Gendered Frames, Embodied Cameras: Varda, Akerman, Cabrera, Calle, and Maïwenn is the first book to link these five filmmakers together through an analysis of the relationship between filming one’s own body and the creative body. Through engaged artistic practices, these female filmmakers turn the camera to their bodies as a way to show the process of artistic creation and to produce themselves as filmmakers and artists in their work from 1987–2009. By making visible their bodies, they offer a wider range of representation of women in French film. Through avant-garde form, in which tangible corporeal elements are made image, they transform representational content and produce new cinematic bodies with the power to influence signifying practices in contemporary French culture. By rendering visible their artistic practice and praxis and their camera in their work—reflexive practices that also unite these filmmakers—these women also visually claim the role of filmmaker and creative subject. Thus they establish their authority in a film industry in which women’s participation and recognition of their achievements have historically been lower than that of their male counterparts.

Product Description: Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film examines the transformation of the stereotypical 'tragic mulatto' from tragic to empowered, as represented in independent and mainstream cinema. The author suggests that this transformation is through the character's journey towards African-based religions...read more

Looks at the role of women and violence in horror films, covering over two hundred films in the genre

Product Description: Between the end of the Civil War (1949) and the colonels' military coup (1967) Greece underwent tremendous political, economic, and social transformations which influenced gender identities and relations. During the same period, Greece also witnessed an unparalleled bloom in cinema productions...read more

An undying procession of sons of Dracula and daughters of darkness has animated the horror film genre from the beginning. Indeed, in this pioneering exploration of the cinema of fear, Barry Keith Grant and twenty other film critics posit that horror is always rooted in gender, particularly in anxieties about sexual difference and gender politics. The book opens with the influential theoretical works of Linda Williams, Carol J. Clover, and Barbara Creed. Subsequent essays explore the history of the genre, from classic horror such as King Kong and Bride of Frankenstein to the more recent Fatal Attraction and Bram Stoker's Dracula. Other topics covered include the work of horror auteurs David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and George Romero; the Aliens trilogy; and the importance of gender in relation to horror marketing and reception. Other contributors include Vera Dika, Thomas Doherty, Lucy Fischer, Christopher Sharrett, Vivian Sobchack, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood. Writing across a full range of critical methods from classic psychoanalysis to feminism and postmodernism, they balance theoretical generalizations with close readings of films and discussions of figures associated with the genre. The Dread of Difference demonstrates that horror is hardly a uniformly masculine discourse. As these essays persuasively show, not only are horror movies about patriarchy and its fear of the feminine, but they also offer feminist critique and pleasure.

Product Description: Commedia all'italiana, or Comedy, Italian style, became popular at a time of great social change. This book, utilizing comedies produced in Italy from 1958-70, examines the genre's representation of gender in the everyday spaces of beaches and nightclubs, offices, cars, and kitchens, through the exploration of key spatial motifs...read more

Product Description: The Weimar period in Germany was a time of radical change, when the traditions and social hierarchies of Imperial Germany crumbled, and a young, deeply conflicted republic emerged. Modernity brought changes that reached deep into the most personal aspects of life, including a loosening of gender roles that opened up new freedoms and opportunities to women...read more

Product Description: Filmic constructions of war heroism have a profound impact on public perceptions of conflicts. Here, contributors examine the ways motifs of gender and heroism in war films are used to justify ideological positions, shape the understanding of the military conflicts, support political agendas and institutions, and influence collective memory...read more

Product Description: War has been depicted in cinema for more than a century, from early silent films to more recent blockbusters such as Saving Private Ryan and Lone Survivor. Most war films, especially combat films, are about men engaged in battle. But while Hollywood has reinforced the cultural stereotype of war as a man’s job, women have not been completely invisible in many of these films, whether waiting for their men to return home or standing shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts on the battlefield...read more

Product Description: This book explores the relationship among gender, desire, and narrative in 1940s woman’s films which negotiate the terrain between public history and private experience. The woman’s film and other form of cinematic melodrama have often been understood as positioning themselves outside history, and this book challenges and modifies that understanding, contextualizing the films it considers against the backdrop of World War II...read more

Product Description: Focusing on Irish-made films from 1960 to the 1990s, Scarlata considers the many ways in which filmmakers present the country as "occupied." Exploring Ireland's past in relation to its present, these films become a mode of postcolonial historiography, and, Scarlata argues, they are an important component in the re-evaluation of what constitutes political cinema and political resistance...read more

Product Description: In the 1950s, science fiction invasion films played a complicated part in supporting and criticizing Cold War ideologies. By reading these invasion narratives as performances of middle-class, white Americans' excitement and anxiety about social and political issues, George shows how they often played out as another round in the battle of the sexes...read more

Product Description: Since at least the early 1970s, when Claire Johnston observed that despite ‘the enormous emphasis placed on woman as spectacle in the cinema … woman as woman is largely absent’, the relationship of cinema to the construction of gender identities and gendered pleasures has been a central concern within Film Studies...read more

Product Description: Nonfiction films about sports have been around for decades, but the previously neglected subgenre of the documentary has become increasingly popular in the last several years. Despite such recent successes as Senna, Undefeated, and ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, however, few scholarly articles have been published on these works...read more

Product Description: The past decades have witnessed considerable developments in Translation Studies and, particularly, a growing interest in the cultural and ideological differences engendered by the act of translating. More recently, Audiovisual Translation has also experienced an impressive growth in terms of research developments and applications...read more

Virginia Woolf famously wrote 'as a woman I have no country', suggesting that women had little stake in defending countries where they are considered second-class citizens, and should instead be forces for peace. Yet women have been perpetrators as well as victims of violence in nationalist conflicts. This unique book generates insights into the role of gender in nationalist violence by examining feature films from a range of conflict zones. In The Battle of Algiers, female bombers destroy civilians while men dress in women's clothes to prevent the French army from capturing and torturing them. Prisoner of the Mountains shows a Chechen girl falling in love with her Russian captive as his mother tries to rescue him. Providing historical and political context to these and other films, Evangelista identifies the key role that economic decline plays in threatening masculine identity and provoking the misogynist violence that often accompanies nationalist wars.

Product Description: Many of the key films in the career of horror icon Vincent Price (1911-1993) contain commentaries both obvious and subtle on the role of women, not only in the context of the times in which the films were created, but also during the historical periods depicted in the storylines...read more