Tonguing Time: Transnational Feminism, Film & Festival

What can recent films representing women's experience in particular national and historical contexts contribute to our understanding of transnational feminist practice? While I am mainly concerned with use of varying temporal structures to represent differing and heterogeneous conceptions of female subjectivity by particular transnational women filmmakers, my question contextualizes these "traveling" films presented at international film festivals within a larger feminist concern of reconciling universal feminism with difference. In the films Water, Women Without Men and Where Do We Go Now? each filmmaker presents a multidimensional narrative of women's experience in various national and historical contexts. Expanding on the idea that these women auteurs are working within and against certain epistemological and representative traditions and their awareness of various conceptions of space, and particularly time, inform their work, I draw on Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope to analyze the narrative structures and various motifs in these films; in order to understand and hopefully help reformulate fundamental ideas about identity, society, feminism and culture, in today's epoch of transnational media relations.;It is within this larger context then, that this dissertation presents a multi-level chronotopic analysis of Indian-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta's Water (2005), exiled Iranian filmmaker Shirin Neshat's Women Without Men (2009) and Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki's 2011 film Where Do We Go Now? with a particular emphasis on time. I argue that for transnational theorizing, temporality emerges as a central concern in understanding post-post modern identity politics and questions of female subjectivity. I identify the chronotope of threshold and chronotope of carnival and grotesque as shared in order to theorize a revolutionary feminist temporality. I provide a narrative film analysis which places Water in pre-colonial India's and Hindu nationalism context; WWM is read in light of the Pahlavi regime's coup and post-Revolutionary Iranian cinema; and, WDWGN is situated within Lebanese experience of civil war as applied to a critique of universal perpetuation of cyclical violence. Recurring motifs such as door, road, public square, water, death, veil and festival are placed within the filmmaker and their filming context in each case. Carnivalesque aesthetics, including grotesque and folk realism are applied to these filmmakers' depiction of the widow's ashram, village "harem" and magical orchard -- as representing "women's time." Through identification of these shared motifs I argue that Mehta, Neshat and Labaki are not just telling narratives but because of their transnational positioning and awareness of their epistemological and discursive heritage they are engaged in a form of dialogue. Their fictional recreation of historically determined experiences of female subjecthood travel directly to the contemporary moment of feminism through film. Experience of these films at international film festivals creates a unique opportunity to theorize transnational feminist practice anew.