Punks, Poets & Valley Girls: Women Filmmakers in 1980s America

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Following the independent breakthroughs made by women filmmakers in the 1970s, opportunities unseen since the silent era suddenly opened up for (white, straight, cis) women in the studio system in the 1980s. The result was a wave of decade-defining classics by directors like Kathryn Bigelow, Amy Heckerling, and Penny Marshall, who brought a sensitivity to female subjectivity and experience hitherto rare in mainstream genre cinema. Simultaneously, women filmmakers outside Hollywood continued to challenge white, patriarchal notions of narrative, form, and subject as seen in the radical works of the New York downtown scene, the LA Rebellion, and the burgeoning New Queer Cinema movement. These artists—pioneers like Kathleen Collins, Lizzie Borden, and Donna Deitch—defied the Reagan-era status quo to bring their stories and experiences to the screen.
Aug 7—20