Search Results

Tanaka’s fourth film, The Wandering Princess (Ruten no ōhi, 1960), is the subject of Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández’s chapter. Based on the autobiography of Saga Hiro (1914-1987), a Japanese aristocrat who married the younger brother of the emperor of Manchukuo, The Wandering Princess was marketed as a ‘women’s film’ by highlighting the three women who occupied key positions in the production: scriptwriter Wada Natto, star Kyō Machiko and director Tanaka Kinuyo. With this in mind, Armendáriz-Hernández examines Tanaka’s work against more prevalent representations of women and national history in postwar Japanese cinema in order to argue that the film and, crucially, Tanaka herself occupied a liminal gendered position within early 1960s Japanese cinema.

This chapter deals with the period of the mid-1930s, when Ozu had to face new challenges from the pressure of commercialism to the coming of sound technology. The main question addresses whether and how the director maintained his critical view of Japanese modernity while using mass-oriented genre formats. Firstly, the conversion to sound in the Japanese film industry is investigated in relation to how it influenced Ozu’s filmmaking. It is followed by a discussion of Ozu’s Kihachi series (such as An Inn in Tokyo (1935)) and woman’s films (such as Woman of Tokyo (1933) and Dragnet Girl (1933)), as an evidence of the director’s expanding generic interest from the middle class into the working class and women. These generic terms will be finally confirmed through textual analysis of Ozu’s films to examine how Ozu’s everyday realism, while working within the context of established generic formats (such as ‘failed moga’ narrative in woman’s film), remains as a critical view of the Japanese modernity.

This chapter studies noir's twin genre, the woman's film. While this genre's formal politics are quite similar to noir's, its focus on female identity entails a representation of female desire. The woman's film is the site of contradictory and antithetical functions: its narrative is structured by twisted plots and tortuous trajectories that often split into two opposite scenarios or styles—one representing the public/male/urban space and the other the private/female/domestic space. The genre's formal convolutions correspond with the contradictory discourse on postwar femininity, namely the opposition between the need to conform to normative femininity and the relentless effort by women to find new ways of being and new forms of desire. While the genre's proximity to noir's modern concerns cannot be underestimated, its gender interests lead to an excessive focus on the female body.

This chapter discusses hardcore films that, rather than adapting a specific literary text, set the sexual action in the nineteenth century. These films appropriate Victorian costume, customs, imagery, ideology, and other symbolism, revealing the rhetoric of transgression and sexual progressiveness employed by pornography in staging the Victorian for erotic appeal. These films illuminate the complex ways in which pornography and its consumers make use of “the Victorian” as a repressed yet perverse space populated by rigid class and gender distinctions, tantalizing thresholds and doorways ready to be crossed, secret domestic spaces ripe for sexualization, uptight but secretly sexual women, proper but perverse families, and other nineteenth-century sexual goings-on that pornography claims it has the guts to reveal. At the same time, these films situate themselves as heirs to a violent, racist, misogynistic, and pornographic legacy that can be erotically explored via the distancing mechanism of the Victorian.

This book examines film history with the goal of reframing it to accommodate new approaches to women's filmmaking. It brings together a wide range of case studies investigating women's work in cinema across its histories as they play out in different parts of the world from the pioneering days of silent cinema through recent developments in HD transmissions of live opera. It also tackles a range of conceptual and methodological questions about how to research women's film history—how, for example, to reconceptualize film history in order to locate the impact of women in that history. Furthermore, the book looks at the debates over relations among gender, aesthetics, and feminism. In this introduction, a number of interrelated themes and issues that can be grouped into four broad problematics are discussed: evidence and interpretation; feminist expectations of both contemporary and past women's filmmaking; the impact of women's film history on existing historical narratives and theories; and factors that determine the visibility of women's films and build audiences for them.

This chapter explores the cultural work that feminist critics performed in “inventing” the genre of the woman's film, and how genre impacts on feminist cinema practices in the current postmodern moment. It argues first that historically, genre was important in providing a useful pathway through which feminist film theorists could assert a critical position vis-à-vis dominant cinematic and critical strategies. That is, feminist critics used genre as a concept to invent a new genre—the women's picture or woman's film—thereby drawing attention to aspects of Hollywood melodrama that had been neglected by (largely male) critics. Secondly, through the examples Sister My Sister (Nancy Meckler, 1994) and Memsahib Rita (Pratibha Parmar, 1994), the chapter shows how some female directors have drawn on traditional Hollywood genres for feminist ends.

