Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers
[NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT] Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers
By Katarzyna Paszkiewicz
About the book
Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers examines the significance of women’s contribution to genre cinema by highlighting the work of US filmmakers within and outside Hollywood – Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, Nancy Meyers and Kelly Reichardt, among others. Exploring genres as diverse as horror, the war movie, the Western, the costume biopic and the romantic comedy, the book interrogates questions of ‘genre’ authorship; the blurring of the borders between commercial and independent cinema and gendered discourses of (de)authorisation that operate within each sphere; ‘male’–‘female’ genre divisions; and the issue of authorial subversion in film and popular culture in a wider sense.
With its focus on close analysis of the films themselves and the cultural and ideological meanings involved in the reception of genre texts authored by women, this book expands critical debates around women’s cinema and offers new perspectives on how contemporary filmmakers explore the aesthetic and imaginative power of genre.
“Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers is a challenging, complex and critically intelligent work. It offers new perspectives on the cinema’s fraught relationship with women directors and their significant contribution to popular genre cinema from the war and horror film to the western and biopic. An important addition to feminist film theory, Paszkiewicz’s book is essential reading for anyone interested in the most recent debates around gender, genre and the achievement of women filmmakers.”
Barbara Creed, University of Melbourne, author of The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis