Marleen Gorris: Practices of Resistance

by Sue Thornham

Overview

Dutch director Marleen Gorris is known chiefly for two films: A Question of Silence (1982), her fiercely feminist first film, in which three women meet by chance in a women’s clothing boutique and ritually murder its male owner; and Antonia’s Line (1995), her fourth film and winner of the 1996 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, which traces four generations of Antonia’s female ‘line’ in the matriarchal community she establishes in postwar rural Holland. Both have been extensively discussed, though rarely together, and appear on university syllabuses. Her second Dutch language film, Broken Mirrors (1984), and her five films in English, however, have received far less, and in some cases no critical attention. Using feminist reformulations of ideas of vulnerability and resistance, this first book-length study of her films examines their revisionings of narrative, time and space, and the possibilities they present of other narratives, other subjectivities and other relationships.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399527972
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	05/31/2025
Series:	Visionaries: The Work of Women Filmmakers
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Sue Thornham is emerita Professor of Film and Media at the University of Sussex. She is author of Passionate Detachments (1997), Feminist Theory and Cultural Studies (2001), Approaches to TV Drama (2004, with Tony Purvis), Women, Feminism and Media (2007), What if I Had Been the Hero? Investigating Women’s Filmmaking (2012) and Spaces of Women’s Cinema (2019). She is also author of numerous articles on feminist theory and film and television texts, and editor of three key collections, Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (1999), Media Studies: A Reader (3rd edition, 2009) and Film and Gender (2014).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Resistance, time and women’s filmmaking

1. Time and the politics of resistance

2. Imagining otherwise

3. Revisioning the literary past

4. Abject zones and liminal worlds

Conclusion: Other stories

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

A superb and lucid study of Marleen Gorris, whose work has not yet received the critical attention it deserves! Deftly integrating cultural history, theory and formal analysis, Thornham traces the message of female survival and feminist resistance that runs through Gorris’s powerful and inspiring films.

University of Oregon Kathleen Karlyn

Sue Thornham masterfully illuminates and explores the feminist filmmaking of Marleen Gorris. Through accessible chapters, she persuasively demonstrates how Gorris’ films embody a feminist practice of resistance, rooted in a shared sense of vulnerability and a deep commitment to care and community.

Anneke Smelik