Notes from Source: This feminist film poetics explores the centrality of film in experimental writing by feminist writers and the insurgence of poetry in films by feminist filmmakers. Focused on the iconic presence of the female body and face, these texts rewrite misogynist grand narratives, excavating them for feminist agency, represented by a crasis of poetic speech and prophetic vision, as in Christa Wolf’s Cassandra. These figures emerge as self-aware and self-theorising, embodying texts that I refer to as “auteurepoetics,” the writing of the creative self, drawing on H.D.’s Helen, who reads her identity in the (cinematic) writing on the wall. Opposed to autobiography and psychoanalysis, artists such as Anne Carson, Nicole Brossard and Sally Potter critique the elision of female identity into representation, drawing on the resistant strategies of Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, while also revising them, as Potter updates Woolf’s fear of film in adapting Orlando. I term the constant movement between modernism and postmodernism the paramodern, which constitutes a recognition of politicised formal experimentation in work of postmodern writers such as Brossard and Abigail Child, as well as H.D., whose involvement in film was marginalised. Arguing for a crucial continuity between minor and mainstream feminist work, I trace these developments with reference, in each chapter, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s uncanny feminism. Arguing that all the writers and filmmakers I examine are themselves theorists, and drawing on theorists Kaja Silverman, Vivian Sobchack, Rosalind Krauss, and Donna Haraway, I construct a “paramodernist politics” of the speculative present, in which these artists engage with the uncanny (which erupts as both the erotic and the popular) to suggest a theory of female difference and desire, from the mirror doubles of Maya Deren to Carson’s monstrous Nudes to Angela Carter’s cyborgic transwomen. Excessive bodies mark the imbrication of film and poetry in both mediums, as in the surprisingly poetic feminist uses of pornography in the mainstream with which I conclude. The “pornopoetics” of Fiona Banner, Dodie Bellamy and Jane Campion read back into my study’s insistent concern with visualising female desire by facing, rather than ignoring, patriarchy’s revenants.

Further Notes: Book Title: Script girls and automatic women: A feminist film poetics. ISBN: 9780494397039