Anna Backman Rogers

University of Gothenburg, Department of cultural sciences/gender studies, Faculty Member

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I graduated from the University of Edinburgh, UK in 2011 with a PhD in Film Studies. I previously worked at the University of Groningen, Netherlands and the University of Stockholm, Sweden. I currently hold the position of Professor of Aesthetics and Culture specialising in Feminist Theory at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

I am the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and The Crisis Image (Edinburgh University Press, 2015); Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (Berghahn 2018); and Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden's 'Wanda' (1970) (Punctum Books, 2021)

I am the co-editor with Laura Mulvey of Feminisms (Amsterdam University Press, 2015) and the co-editor with Boel Ulfsdotter of Female Authorship and the Documentary Image: Theory, Practice and Aesthetics, and Female Agency and Documentary Strategies: Subjectivities, Identity, and Activism (both with Edinburgh University Press, 2018)

I am the co-founder and editor in chief, with Anna Misiak, of the online academic feminist journal MAI: FEMINISM AND VISUAL CULTURE (www.maifeminism.com)

I am currently preparing a monograph on Lynne Ramsay and the philosophy of Julia Kristeva (Berghahn 2024) and I am writing the BFI Classics volume on Peter Weir's 'Picnic at Hanging Rock' (Bloomsbury, 2022). I am also co-editing with Laura Mulvey a book of conversations with feminist practitioners and scholars (Bloomsbury, 2024).

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Still Life

This book is dedicated in loving memory to my mum, Eva Christina Backman Rogers… who once told me... more

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‘Lena Dunham’s ‘Girls’: Can-Do Girls, Feminist Killjoys and Women Who Make Bad Choices

Lena Dunham’s series ‘Girls’ is a cultural phenomenon. Dunham herself writes the majority of the ... more Lena Dunham’s series ‘Girls’ is a cultural phenomenon. Dunham herself writes the majority of the show, has directed some of the episodes and plays the main character Hannah Horvath. She has stated that she wants to investigate a neo-liberal and postfeminist world in which young women are coming of age in the era of social networking, readily available medication for depression and financial crisis as well as the significance that: ‘this is the first generation who can expect to do less well than their parents did’ . The show examines, then, the detrimental effects of this climate and, as such, can be read as a critique of postfeminist thinking. Having previously only made two feature length films ‘Creative Non-Fiction’ (2009) and ‘Tiny Furniture’ (2010), Dunham was championed by filmmaker and producer Judd Apatow, famous for controversial films that investigate masculinity in crisis. Much has been made of Dunham’s artistic and middle-class background as well as her link to Apatow, w...

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American Independent Cinema

Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but... more Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema which often explores the rite of passage by explicitly drawing on American cinematic heritage, from the teen movie to the western, American independent films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis, offering a subversive engagement with more traditional modes of representation. Examining films by Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, this study sets forth that American indie films offer the viewer an ‘art experience’ within the confines of commercial, narrative cinema by engaging with cinematic time (as a mode of philosophical thought) and foregrounding the inherent ‘crisis’ of the cinematic image (as the mode of being as change). The subject of this book is how certain American independent films appropriate ritual as a kind of power of the false in order to throw into crisis images – such as the cliché – that pertain to truth via collective comprehension. In his study of genre, Steve Neale (2000) has outlined how certain images and sound tracks can function ritualistically and ideologically; cinema, according to Neale, both creates a horizon of expectations for an audience and also draws upon existing stratifications and categories in order to shore up established identities and modes of thought.

Disconnection Notices: Interview with Miranda July

Film Quarterly, 2011

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ABANDONING HAPPINESS FOR LIFE: MOURNING AND FUTURITY IN MAJA BORG’S FUTURE MY LOVE (2012)

