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In Guilty Pleasures, Alice Guilluy examines the reception of contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy by European audiences. She offers a new look at the romantic comedy genre through a qualitative study of its consumption by actual audiences. In doing so, she attempts to challenge traditional critiques of the genre as trite “escapism” at best, and dangerous “guilty pleasure” at worst. Despite this cultural anxiety, little work has been done on the genre's real audiences. Guilluy addresses this gap by presenting the results of a major qualitative study of the genre's reception, based on interview research with rom-com viewers in Britain, France and Germany, focusing on Sweet Home Alabama (2002, dir. Andy Tennant). Throughout the interviews, participants attempted to distance themselves from what they described as the “typical” rom-com viewer: the uneducated, gullible, overly emotional (American) woman. Guilluy calls this fantasy figure the “phantom spectatrix”. Guilluy complements this with a critical examination of the press reviews of the 20 biggest-grossing rom-coms at the worldwide box-office in order to contextualise the findings of her audience research.
A celebration of 100 of the best romantic comedies of all time – all with proper feminist credentials. From Barbie to Muriel’s Wedding and It Happened One Night to 13 Going on 30, this book will validate your love of romcoms and prove they have always had your back. We all love romcoms. They keep us on the edge of our seats, waiting for the two leads to fall madly in love. But what you may not realize is that they often contain profound feminist messages that have the power to re-shape how we think about sexism and women’s rights. In this fascinating guide, movie journalist and Bechdel Test Fest founder Corrina Antrobus reveals how romcoms reflect feminism in the modern age. These icon...
In Bion in Film Theory and Analysis: The Retreat in Film, Carla Ambrósio Garcia introduces the rich potential of the thinking of British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion for film theory. By so doing, she rethinks the space of the cinema as a space of retreat, and brings new insights into the representation of retreat in film. Presented in two parts, the book seeks to deepen our understanding of the film experience and psychical growth. Part I places Bion’s view on the importance of the epistemophilic instinct at the heart of a critique of the pleasure-centred theories of the cinematic apparatus of Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz and Gaylyn Studlar, proposing an idea of cinema as ‘thoughts i...
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Despite the widely publicised prejudice faced by women in Hollywood, since around 1990 a significant minority of female directors have been making commercially and culturally impactful films there across the full range of genres. This book explores movies by filmmakers Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig, including many which are still critically neglected or derided, seeing them as offering a new understanding of genre filmmaking. That is, like many other contemporary films but in a striking proportion within the smaller set of mainstream movies by women, this body of work revels in a heightened genre status that allows its authors to simultaneously address ‘intellectual’ cinephilic pleasures and bodily-emotive ones. Arguing through close analysis that these films demonstrate the inseparability of such strategies of engagement in contemporary genre cinema, Heightened Genre reclaims women’s mainstream filmmaking for feminism through a recalibration of genre theory itself.
In Guilty Pleasures, Alice Guilluy examines the reception of contemporary Hollywood romantic comedy by European audiences. She offers a new look at the romantic comedy genre through a qualitative study of its consumption by actual audiences. In doing so, she attempts to challenge traditional critiques of the genre as trite “escapism” at best, and dangerous “guilty pleasure” at worst. Despite this cultural anxiety, little work has been done on the genre's real audiences. Guilluy addresses this gap by presenting the results of a major qualitative study of the genre's reception, based on interview research with rom-com viewers in Britain, France and Germany, focusing on Sweet Home Alabama (2002, dir. Andy Tennant). Throughout the interviews, participants attempted to distance themselves from what they described as the “typical” rom-com viewer: the uneducated, gullible, overly emotional (American) woman. Guilluy calls this fantasy figure the “phantom spectatrix”. Guilluy complements this with a critical examination of the press reviews of the 20 biggest-grossing rom-coms at the worldwide box-office in order to contextualise the findings of her audience research.
Explains how precious fiction is to contemporary British fiction readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Draws on over 500 interviews with and questionnaires from women readers and writers.
Nancy Meyers is acknowledged as the most commercially successful woman filmmaker of all time, described by Daphne Merkin in The New York Times on the release of It's Complicated as "a singular figure in Hollywood – [she] may, in fact, be the most powerful female writer-director-producer currently working". Yet Meyers remains a director who, alongside being widely dismissed by critics, has been largely absent in scholarly accounts both of contemporary Hollywood cinema, and of feminism and film. Despite Meyers' impressive track record for turning a profit (including the biggest box-office return ever achieved by a woman filmmaker at that timefor What Women Want in 2000), and a multifaceted c...
In Feel-Bad Postfeminism, Catherine McDermott provides crucial insight into what growing up during empowerment postfeminism feels like, and outlines the continuing postfeminist legacy of resilience in girlhood coming-of-age narratives. McDermott's analysis of Gone Girl (2012), Girls (2012–2017) and Appropriate Behaviour (2012) illuminates a major cultural turn in which the pleasures of postfeminist empowerment curdle into a profound sense of rage and resentment. By contrast, close examination of The Hunger Games (2008–2010), Girlhood (2014) and Catch Me Daddy (2014) reveals that contemporary genres are increasingly constructing girls as uniquely capable of resiliently overcoming and adap...