The Autobiographical Cinema of Women as Resistance

Self-naming and the Subversion of Stereotypes of Cinema of Patriarchal Hegemony

Abstract

Autobiographical films are films that propose a dialogue between the experiences presented on screen and the experiences of the filmmaker, or even the remnants of experiences that constitute her. They start from a need to exercise the right to speak, a speech often silenced by exercises of power that are recurrently patriarchal, monetary, racist, heterosexual, and colonialist. Represented from the outside looking in, subalternized women empower themselves and create forms of naming themselves as opportunities to be understood as social, complex, and heterogeneous subjects. Likewise, they open new reflections on the importance of the act of filming themselves as a political act of taking the power of narration over themselves and encourage this act to be exercised by other women. In the scope of the research project "Speculum: Filming and looking at oneself in the mirror: the use of self-writing by Portuguese-speaking documentary filmmakers" (EXPL/ART-CRT/0231/2021), this research aims to reflect on a set of works that may represent resistance to hegemonic commercial cinema and stereotypical ways of representing women. Through the exercise of filmic analysis, we intend to reflect on how certain works dismantle crystallized representations about the experience of being a woman, also in the intersectionalities that dialogue with this same experience. To this end, we will analyze works by Brazilian filmmakers: Tila Chitunda, Mayara Santana, Vanessa Santos de Oliveira, Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yaxapy and Sofia Pinheiro, as well as Yasmin Thayná and the members of the Coletivo de Mulheres da Pedra.