ABANDONING HAPPINESS FOR LIFE: MOURNING AND FUTURITY IN MAJA BORG’S FUTURE MY LOVE (2012), 2018

A dilemma, posed as a question, lies at the heart of Maja Borg’s poetic and alternatively distrib... more A dilemma, posed as a question, lies at the heart of Maja Borg’s poetic and alternatively distributed documentary film, Future My Love (2012): why do we labour so hard to sustain relationships that are fundamentally deleterious and corrosive to our wellbeing?[1] The detrimental bonds on which the film focuses are those that maintain our connection to an economic system that has thrown us into an acute state of crisis and the stillborn emotions that keep us attached hopefully to a romantic partnership that we have already outgrown; this elision imbricates and implicates the personal in the political.[2] Indeed, Borg herself has stated that it was through the lens of her own personal loss that she was able to explore and to question our global relationship to an economic system that is fast failing us: ‘(t)he question that kept coming back to me was: if we know what is wrong with the economy and we know how to change a lot of what is wrong, why don’t we? I needed something in the film to explore that issue: why we don’t change the fundamentals of a relationship when it is hurting us. So, that’s when I brought in my experience of love – I needed something that was true to me, that I understood personally and that I could explain and make universal’. (in Fielder 2012) In the film’s opening moments, Borg addresses, by way of dedication, the idealistic lost love of her life (actress and activist Nadya Cazan), thus: ‘my only way to tell you what I could not then is to try to understand it your way: “Our global economy simply does not work. We have to find something new”. It is equally hard to learn to live without you.’ Through a prism of painful and, at times, unbearable emotion, and by blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, the real and the fictional, this film urges us to imagine ourselves into a future in which it might be possible to live otherwise; but this requires us to abandon the future we have already imagined and, as the film evinces through archival imagery from the 1950s or golden age of capitalism, imaged ourselves into. Moreover, the intimate nature of the voiceover that is such a prominent part of the film’s poetics – namely, its address from the first person to the second person – works to foreground reparative labour: there is a form of power in naming loss. By drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed on the cultural politics of emotion, Judith Butler’s work on the act of mourning, and the writing of Eva Illouz, Luce Irigaray, and Alain Badiou on love (in the age of late capitalism), I set forth a (mostly) queer reading of Borg’s film as an intervention into traditional narratives of happiness. More specifically, the work of Ahmed and Berlant in particular engages directly with the notion of futurity as a promise within a critical context – a context that was powerfully and controversially outlined already by Lee Edelman in No Future (2005). In contrast to Edelman, though, Berlant and Ahmed do not call for us to reject the future, but to rethink the place from which hopefulness over the future emanates. As such, their work seeks to un-ground and destabilise those life scripts to which we so readily subscribe and to open up new ways of imagining and imaging life and the notion of futurity. In short, this article contends that Future My Love pleads with us to abandon ‘happiness for life’ (Ahmed 2010: 75), to forsake an ideology that is invested in a highly specific conception of what it means to flourish and to thrive, to mourn and name our losses, and to think about the future creatively and without cynicism.

Liminal Spaces, Lesbian Desire and Veering off Course in Todd Haynes’ Carol, by Anna Backman Rogers

Liminal Spaces, Lesbian Desire and Veering off Course in Todd Haynes’ Carol, by Anna Backman Rogers, 2022

Available in Film and Domestic Space Architectures, Representations, Dispositif Edited by Stefano... more

Not Because My Heart is Gone; Simply The Other Side: Francesca Woodman's Relational and Ephemeral Subjectivity at the Limit of The Image

Francesca Woodman's personal history, more specifically her suicide at the age of only twenty-two... more Francesca Woodman's personal history, more specifically her suicide at the age of only twenty-two years old, is often used as an heuristic framework through which her highly intricate and complex photographic work is read retroactively. This essay argues that such readings fundamentally miss Woodman's fascination with liminality and states of transition precisely in order to contain her fundamentally ambiguous images within a generic narrative that serves to cast her in the role of a tragic, female artist. Backman Rogers wholly rejects this sexist conflation of the artist's biography with her art.

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Books by Anna Backman Rogers

Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden's Wanda (1970)

Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden's Wanda (1970), 2021

There is indeed a “miracle” in the 1970 film Wanda. This film has survived, despite decades of ne... more There is indeed a “miracle” in the 1970 film Wanda. This film has survived, despite decades of neglect, to emerge into the fuliginous light of an era that may just be ready to strain at grasping its harsh and brutal truths — truths that reveal the imbrication of the psychic in the social and the experiential in political structures. Barbara Loden’s film dares to suggest that the social and ethical functions of art should not necessarily be redemptive – that salvation is a cheap and spurious form of consolation that few can afford in this world. This film, made by a woman who knew all too well what it means to be defined through and by her material circumstances (and her relationships to men), and that is so relentlessly ferocious in its refusal to assuage and comfort the viewer, has always been a form of future feminism. Wanda does not brook the comforts of positivity, of aspiration, or even the luxury of selfhood.

This film, Still Life contends, is so radical in its feminist-anti-capitalist politics of refusal that we are still struggling to keep up with it. It delineates precisely how the personal is political and why this matters now more than ever. Wanda, a film about a woman who refuses to be saved or to save herself, who lacks the means and energy to alter anything in her life, who lives in a permanent state of blockage, impasse and failure is, as this publication suggests, the film of our contemporary moment.

Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure

Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, 2019

All too often, the movies of Sofia Coppola have been dismissed as “all style, no substance.” But ... more All too often, the movies of Sofia Coppola have been dismissed as “all style, no substance.” But such an easy caricature, as this engaging and accessible survey of Coppola’s oeuvre demonstrates, fundamentally miscontrues what are rich, ambiguous, meaningful films. Drawing on insights from feminist philosophy and psychology, the author here takes an original approach to Coppola, exploring vital themes from the subversion of patriarchy in The Virgin Suicides to the “female gothic” in The Beguiled. As Rogers shows, far from endorsing a facile and depoliticized postfeminism, Coppola’s films instead deploy beguilement, mood, and pleasure in the service of a robustly feminist philosophy.

