Introdução : Mulheres e Espaço no Cinema Contemporâneo

A segunda metade do século XX foi marcada por novas relações entre mulheres e espaço. O incremento do acesso ao mercado de trabalho e aos diferentes níveis de ensino foi uma importante conquista para as mulheres em muitos países, ainda que atravessadas por assimetrias de classe, raça e região. Um pouco por todo o mundo, enquanto lutavam por mais direitos sociais, laborais e sexuais, as mulheres foram não só abandonando, e ocupando, de diferentes formas, o espaço doméstico, como habitando, de forma crescente, o espaço público e mediático. Tais transformações não demoraram a se fazer sentir no cinema. Não por acaso, em diferentes filmes produzidos nos anos 1960 e 1970, vemos nas telas mulheres que flanam, trabalham ou lutam pela sua sobrevivência nas ruas de diferentes cidades. O espaço natural, muitas vezes usado como metáfora para a condição feminina, porque imbuído de valores tradicionalmente associados às mulheres, como pureza, emoção e irracionalidade (McDowell 1999), torna-se também espaço de contestação. As mulheres ocupam ao mesmo tempo os espaços de representação e de produção do cinema.

Na contribuição final deste número especial, a discussão se dedica a uma cineasta específica, não através do estudo detalhado de suas obras, e sim da sua relação com o contexto. Referindo-se a uma pesquisa que mapeou o cinema brasileiro entre 2002 e 2012 e concluiu que, nesses dez anos, nenhuma mulher negra foi listada como diretora de cinema, o artigo de Edileuza Penha de Souza reflete sobre a invisibilidade das mulheres diretoras no Brasil, e, especialmente, das diretoras negras. Para isso, examina o trabalho de Adélia Sampaio, a única mulher negra a dirigir filmes no Brasil na década de 1980, antes do desenvolvimento do que é entendido como cinema de retomadauma fase em que um grande número de mulheres cineastas completou 3 Tradução nossa; no original em inglês: "the question of authorship is an impossibly difficult one, since there is neither a straightforward relationship between the text's origins and what as readers we find within it nor a specifically female or feminist content or style that might be fixed and determined". 4 Tradução nossa; no original, em inglês: "the text's signature remains important". importantes filmes no Brasil (Nagib 2003). A carreira de Sampaio é contextualizada em relação a outras cineastas e Zózimo Bulbul, atualmente reconhecido como o pai do cinema negro no Brasil.