This chapter explores the relationship between feminism and women's film history in the context of 1980s Turkey. In discussing women's film history, the chapter includes not only the history of women filmmakers and the films they have made but also the link between the history of Turkish film industry and feminism. It begins with a historical overview of the feminist movement in Turkey and then examines its visible traces in film texts produced during the 1980s in order to argue that those films can be most productively understood as explorations of gendered power relations. The chapter then considers how the enforced depoliticization introduced in Turkey after the 1980 coup opened up a space for feminist concerns to be expressed within commercial cinema. It also shows how this political context gave rise to the newly humanized, more independent heroine that characterized Turkish cinema during the period, but suggests that the films were nevertheless made largely within the structures of a patriarchal commercial cinema.

This chapter offers a theoretical revision of auteur theory as a gendered concept, as well as reconceptualisation of women’s cinema and film authorship in relation to genre theory. It starts by raising several questions: is the much-debated concept of auteur equally applicable to female filmmakers, and if so, how, and in what cultural and industrial contexts? Does the female director working in genre film ‘transcend’ the industrial form in the way that the male auteur is said to ‘transcend’ genre? The first section of this chapter briefly explores the gendering of the politique des auteurs and discusses the implications of the ‘death of the author’ for feminist criticism. It then goes on to consider new approaches to film authorship, which offer a more dialogical, ‘interactive’ relationship to wider film cultures than the previously discussed perspectives. The remainder of the chapter builds on Jane Gaines’s (2012) argument on the interchangeability of the critical categories ‘women’ and ‘genre’, and the problematic question of feminist/authorial subversion of mainstream forms. The chapter’s central argument is that rather than subverting genres, some women directors explore their aesthetic and imaginative power.

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.

Celebrated in accounts of the American indie heyday of the 1990s through the 2000s, Killer Films is headed by the equally feted partnership of producers Christine Vachon and Pam Koffler. Drawing on interviews and other primary source material, White seeks integrates the story of Killer as a butch-lesbian woman’s company into the history of feminist filmmaking. This history includes not only the New Queer Cinema but trailblazing lesbian and transgender features such as Go Fish (1994), High Art (1998) and Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and ‘women’s films’ made by women (Mary Harron) and queer men (Todd Haynes).

As modern film audiences, we are well aware of the capacity of music soundtracks to perform a multitude of functions in film. Music, whether diegetic (a part of the world of the film) or non-diegetic (outside of the world of the film), has the capacity to create emotion or humour; to be narrative or symbolic; to create atmosphere or provide information about a setting; and in its various forms, music is integral in creating meaning about film characters. This chapter looks at the use of music in melodramas of the 1940s and the 1950s. Melodrama is a film genre that notoriously makes use of music for its emotional capacity and for its ability to generate meaning about female protagonists in film texts that have been historically labelled as ‘women’s films’ or ‘female weepies’. In this discussion, I am interested in the use of diegetic music in melodrama, the function of which appears more difficult to outline. Diegetic music is also crucial in providing semantic information about characters and in establishing time and place. Yet what links can be drawn between diegetic music and the representation of gender in melodrama?

This introductory chapter argues that the existing literature on classical Hollywood could roughly be divided into two sets. On the one hand, there were those scholars who had analyzed the whole period arguing for continuities and similarities in most domains, from production to plot structure, from stylistic procedures to viewing experience, and so forth. On the other hand, critical work on Hollywood cinema had more often approached the topic by selecting a specific genre and period and making a statement about the peculiar relations between aesthetics and ideology. Often focusing on a specific genre, many investigated especially 1940s and 1950s Hollywood cinema in relation to cultural, artistic, and social dynamics. Indeed, for four decades, film noir, the woman's film, and melodrama have been the locus of such innovative research—from the theory of the “progressive text” in the early 1970s to “cinema and modernity studies” during the last twenty years or so.

