Women’s Filmmaking in France 2000-2010

As the introductory essay to this themed issue, this article sets out the context of the publication, a ‘sister’ issue of Studies in French Cinema, 12: 3 (2012), whose articles, like that issue's, have been developed from papers given at a conference held in London in December 2010. After reviewing the trends and progress of women's film-making in France between 2000 and 2010, the essay discusses some recent reconsiderations of film authorship by critics (Rosanna Maule, Julia Dobson) for whom gender is a particularly important factor in that authorship, before setting out how haptic optics, embodied experience and ‘the cinema of the senses’ have been among the most important critical paradigms for films directed by women in France in the 2000s. The essay concludes by introducing the six articles that constitute the issue ‘proper’.