Mariana Liz Marina Tedesco
The second half of the 20 th century was characterized by the emergence of a new relationship between women and space. Easier access to the labour market, as well as to higher levels of education, were important victories for women in many countries, even if these were defined by obvious asymmetries in terms of class, race, and location. Across the world, while fighting for fairer social, workplace, and sexual rights, women not only abandoned and occupied the domestic space in new ways, they also began to inhabit, both public and media space in a more affirmative manner. It wasn't long before these changes had an impact on film. It is no coincidence that in many films from the 1960s and 1970s we see women walking, working, or fighting for their survival in the streets of different cities. Nature, which is often used as a metaphor for women because of the attributed values traditionally associated with the feminine condition, such as purity, emotion and irrationality (McDowell 1999), also became a space for contestation. Women simultaneously came to occupy the spaces of film representation and production.
In 1970's Brazil, there was, for the first time, a growing number of women directors (Holanda and Tedesco 2017). Not only have many of these women directed more than one film, but many are also still active. In Portugal, three decades after Bárbara Virgínia -active in the 1940s and conventionally known as the country's first woman filmmaker -female directors finally reemerged in the 1970s (Liz and Owen 2020). The growing number of women who have been playing important roles in the most diverse areas of the cinematographic industry is not, of course, restricted to these two countries.
This special issue of Aniki brings together six essays that discuss the multiple ways in which women and space can be examined in contemporary film. The articles featured here draw on the work of established feminist film texts such as Laura Mulvey's essay on 'Visual Pleasure on Narrative Cinema' (1976), as well as on theoretical contributions about women and space, including those by Doreen Massey (1994), Sueli Carneiro (2003), and Tanu Priya Uteng (with Tim Cresswell;2008) to reflect on the meaning of concepts as wide as feminism, posthumanism, and landscape. A major concern in these articles is the nature and quality of the spaces occupied by women on-and off screen in twenty-first century cinema: the landscapes we see on screen (the city and the countryside, urban and rural settings), and the ways in which films directed by women circulate in the global media context. These new approaches to the spaces occupied by women in film history and film criticism mean these fields are being reshaped to include those that have been marginalized -for instance, black women filmmakers in Brazil. With case studies on directors and films from the USA, Japan, Iran, Canada, and Brazil, and considering the latter's international projection and transnational circulation, the articles featured in this special issue also confirm Patricia White's approach to contemporary women's cinema as de facto world cinema (2015). This is a bilingual issue, with two articles written in English and four articles written in Portuguese. We have chosen to write a shorter, but equally bilingual, introduction, in order to better contextualize all pieces featuring in this issue. The articles can be roughly divided into two main groups: the first group of three articles is focused on specific films; the second, also containing three articles, looks more closely at particular filmmakers. In the first piece, William Brown examines feminism, posthumanism, and race in Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled (2017). Brown's detailed textual analysis draws connections between the novel on which the film is based, as well as previous cinematographic adaptations. Considering The Beguiled in a wider cultural context, which includes Coppola's previous work and other films on the American Civil War, Brown puts forward an argument about the masculine and white character of accepted versions of the Anthropocene, and highlights the importance of gender and race for debates on contemporary cinema and culture.
Maud Ceuterick then examines Women Without Men (Zanan-e bedun-e mardan, Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, 2009). Winner of a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the film is set against the 1953 coup d'état in Iran and tells the story of four women, stressing their political agency. Much like Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Dans la ville de Sylvia (In The City of Sylvia, José Luis Guerín, 2007), Women Without Men explores the ghostly nature of female protagonists. Ceuterick's analysis focuses on the way in which female characters come to occupy spaces traditionally reserved for men, thus challenging social convention, norms, and reality. Also on a specific film, although this time adopting the perspective of film genres, the following piece, in Portuguese, addresses the gendered nature of horror. Laura Loguercio Cánepa and Rodrigo Carreiro analyse The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015) and explore the ways in which the film constructs its female protagonist and places the social experience of women at the core of its narrative. Clearly drawing on the legacy of the American Gothic, Loguercio Cánepa and Carreiro argue The Witch is also very much a film about today's America. As such, questions of women, space, and cinema are examined in both historical and contemporary terms.
In the second part of the issue, the first two pieces consider the work of specific directors, namely Kelly Reichardt and Naomi Kawase, looking at two or more films shot by each of these directors. These two essays link the study of women in film with authorial approaches -a theoretical framework that has been challenged by scholars including Catherine Grant (2001), Rosanna Maule (2008), and Kate Ince (2017). However, as Sue Thornham has put it, the question of authorship is an impossibly difficult one, since there is neither a straightforward relationship between the text's origins and what as readers we find within it nor a specifically female or feminist content or style that might be fixed and determined (2019,195).
In fact, as Thornham goes on to argue 'the text's signature remains important ' (2019, 195), and these pieces show that to examine women and space in twenty-first century cinema is often to consider the spaces of film production and exhibition, side by side with the existence of the films as texts.
Cesar de Siqueira Castanha's piece on body, space, and the politics of movement in the cinema of Kelly Reichardt offers a close analysis of Wendy and Lucy (2008) and Meek's Cutoff (2010). The examination of these two films prompts a discussion about the increasingly close relationship between the human body and the landscape. For Castanha, the key tension in the articulation between individuals and the space that surrounds them is to be found in the issues of time, temporality, and rhythm, and more specifically, of mobility and immobility. Movement, or the lack there-of, is what defines the appropriation of the spaces occupied by the female protagonists of these two films -as they are, or are not, allowed to circulate freely through post-crisis America. Landscape is thus a proxy for the socio-political conditions of these characters, as gender comes to be defined in relation to categories such as work and occupation, as well as the (in)existence of family and other personal relations. Examining the work of Japanese film director Naomi Kawase, the following piece by Larissa Veloso Assunção is focused on two fiction films: The Mourning Forest (Mogari no Mori, 2007) and Still the water (Futatsume no Mado, 2014). Much like in the previous text, it is the relationship between the human characters and the space surrounding them that is analysed -except in this case the analysis is conducted through an eco-critical lens.
The final article in this special issue frames the discussion of a specific filmmaker not through the close analysis of her films, but in relation to biographical contextual information. Referring to a survey that mapped Brazilian cinema between 2002 and 2012, and which concluded that in those ten years no black woman was listed as a film director, the article by Edileuza Penha de Souza reflects on the invisibility of women directors in Brazil, and especially, on black women directors. To do so, it examines the work of Adélia Sampaio, the only black woman to direct feature films in Brazil in the 1980s, before the development of what is understood as cinema de retomada -a phase that saw a large number of women filmmakers complete important films in Brazil (Nagib 2003). Sampaio's career is contextualized in relation to the work of other women filmmakers, as well as in relation to that of Zózimo Bulbul, currently recognized as the father of black cinema in Brazil.
When proposing the topic of Women and Space in Contemporary Cinema for this special issue, our hope was that the topic was already undergoing an expansion process, in terms of both volume and diversity, and in different countries and higher education institutions. The range of texts featured here affirms our hope. A broad understanding of space (and other related concepts), as well as of the particular features that characterize contemporary film, has allowed us to bring these six articles together. Hence, this special issue of Aniki constitutes both an important step in gathering texts that are being written on this topic, and in stimulating new research in an area that still has a lot to offer.