This chapter looks at Agnès Varda, who has been associated with films that explore the boundaries between documentary and fiction. She likes to blend reflections on the world we live in with a more aesthetic personal enquiry on artistic creation. The chapter focuses on Varda's most commercially successful film since the New Wave, Sans toit ni loi/Vagabond (1985). This is an important film on many counts: despite its small budget, it has been widely distributed, unlike many of Varda's other films which are still viewed as marginal in form and content; it has been extensively discussed critically for its original engagement with a non-linear narrative structure and as an example of Varda's unique method of 'cinécriture', which links writing and film-making; and it addresses important social issues and themes, including a meditation on homelessness and freedom in modern society, which marks the engagement of the film-maker with the real world. In addition, Sans toit ni loi is an example of women's film-making, which illustrates the role played by Varda in making the feminine perspective more visible. Since she has sometimes referred to herself as a feminist, the chapter also outlines some feminist Film Studies responses to Sans toit ni loi.

This prologue examines overarching issues about women's film history, feminism, and the researching and writing of film history. Foregrounding historiographic problems, it explores the researching and writing about women “in” and “as” “history” in the cinema century by focusing on the critical-historical approach, which deals with the problem of “the history of history” —the approach used to expose the never-neutral amnesias of traditional historiography and to counter its claim to objectivity with the inevitability of its “fictions.” The chapter discusses the concept of becoming historical others and highlights the impossibility of history's history by drawing on the case of Elvira Giallanella, an Italian director and producer never mentioned in previous accounts of Italian silent cinema but who suddenly made her way into feminist historiography after a 35mm print of her 1919 antiwar film Umanità was discovered in 2007.

Chapter 3 examines the question of gender in the cinematic conceptions of the citizen–devotee. The contradictions that traverse the nationalist ideal of femininity manifest themselves in the cinema of the 1950s and 1960s in the form of a conflict between two figures which have been central to the Telugu devotional genre—the sati and sakti—the good wife and the goddess. Hindu mythic characters of ideal wives provided the role models for imagining the ethics of good wifehood. In many of these films the goddess in her fierce and terrifying aspects, whose worship is usually associated with the superstitious lower castes, is dismissed as a sign of primitive nature. In later decades, however, there are perceptible shifts and lower caste village goddesses begin to make an appearance. Drawing on feminist film theory and anthropology of embodiment, I examine the implications of these thematic and generic shifts.

This introduction lays the groundwork for the book’s larger argument, namely, that study of film music’s collaborative production process changes our appreciation of the music itself. Although this book joins a larger conversation about filmmakers who exert creative control over the music in their films, this is the first book-length study to consider a producer’s relation to film music. Therefore, the introduction contextualizes the work of producers more generally and the four major phases of Selznick’s career. In particular, this chapter shows that Selznick’s commitment to film music is inseparable from his broader interest in the woman’s film, the prestige film, and middlebrow culture.

This chapter examines Shanta Apte's tactical use of the hunger strike to protest Prabhat Film Company's withholding pay for the days in June that she had not come to work. Beginning on the evening of July 17, 1939, Apte, a singing star, sat and remained on the bench a bench outside Prabhat studios in Pune—dressed in men's clothing—for two nights and one day and drank only salted water. Eventually her doctor and her brother succeeded in persuading her to return home. Apte's hunger strike is one of those small events out of which the vaster network of women's film history is constituted. This chapter first considers some tentative details pertaining to the major players in Apte's story, as drawn from various sources, before analyzing her hunger strike in the context of gossip, labor, and female stardom in pre-independence Indian cinema. It shows how labor and work become a breach of etiquette with precisely the moral labor of decorum that seemed to be violated when Apte went on hunger strike.

This concluding chapter reviews how the book has explored the ways in which Japanese cinema expressed a distinct vision of modernity by focusing on five aspects of the Japanese cinema in the 1920s and 1930s: Tokyo urban space, the middle-class film genre, modern sports, the woman’s film, and Kamata style. It has argued that modern Japanese subjectivity was reified by the Japanese themselves through popular culture, especially the cinema. Tokyo symbolically and materially figured as the capital of Japanese modernity, and the Shochiku Kamata Film Studios’ prolific output of films consciously emulated Hollywood filmmaking modes to express a vision of modern Japanese life. The book concludes with a discussion of the role that film criticism played in the discourses of Japanese modern subjectivity, from the nationalist turn toward exceptionalism to the postwar acceptance of Japan as a vassal of the United States. In particular, it considers the work of Tsumura Hideo to illustrate the contested nature of Japanese modernity.