#4: Mothers (as) grandmothers in recent European (small national) cinemas
Free in-person public lecture by our team members Dr. Andrea Virginás and Boglárka Angéla Farkas, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
20.12.2023, 6-8 p.m.
Goethe University Frankfurt, Campus Westend PEG-Building, Room 1G191
In spite of their peripheral situatedness and scarce(er) resources, 21st century European small
national cinemas are overrepresented as far as the moving image-based, narrative fictional
articulation of the ageing, childless, or infertile woman, fighting an ecological(ly) inspired
‘war’, is concerned. Our presentation shall examine the phenomenon along three subhypotheses.
- Older women might appear more frequently in decision-making positions insmall national film and television production cultures – such as the presently considered Danish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Greek, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Swedish, or the Romanian one(s) – and their involvement is essential with regards to ‘proposals’ to reimagine female existence past youth and fertility.
- These lonely women characters, performing small charities or sabotage actions on behalf of nature and the environment, are a 21st century actualization of the stereotype, also archetype, of the caring woman, possibly wise, old, a witch or a priest, even a deity – a way to engage with climate trauma through a powerful yet ‘cost-effective’ method, so important for scarce(er)-resource small national film and television cultures.
- The explicit childlessness and/or infertility, as well as the pronouncedageing process of the heroines might be linked to the grandmother theory advanced in behavioural ecological thinking. “A woman could not invest fully in her grandchildren if she went on having children of her own” suggested Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene in 1976, offering thus an explanation “of the evolution of the menopause in females” (Dawkins 115-116).
With the overall ageing of the population in a European Anthropocene context, the
tendency is more pronounced in the case of women – who simply live longer than men – and
it is even more evident in scarcer-resource small national contexts of grand/mothers. Thus,
these proposals to reimagine female existence in the Anthropocene through the stereotype of
the lonely ecological terrorist, the archetype of the wise old woman, and in the character of
‘mothers as grandmothers’ must be considered in detail.
Image credit: “Claire Darling”, directed by Julie Bertuccelli, produced by Yael Fogiel and Laetitia Gonzalez, 2018.
Here you can find a brief summary of the lecture written by Boglárka Angéla Farkas:
Related films:
Woman at War a 2018 Icelandic-Ukrainian comedy-drama film written, produced and directed by Benedikt Erlingsson, and starring Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir.
All copyrighted materials included on this website are used for educational purposes in accordance with fair use guidelines.
All copyrighted materials included on this website are used for educational purposes in accordance with fair use guidelines.