Building a Feminocentric Canon

As the digital age ruptures all norms for traditional cinema, rendering everything into content fractured across any number of screens and apps, the logic of legitimacy and authenticity is entering a space of overwhelming uncertainty. In light of these transformations, this book positions Celine Sciamma as not just an important voice within contemporary cinema, but also as the foundation for a new vision of authorship and a reimagined canon of tomorrow.

Alongside uncertainty, Tom Knoblauch argues, is the promise of new conventions and perhaps even a new canon. In envisioning a new system of valuation for authentic expression with an open door to previously marginalized voices, Building a Feminocentric Canon: Celine Sciamma and the Inflections of Post-Auteurism proposes Celine Sciamma as a filmmaker whose works offer a bold challenge to the existing canon and a model of authorship that can form a new, revitalized canon.

Cinema's future, Knoblauch asserts, will exist in a space that is both post-cinema and post-auteur, eschewing what has often been an exclusionary politics of genius that has dominated the medium since the French New Wave. Through an embrace of the algorithmic age's ruptures, Knoblauch situates Sciamma as both a standard bearer and skeleton key to the conception of a feminocentric canon that need not be viewed as radical, instead holding the potential to form and embody a new tradition.