as Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig, but they could rarely name a female documentary filmmaker even though documentaries continue to provide more opportunities for female filmmakers than narrative films.[1] One of the ways in which I approached teaching this course was to think about how both documentary and narrative filmmaking address ideas of visibility, agency, and labor. Rather than separating documentaries into a single thematic section within this course, I incorporated documentaries such as Trinh Minh-ha’s Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989), Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012), Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016), and Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places (2017) into multiple thematic sections of the course. Screening such documentaries has enabled me to incorporate as many media examples and readings as possible from marginalized and underrepresented groups, including women directors, Vietnamese writers, and LGBTQIA+ creators, among many others.

As I have integrated these films and readings into my classroom, I have also worked to create ways of thinking about the intersections between documentary filmmaking and feminist and women’s filmmaking that includes suggestions for how my students might be more inclusive in their own documentary media and filmmaking practices. In this way, the course also investigates how “women’s cinema” is constructed in relation to documentary, and encourages students to recognize the commonalities among these modes of filmmaking as a means of creating more possibilities for building empathy and empowerment, especially among audiences.

To this end, I argue that there are five modes of thinking about the intersections between women’s cinema and documentary: 1) troubling, 2) autobiography, 3) intersectionality, 4) labor, and 5) agency. In this context, the course focuses on the following questions: Who is making these films? Whose stories are being told? Who is speaking in these films? Who are these films speaking to? How do audiences gain access to these stories? This essay focuses on how these modes of thinking impact not only whose stories are being privileged onscreen, but also whose stories are being erased from documentary histories.

Dividing the course into topics such as “Troubling gender,” “Autobiography,” and “Intersectionality,” and using the work of theorists such as Lan Duong, Belinda Smaill, and Trinh Minh-ha, we study such themes as authorship, form and aesthetics, spectatorship and audiences, media industries, media production, and local, national and world cinemas as a means of investigating how these films call attention to questions of agency, labor, and power.[2] Following Judith Butler’s idea of “troubling gender,” we also discuss the difficulties and limitations of being named a “woman director” or “female auteur,” and we question the idea that a filmmaker has to be a reflection of “one’s own cinema” or “one’s own country.”[3] Analyzing and resisting how auteurism has traditionally been investigated in relation to documentaries, nontheatrical, and experimental media work, we also “trouble” the idea of gender in an attempt to address Patricia White’s question: “How can we move beyond paradigms that marginalize women’s film production as reference material, as specialized national or regional genre, or as exceptional anomaly (the female auteur)?”[4]

We begin the course by analyzing the contested meanings of both women’s cinema and documentary cinema by reading the work of Patricia White, Alison Butler, and Betsy McLane.[5] Central to the course is Alison Butler’s idea of “women’s cinema” as

Thus, we also discuss not only these conflicting ideas of women’s cinema and documentary filmmaking, but also what defines a female director, how women directors subvert stereotypes, and the political, formal, and aesthetic elements of women’s cinema and its audiences. Our first screenings of the semester include Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016) and Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places (2017) as a means of investigating the collaborative nature of making these documentaries. These screenings encourage students to explore the blurry boundaries between such roles as the cameraperson, cinematographer, writer, editor, and director, especially within their own filmmaking practices. In fact, inspired by this section of the course, a number of students created their own group focused on making a female-centered film with an all-female cast and crew. This student group made a fiction film focusing on a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative about female identity and subjectivity in Utah. In addition, they also made a documentary about the making of this short film that elaborated on how their division of labor on set as well as their collaborative spirit enabled a rethinking of these roles within both a theoretical and a production context.

In the next section of the course, we focus on “Autobiography” and look at how films such as Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012) not only raise awareness about social issues, but also focus on female subjectivity and self-reflexivity in that context. Examining how these films question the formal and aesthetic codes of documentary such as observational camerawork, interviews, and the voice over, we also look at how these films challenge the nature of truth and highlight the constructed nature of identity. Thus, we also read the work of Belinda Smaill and Kate J. Waites as a means of studying questions of documentary realism, female subjectivity, and the concept of the docu-memoir.[7]

Finally, in the section of the course that focuses on “Intersectionality,” we look at Trinh Minh-ha’s Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989) and the ways in which her filmmaking and writing address themes like transnationalism, borders, and liminal subjectivities. Seeing her work in relation to the idea that Asian cultural heritages cut across national borderlines, we also discuss how she questions the authenticity of both sound and image in documentary by using synchronous sound, voice over, close-up, etc. This section of the course also intertwines with the sections on “Troubling gender” and “Autobiography” by focusing on the “making and unmaking of identity.”[8] Reading Trinh Minh-ha’s own writing in “Speaking Nearby” and “Documentary Is/Not a Name,” we also discuss the idea that “there is no such thing as documentary—whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques” as well as the idea that documentary is “only an element of aesthetics,” “a set of techniques.”[9] We also read the work of Lan Duong as a means of further exploring issues of truth and translation in Trinh Minh-ha’s work.[10] Examining the ways in which Trinh Minh-ha’s work focuses on translation, the play between the oral and the written, and its commentary on authenticity and the nature of truth, students often put their own formal, generic, and aesthetic expectations of documentary into question when watching these films since they break these generic codes by using cinematic and aesthetic techniques that students have often never (deliberately) noticed within a documentary. Thus, many of the students made films or video essays that self-reflexively drew attention to these codes as a means of further challenging cultural and gendered expectations.

