This panel presentation brings together three scholars from varied fields to examine international depictions of aging women in film. While each paper has its own original argument, together they provide an overview of cinematic postmenopausal women outside Hollywood. The panel will acknowledge the patriarchal limitations on elder female characters in France, Italy, and Chile, but also provide insight into ways some recent films offer visibility to the depth and potential of female life in the “third age.” Our respondent will give both a frame for discussion and suggestions for further consideration.
Because the papers we have selected represent such culturally varied works, we have chosen to begin with Olivier Morel, whose “Writing-filming the aging body of oneself” provides a theoretical context for the notion of aging through autography and cinematography of the woman’s body. His paper will consider renowned filmmaker Agnes Varda’s “The Gleaners and I” in the context of Hélène Cixous’ writing about her dying mother and filmmaker Clair Simon’s “Our Body” (2023), positing that “Varda’s camera is not just filming the passing of time or fixing moments: she, like Cixous, is creating memories while collecting-gleaning (ramasser, glaner) them.”
Vilma Navarro-Daniels will enter the panel discourse from a different angle and continent to extend the conversation about potential narratives for elder women. Her paper “Shifting Narratives of Age in New Chilean Cinema analyzes Claudina, widowed protagonist of Nicol Ruiz Benavides’s 2020 film “Forgotten Roads.” She explores how the film presents widowhood and aging as a beginning that is not exempt from obstacles, disappointments, and even violence. Navarro-Daniels further argues that by depicting Claudina as a character who firmly embraces her newfound freedom, the film questions and deconstructs the discourses and cultural practices that define the meaning of aging.
In “Postmenopausal Woman: Screening Italy’s Aging Divas,” Lisa Dolasinki considers the actor’s role in this narrative pattern, examining the careers of two veteran actresses of Italian cinema, Barbara Bouchet and Sophia Loren. Her presentation looks at the casting decisions and performances of these aging Italian divas, recognizing how their opportunities and screentime have declined. In contrast to those patriarchal limitations, Dolasinki analyzes some shifting norms in a few recent films, which extend to them complex and dynamic roles enhanced by the actresses’ veteran status and age.
As a respondent, Shawn Maurer will elucidate connections in the arguments and ways they imagine a more visible future for aging women on screen.
The three papers speak to each other in compelling ways about the particular role of the aging female on screen. Existing scholarship provides ample evidence of the ways postmenopausal women are disguised or reduced to mere caricatures in popular American culture. (For examples, see Sally Chivers, The Silvering Screen: Aging and Disability in Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011) and Josephine Dolan and Estella Tincknell, eds., Aging Femininities: Troubling Representations (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). Yet this panel offers examples of a recent turn away from invisibility, farce, and mortality for “women of a certain age,” a turn appearing across national and cultural lines. With three 15-minute papers and a response of 5-8 minutes, this diverse panel will also allow ample time for the follow-up discussion among attendees that we expect these fascinating papers to generate.
While our CFP was broadly conceived to consider all ages and all genres of film and television, the majority (6 of 8) proposals we received featured issues surrounding females in later life. We chose to organize the panel around this apparently common topic of interest, and looked for proposals that showed analytical depth while seeking presenters from a variety of professional appointments. (We originally planned for four speakers, including the work of a graduate student from USC, but she accepted a different session opportunity.) Our speakers represent different disciplines, regions, and backgrounds, but their papers share a clear theme; we added a forum executive committee member as a respondent to pull them together in a way that would open up discussion.