Film and the Politics of Aesthetics

The film Before, Now & Then (2022), directed by filmmaker Kamila Andini, tells the life story of a woman, Nana, and the women around her in West Java in the period from 1947 to 1966. As a work of historical fiction, the film shines a light on women’s subordination within a patriarchal world. This chapter offers an aesthetic analysis of the film to reveal how symmetrical compositions, camera movement and framing, music, set design, and costume come together to represent a certain worldview. The film breaks with essentialist binary gender oppositions to demonstrate the agency and power of the women depicted. The filmmaker’s aesthetic expression can be seen as a form of women’s activism for the promotion of gender equality.