Marleen Gorris: Practices of Resistance
By (Author) Sue Thornham
Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh University Press
7th October 2025
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
Hardback
170
Width 138mm, Height 216mm
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.
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).