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Since the early 70s, film theory has focused on melodrama as a particularly challenging genre. Feminism, in particular, has claimed a stake in re-examination of the form, raising many critical questions about the relation between gender and culture. This collection contains the most exciting contributions from nearly two decades of critical endeavor to come to terms with these questions. Christine Gledhill's overview precedes essays that range from classics by Thomas Elsaesser, Laura Mulvey, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith to newly commissioned perspectives covering Hollywood's output from the early 20s to the 60s. Home is Where the Heart Is constitutes invaluable reading for anyone interested in ...
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In the past stars have been studied as cogs in a mass entertainment industry selling desires and ideologies. But since the 1970s, new approaches have reopened debate, as film and cultural studies try to account for the active role of the star in producing meanings, pleasures, and identites for a diversity of audiences. Stardom brings together for the first time some of the major writing of the last decade which seeks to understand the phemomenon of stars and stardom. Gathered under four headings - The System, Stars and Society, Performers and Signs, Desire and Politics - these essays represent a range of approaches drawn from film history, sociolgy, textual analysis, audience research, psychoanalysis, and cultural politics. They raise important issues about the politics of representation and the cultural limitations and possibilities of stars.
This remarkable collection uses genre as a fresh way to analyze the issues of gender representation in film theory, film production, spectatorship, and the contexts of reception. With a uniquely global perspective, these essays examine the intersection of gender and genre in not only Hollywood films but also in independent, European, Indian, and Hong Kong cinemas. Working in the area of postcolonial cinema, contributors raise issues dealing with indigenous and global cinemas and argue that contemporary genres have shifted considerably as both notions of gender and forms of genre have changed. The volume addresses topics such as the history of feminist approaches to the study of genre in film...
This anthology of specially commissioned essays introduces students to some of the central questions and debates which have concerned the development of Film Studies. It differs from other readers in that it does not start with the intellectual history of the evolution of film theory, or the history and criticism of film, but with the problems and questions that confront us now. The contributors begin with questions that are central to the field, asking what we need to know and what theories, concepts, and methods help us to know. These questions that confront the discipline at the beginning of a new century, either reframe or depart from the concerns of the 1970s when film first became an a...
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Research into and around women's participation in cinematic history has enjoyed dynamic growth over the past decade. A broadening of scope and interests encompasses not only different kinds of filmmaking--mainstream fiction, experimental, and documentary--but also practices--publicity, journalism, distribution and exhibition--seldom explored in the past. Cutting-edge and inclusive, Doing Women's Film History ventures into topics in the United States and Europe while also moving beyond to explore the influence of women on the cinemas of India, Chile, Turkey, Russia, and Australia. Contributors grapple with historiographic questions that cover film history from the pioneering era to the presen...
Deals with feminism and melodrama
For too long melodrama has been associated with outdated and morally simplistic stereotypes of the Victorian stage; for too long film studies has construed it as a singular domestic genre of familial and emotional crises, either subversively excessive or narrowly focused on the dilemmas of women. Drawing on new scholarship in transnational theatrical, film, and cultural histories, this collection demonstrates that melodrama is a transgeneric mode that has long spoken to fundamental aspects of modern life and feeling. Pointing to melodrama’s roots in the ancient Greek combination of melos and drama, and to medieval Christian iconography focused on the pathos of Christ as suffering human bod...
What was the relation between gender and nation when the waiting woman was displaced by the mobile woman and homes were flattened by bombs? What happened to notions of femininity, sexual difference and class as women moved into the workplace and donned dungarees, military uniforms and utility clothing?