Law and film are two of contemporary society’s major discourses, two prominent vehicles for the chorus through which society tells and creates itself. Law and film both create meaning through storytelling, performance and ritualistic patterning, envisioning and constructing human subjects and social groups, individuals and “imagined communities”. Each invites participants -viewers, legal professionals, parties to legal proceedings and/or members of the public - to share its vision, logic, rhetoric and values. The emerging discipline of “Law and Film” is a new cultural field where complex relations between these two discourses can be explored: similarities, differences, analogies, dialogue and mutual influences on various levels. Legal and cinematic structures, techniques, images, symbols, ideologies, social functions and impact can be identified and analyzed in reference to each other, inviting conceptualization and comparisons leading to the deeper understandings of the multiple perspectives of interdisciplinary analysis.
This course is a study of law and film, focusing on cultural reflections and refractions of women and femininity in the highly influential, multi-layered dialogue between the two discourses. We will closely examine films from different countries and cultures (including Japan, Spain, and the United States) and different periods, each portraying and commenting on legal treatment of women and social construction of gender, gender stereotypes and roles. In their portrayal and criticism of socio-legal treatment of women, these films are “jurisprudential” texts as well as social agents filling judgmental roles; it is as such that we will study them. One of the course’s key themes will be victimization of and accusation against women in law and film. Analyzing the films, we will learn to reveal how film - like law - can blur women’s victimization by aggressors and by the socio-legal system, and how, at the very same time, it can highlight women’s “responsibility” for their own victimization as well as for that of others. The discussion of films is instructive in exposing how films influence us as well as in demonstrating how other discourses (i.e., legal discourse) influence us in parallel and similar ways.