Panel on Works by Female Filmmakers

In a situation where access and opportunities to work are wide open, are women directors capable of creating novelty or aesthetics that are specifically female? This paper will discuss about how the film Marlina the Killer in Four Acts can be the answer to the challenge. Through the characters Marlina and Novi who are placed in the tension between molar and molecular identities, this film seeks to offer a way out of feminists stagnation which still places emancipation and equality as the main problem. Marlina, the main character of this film, is not described as an ‘ideal subject’, a subject or character in a film that generally makes the audience identify or sympathize. She is not a representation of the women we recognize in our everyday life. Through mise-en-scene and camera placement, we are constantly kept at a distance. We are invited to reconfigure the ‘new subjects’ manually, piece by piece, as a way to break out from female identities that are still confined by binary logic.