Dorothy Arzner

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theresa Geller
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Film History ◽  
Women Directors ◽  
Scholarly Book ◽  
Gender Essentialism ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Women's Film ◽  
Extensive Body

In 1936, Dorothy Arzner (b. 1897–d. 1979) was the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America; it would be seventy-four more years before a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, would win an Academy Award for directing. To date, women remain profoundly underrepresented in the DGA, constituting about 7 percent of the guild. Within the context of such pronounced and continuing discrimination against women in this field, Arzer’s success in the industry is all the more compelling. Although other women directors predated Arzner, her productive and successful career as a Hollywood film director in the studio system remains unparalleled. Between 1927 and 1943, she made seventeen features, most of them critically well received and profitable. Her extensive body of work, along with inventing the prototype for the boom mike (by attaching a microphone to a fishing pole), certainly makes her an important figure in American film history. That she was a woman in this field, however, is often the first and most salient detail commented on in biographies and other literatures, despite the fact that Arzner herself resisted the importance others placed on her gender. Because of her unique career as a prolific female film director—indeed, only a handful of women have comparable careers to this day—she figured centrally in the recovery projects of second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist film historians looked to Arzner as a forerunner of the women’s film movement, spearheaded by filmmakers Laura Mulvey, Chantal Ackerman, and Yvonne Rainer. Accordingly, Arzner’s films were rediscovered, screened at women’s film festivals, and interpreted in terms of a female aesthetic—an aesthetic demonstrated across various forms of cultural production. Although the gender essentialism that informed the claims to a female aesthetic waned, interest in Arzner remained. Her films—mostly women’s melodramas—provide a counterpoint to the ways Hollywood cinema represents women as spectacle. More recently, Arzner has figured centrally in discussions of lesbian and gay film history and queer cinema broadly defined. Her “masculine” appearance and lesbianism—including a life-long relationship with choreographer Marion Morgan—continue to be of interest to many, including director Todd Haynes, who has spoken of filming a biopic of Arzner’s life. Subject of documentaries, creative work, and several scholarly book-length studies and essays, Dorothy Arzner, her life and her films, continues to fascinate spectators and scholars alike.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cáel M. Keegan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Trans Studies ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
And Gender

This book analyzes the filmmaking careers of Lana and Lilly Wachowski as the world’s most influential transgender media producers. Situated at the intersection of trans* studies and black feminist film studies, it argues that the Wachowskis’ cinema has been co-constitutive with the historical appearance of transgender, tracing how their work invents a trans* aesthetics of sensation that has disrupted conventional schemas of race, gender, space, and time. Offering new readings of the Wachowskis’ films and television, it illustrates the previously unsensed presence of transgender in the subtext of queer cinema, in the design of digital video, and in the emergence of a twenty-first-century global cinematic imaginary. It is in the Wachowskis’ art, the author argues, that transgender cultural production most centrally confronts cinema’s construction of reality, and in which white, Western transgender subjectivity most directly impacts global visual culture. Thus, the Wachowskis’ cinema is an inescapable archive for sensing the politics of race and gender in the present moment.

scholarly journals Space, Place, and Realism

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-154
Author(s):  
Sue Thornham
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film History ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Women Directors ◽  
Feminist Film Theory ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Feminist Film

John Hill has described the ways in which male-centered narratives of British “working-class films” of the 1980s and 1990s mobilize the idea of the working-class community as “a metaphor for the state of the nation.” Writing on films of the same era by women directors, Charlotte Brunsdon deems it more difficult to see these films as “representations of the nation.” There are, she writes, “real equivocations in the fit between being a woman and representing Britishness.” This article explores this issue, arguing that the history of British cinema to which Hill's chapter contributes is not only bound up with a particular sense of British national identity, but founded on a particular conception, and use, of space and place. Taking Andrea Arnold's Red Road (2006) as its case study, it asks what it is about this sense of space and place that excludes women as subjects, rendering their stories outside of and even disruptive of the tradition Hill describes. Finally, drawing on feminist philosophy and cultural geography, it suggests ways in which answering these questions might also help us think about the difficult questions raised by Jane Gaines, in a number of articles, around how we might think together feminist film theory and film history.

scholarly journals Digital opportunities for feminist film historiography

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-204
Author(s):  
Lisa Stead
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Film History ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
The South ◽  
Turn On ◽  
South West ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Women's Film ◽  
The University

This paper discusses some of the key methodological challenges emerging from the AHRC project Reframing Vivien Leigh: Stardom, Archives and Access, led by PI Dr. Lisa Stead at the University of Exeter. This twenty-month project examined how the legacies of screen star Vivien Leigh are archived and curated by a range of public institutions in the South West of England, taking audiences behind the scenes of local archives and museums. The paper reflects on how researching within rural heritage centres and volunteer run archives encourages the introduction of new voices and new case studies within women’s film history, by encompassing the archival labour of a network of volunteers, amateurs and professionals within a broader heritage sector whose historical actions and choices produce alternative kinds of women’s film history. It reflects in turn on the challenge involved in finding new ways to present these histories in interactive, digital and physical forms for audiences beyond the academy and to make meaningful impact from this kind of research.