American Independent Cinema Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image

American Independent Cinema Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image, 2015

Examines crisis, transition and metamorphosis in American independent cinema Anna Backman Rogers... more Examines crisis, transition and metamorphosis in American independent cinema

Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema which often explores the rite of passage by explicitly drawing on American cinematic heritage, from the teen movie to the western, American independent films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis, offering a subversive engagement with more traditional modes of representation.

Examining films by Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola, this study sets forth that American indie films offer the viewer an ‘art experience’ within the confines of commercial, narrative cinema by engaging with cinematic time (as a mode of philosophical thought) and foregrounding the inherent ‘crisis’ of the cinematic image (as the mode of being as change).

Key features

Case studies include: The Virgin Suicides, Elephant, Dead Man, Last Days, Somewhere and Broken Flowers
Argues for the relevance and importance of American indie cinema as a mode of ‘art’ cinema that offers a challenging viewing experience to a broad audience
Engages with and develops on recent scholarship on American independent film from a formal perspective
Situates analysis of indie film within the context of American generic cinematic (and historical) traditions

Feminisms Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures

Feminisms Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, 2015

This collection brings together an exciting group of established and emerging scholars to conside... more This collection brings together an exciting group of established and emerging scholars to consider the history of feminist film theory and new developments in the field and in film culture itself. Opening the field up to urgent questions and covering such topics as new experimental film, the digital image, consumerism, activism, and pornography, Feminisms will be essential reading for scholars of both film and feminism.
Available Open Access.

Female Authorship and the Documentary Image Theory, Practice and Aesthetics

Female Authorship and the Documentary Image Theory, Practice and Aesthetics, 2018

Examines the politics of female authorship in relation to contemporary documentary practices Thi... more Examines the politics of female authorship in relation to contemporary documentary practices

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and Documentary Strategies, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender.

Female Authorship and the Documentary Image engages with the relationship between female documentary filmmakers and the documentary image. With a thematic focus on the documentary image directly, within the more traditional arenas of theory and practice and especially within the context of gaze and author theory, the book also considers more philosophical questions of aesthetics, home and identity within the contexts of female subjectivity, globalisation and trauma. The book also includes a dialogue on two key photographers, Hannah Wilke and Jo Spence, as well as an interview with Taiwanese documentary filmmakers Singing Chen and Wuna Wu.

Contributors

Anna Backman Rogers, University of Gothenburg
Chris Berry, King’s College London
Elizabeth Coffman, Loyola University Chicago
Sharon Daniel, University of California, Santa Cruz
Lisa French, RMIT University
Gabrielle McNally, Northern Michigan University
Sophie Mayer, Author and Journalist
Rona Murray, Lancaster University
Annelies van Noortwijk, University of Groningen
Aparna Sharma, UCLA
Belinda Smaill, Monash University
Erica Stein, Marymount Manhattan College
Catherine Summerhayes, Australian National University (ANU)
Boel Ulfsdotter, Independent Scholar
Nakane Wakae, Nagoya University

Female Agency and Documentary Strategies Subjectivities, Identity and Activism

Female Agency and Documentary Strategies Subjectivities, Identity and Activism, 2018

Examines the politics of female authorship in relation to contemporary documentary practices Thi... more Examines the politics of female authorship in relation to contemporary documentary practices

This book, like its twin volume Female Authorship and the Documentary Image, centres on pressing issues in relation to female authorship in contemporary documentary practices. Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender.

Female Agency and Documentary Strategies centres on how self-portraiture and contemporary documentary manifestations such as blogging and the prevalent usage of social media shape and inform female subjectivities and claims to truth. The book examines the scope of authorship and agency open to women using these technologies as a form of activism, centring on notions of relationality, selfhood and subjectivity, and includes interviews with Hong Kong based activist filmmaker and scholar Vivian Wenli Lin and Spanish documentarist Mercedes Alvarez.

Contributors

Anna Backman Rogers, University of Gothenburg
Linda C. Ehrlich, Writer, Teacher, Editor
Kerreen Ely-Harper, Creative Media Researcher and Filmmaker
Kristopher Fallon, University of California, Davis
Cadence Kinsey, University of York
Carla Maia, Centro Universitário UNA
Lidia Merás, Film Historian and Researcher
Anna Misiak, Falmouth University
Kim Munro, Filmmaker, Artist and Teacher
Kate Nash, University of Leeds
John A. Riley, Woosong University
Monica Titton, University of Applied Arts and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
Boel Ulfsdotter, Independent Scholar
Gail Vanstone, York University, Toronto

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