In addition, the course focuses not only on documentaries, but also fiction films such as Sweetie (Jane Campion, 1989) and The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), as well as television series such as Issa Rae’s Insecure (HBO, 2016–present) and Lena Dunham’s Girls (HBO, 2012–2016), and web series such as Sydney Freeland’s Her Story (2016) and C.J. Thomas’s Seeds (2018).[11] By intertwining fiction and documentary, film and television, students often see connections between these understandings of autobiography, intersectionality, labor, and agency across these seemingly disparate modes of mediamaking and integrate these practices into their own work. Using a hybrid approach to the classroom that includes both writing and film and media production also enables students to integrate both fiction and documentary techniques into their own work as they explore these ideas through the creation of essays, video essays, narrative shorts, and short documentaries.

As part of the course, every student is also required to give a short four to five minute presentation on a film directed by a female filmmaker as a means of introducing the class to films and directors they may not have seen or heard of before. Students are required to present a trailer of a women-directed film for in-class discussion. As part of this assignment, students suggested viewing such films as Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1991), Call Me Kuchu (Malika Zouhali-Worrall and Katherine Fairfax Wright, 2012) and Kiki (Sara Jordeno, 2017). Seeing even just the trailers for these films enabled students to rethink (and trouble) normative categories of gender, sexuality, and identity since they focus on queer, drag, and vogueing cultures in both local and global contexts. At the same time, focusing on films made collaboratively also allowed students to recognize the intersectionalities among these modes of filmmaking and enable them to think about creating more possibilities for building empathy and empowerment, especially among their audiences. In this way, students (re)consider not only whose stories are being privileged onscreen (and how those stories are being told), but also whose stories (and whose filmmaking roles) are being erased from these documentary histories.

Teaching this course more inclusively, including multiple forms of mediamaking and centering the course around intersectionality, labor, and agency also encourages students to recognize and analyze how both “women’s cinema” and documentary filmmaking can be troubled in this context. By drawing attention to the commonalities between these terms, students are able to rethink their own expectations of film history, form, and genre and create their own intersectional and collaborative filmmaking practices.

Sarah E. S. Sinwell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media Arts at the University of Utah. She has published essays in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Jump Cut, The Projector, Mai, and Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives.

1. Kate Erblund, “Documentaries Continue to Provide Far More Opportunity For Female Filmmakers Than Narrative Film,” IndieWire, August 31, 2021, https://www.indiewire.com/2021/08/documentaries-female-filmmakers-indie-women-study-1234661004/ ↑

2. Lan Duong, “Traitors and Translators: Reframing Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet, Give Name Nam,”Discourse 31, no. 3 (2009): 195–219, muse.jhu.edu/article/402306; Belinda Smaill, “The Documentary: Female Subjectivity and the Problem of Realism,” in Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, edited by Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, E. Kaplan, Patrice Petro, 174-183 (New York and London: Routledge, 2017); Trinh Minh-ha, “Speaking Nearby,” in Feminism and Film, edited by E. Ann Kaplan, 317-335 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Trinh Minh-ha, “Documentary Is/Not a Name,” October 52 (1990): 76–98, https://doi.org/10.2307/778886 ↑

3. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). ↑

4. Patricia White, Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015): 41. ↑

5. Alison Butler White, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2002), and Betsy McLane, A New History of Documentary Film, 2^nd Ed. (New York and London: Continuum, 2012). ↑

6. Butler, 1. ↑

7. Smaill and Kate J. Waites, “Sarah Polley’s Documemoir Stories We Tell: The Refracted Subject,” Biography 38, no. 4 (2015): 543–555, doi:10.1353/bio.2016.0004. ↑

8. Minh-ha 1990. ↑

9. Minh-ha 1990: 76, 88. ↑

10. Duong. ↑

11. On my syllabus, I also include an extensive list of additional screenings (such as the work of Maya Deren, Michelle Citron, and Sadie Benning) and additional readings from anthologies such as Linda Badley, Claire Perkins, and Michele Schreiber’s Indie Reframed: Women Filmmakers and Contemporary American Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers’ Feminisms: Diversity, Difference, and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), and Diane Waldman and Janet Walker’s Feminism and Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) to encourage students to think beyond the classroom and investigate other filmmakers that we didn’t have a chance to discuss in class. ↑