A Major Contribution to Feminist Film History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Chich
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Women's Cinema ◽  
Women's Film ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Site ◽  
Formal Innovation

This chapter examines the centrality of the work of artistic duo Maria Klonaris and Katerina Thomadaki to the project of writing a feminist women's film history by focusing on the aesthetic and conceptual choices they made and on their thought-provoking contributions to feminist film practice. In particular, it considers Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel (Cinema of the Body). The chapter suggests that the female avant-garde film has, paradoxically, been marginalized by feminist film theory's focus on mainstream cinema as a site of patriarchal representation and spectatorship. It shows that Klonaris and Thomadaki's Cinéma corporel represents, for women's cinema, a strategy of dissidence. In form, content, concept, and approach, it calls for a revisitation of “film” outside the canon established in traditional film history. The chapter underscores the need to “heighten the visibility of women's contributions to traditions of formal innovation and explore how formal innovation enables women to enlarge discourses about women's subjectivity” and art.

scholarly journals Rewriting the stars: Surface tensions and gender troubles in the online media production of digital deepfakes

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110294
Author(s):  
Christopher Holliday
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Film History ◽  
Stanley Kubrick ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
Digital Asset ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Film Stars ◽  
Star Performers ◽  
Sophisticated Technology

This article examines a cross-section of viral Deepfake videos that utilise the recognisable physiognomies of Hollywood film stars to exhibit the representative possibilities of Deepfakes as a sophisticated technology of illusion. Created by a number of online video artists, these convincing ‘mash-ups’ playfully rewrite film history by retrofitting canonical cinema with new star performers, from Jim Carrey in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) to Tom Cruise in American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000). The particular remixing of stardom in these videos can – as this article contends – be situated within the technological imaginary of ‘take two’ cinephilia, and the ‘technological performativity of digitally remastered sounds and images’ in an era of ‘the download, the file swap, [and] the sampling’ (Elsaesser 2005: 36–40). However, these ‘take two’ Deepfake cyberstars further aestheticize an entertaining surface tension between coherency and discontinuity, and in their modularity function as ‘puzzling’ cryptograms written increasingly in digital code. Fully representing the star-as-rhetorical digital asset, Deepfakes therefore make strange contemporary Hollywood’s many digitally mediated performances, while the reskinning of (cisgender white male) stars sharpens the ontology of gender as it is understood through discourses of performativity (Butler 1990; 2004). By identifying Deepfakes as a ‘take two’ undoing, this article frames their implications for the cultural politics of identity; Hollywood discourses of hegemonic masculinity; overlaps with non-normative subjectivities, ‘body narratives’ and ‘second skins’ (Prosser 1998); and how star-centred Deepfakes engage gender itself as a socio-techno phenomenon of fakery that is produced – and reproduced – over time.

The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Television Programs ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Queer Cinema ◽  
Sexuality And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
Cross Dressing ◽  
And Gender

Queer media is not one thing but an ensemble of at least four moving variables: history, gender and sexuality, geography, and medium. Although many scholars would pinpoint the early 1990s as marking the emergence of a cinematic movement in the United States (dubbed by B. Ruby Rich the “new queer cinema”), films and television programs that clearly spoke to LGBTQ themes and viewers existed at many different historical moments and in many different forms: cross-dressing, same-sex attraction, comedic drag performance; at some points, for example, in 1950s television, these were not undercurrents but very prominent aspects of mainstream cultural production. Addressing “history” not as dots on a progressive spectrum but as an uneven story of struggle, the writers in this volume stress that queer cinema did not appear miraculously at one moment but arrived on currents throughout the century-long history of the medium. Likewise, while queer is an Anglophone term that has been widely circulated, it by no means names a unified or complete spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, just as the LGBTQ+ alphabet soup struggles to contain the distinctive histories, politics, and cultural productions of trans artists and genderqueer practices. Across the globe, media-makers have interrogated identity and desire through the medium of cinema through rubrics that sometimes vigorously oppose the Western embrace of the pejorative term queer, foregrounding instead indigenous genders and sexualities or those forged in the Global South or those seeking alternative epistemologies. Finally, though “cinema” is in our title, many scholars in this collection see this term as an encompassing one, referencing cinema and media in a convergent digital environment. The lively and dynamic conversations introduced here aspire to sustain further reflection as “queer cinema” shifts into new configurations.

Hollywood Can’t Wait: Elaine May and the Delusions of 1970s American Cinema

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Maya Montañez Smukler
Keyword(s):  
Women Directors ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Made In

Elaine May began her career as a filmmaker during the 1970s when the mythology of the New Hollywood male auteur defined the decade; and the number of women directors, boosted by second wave feminism, increased for the first time in forty years. May’s interest in misfit characters, as socially awkward as they were delusional, and her ability to seamlessly move them between comedy and drama, typified the New Hollywood protagonist who captured America’s uneasy transition from the hopeful rebellion of the 1960s into the narcissistic angst of the 1970s. However, the filmmaker’s reception, which culminated in the critical lambast of her comeback film Ishtar in 1987, was uneven: her battles with studio executives are legendary; feminist film critics railed against her depiction of female characters; and a former assistant claimed she set back women directors by her inability to meet deadlines. This chapter investigates Elaine May’s career within the lore 1970s Hollywood to understand the industrial and cultural circumstances that contributed to the emergence of her influential body of work; and the significant contributions to cinema she made in spite of, and perhaps because of, the conflicts in which she was faced.

Women as film directors in Turkish cinema

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 321-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hulya Uğur Tanrıöver
Keyword(s):  
Public Funding ◽  
Women Directors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Participation Of Women ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
Turkish Cinema ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Film Productions ◽  
The Public Sphere

Representations of women, or more exactly of gender, and the presence and works of women filmmakers constitute an important area of analysis for gender studies and feminist film theories. In Turkey the presence and the participation of women in the public sphere have been one of the important objectives of the Kemalist modernization project since the founding of the modern nation-state in 1923. However, despite the modernizing efforts to empower women in different spheres of life there was no woman director in Turkish commercial feature cinema until the beginning of the 1950s. Since the beginning of the 2000s the number of women directors has increased significantly, reaching a number well above that of the entire period before. This article investigates the reasons behind this increase based on quantitative data gathered from secondary sources and in-depth interviews with women producers and directors. It also questions whether and to what extent the increase in the number of women film directors contributed to the production of ‘women’s films’, based on a qualitative analysis of films produced by women directors between the years 2004 and 2013. The results show that in addition to technological and aesthetic changes in the industry, the increase in the availability of international and national public funding for low-budget independent film productions and the enlargement of the women’s movement allowed more women directors to enter the film industry. While half of the films made by women directors in the 2000s could be qualified as ‘women films’, the other half remained, largely due to market forces, within the conventions of popular or art house cinema.

Doing women’s film history: reframing cinemas, past and future

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 746-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Women's Film

Women and Film

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Fischer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Feminist Film

“Women and Film” encompasses numerous issues in academic film studies, including the histories of female practitioners in the industry; the works they produced; female audiences; female critics, historians, archivists, and theorists; and the portrayals of women on the movie screen. In the early years of cinema, women played a significant role in filmmaking (e.g., the director Lois Weber and the scenarist Frances Marion in the United States), but these individuals were soon forgotten as the industry became male dominated. Thus, it was not until the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s that the work of these pioneers was revived and documented. By then, of course, another generation of female filmmakers had surfaced internationally (e.g., Lina Wertmuller in Italy and Margarethe von Trotta in Germany). Not only were the careers of these artists studied, but also their works were analyzed in monographs and articles, often focusing on whether or not they evinced a specific female point of view or style. Female critics and theorists were also known in the silent era (e.g., H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) in the United States and Iris Barry in the United Kingdom), but it was not until the contemporary period that a field of feminist film history, criticism, and theory emerged. This comprised several subareas: readings of the images of women in film—be it flapper or femme fatale; studies of women in particular film genres; monographs on individual artists; analyses of iconic actresses; analyses of female audiences; and formulations of feminist theory. In the 21st century, the field has expanded further to correct certain prejudices and limitations. An early emphasis on the white woman has been rectified by studies of race and ethnicity. The latest scholarship has also moved beyond a concentration on the United States and Europe to embrace studies of women and film in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. Finally, while early writing on the topic privileged the heterosexual female (as screen subject and viewer), more recent writing has examined questions of lesbianism, bisexuality, and the transgendered body as applied to questions of women and cinema.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document