Download or read book Cinema and the Second Sex written by Carrie Tarr and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women's filmmaking in France has been a source of both delight and despair. On the one hand, the numbers are impressive – over 250 feature-length films were made by over 100 women directors in France in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, despite the heritage of French feminism, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking. This incisive study provides an informative, critical guide to this major body of work, exploring the boundaries between personal films (intimate psychological dramas relating to key stages in life) and genre films (which demonstrate women's ability to appropriate and rework popular genres). It analyzes the effects of postfeminism, women's desire to enter the mainstream, and the impact of a new generation of filmmakers, enabling readers to take stock of the wealth and diversity of women's contribution to French cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.
Download or read book Le Deuxi me Sexe written by Simone de Beauvoir and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1989 with total page 791 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.
Download or read book Existentialism and Contemporary Cinema written by Jean-Pierre Boulé and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Simone de Beauvoir’s work has not often been associated with film studies, which appears paradoxical when it is recognized that she was the first feminist thinker to inaugurate the concept of the gendered ‘othering’ gaze. This book is an attempt to redress this balance and reopen the dialogue between Beauvoir’s writings and film studies. The authors analyse a range of films, from directors including Claire Denis, Michael Haneke, Lucille Hadzihalilovic, Sam Mendes, and Sally Potter, by drawing from Beauvoir’s key works such as The Second Sex (1949), The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and Old Age (1970).
Download or read book Hollywood s Second Sex written by Aubrey Malone and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-04-24 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Women stars in Hollywood were invariably in two categories," said director Otto Preminger. "One group was of women who were exploited by men, and the other, much smaller group was of women who survived by acting like men." Beginning with silent film vamp Theda Bara and continuing with icons like Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch, this study of film industry misogyny describes how female stars were maltreated by a sexist studio system--until women like Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis fought for parity. The careers of Doris Day, Brigitte Bardot, Carole Landis, Frances Farmer, Dorothy Dandridge, Inger Stevens and many others are examined, along with more recent actresses like Demi Moore and Sharon Stone. Women who worked behind the scenes, writing screenplays, producing and directing without due credit, are also covered.
Download or read book The Body and the Screen written by Kate Ince and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1980s the number of women regularly directing films has increased significantly in most Western countries; in France, Claire Denis and Catherine Breillat have joined Agnès Varda in gaining international renown, while British directors Lynne Ramsay and Andrea Arnold have forged award-winning careers in feature film. This new volume in the “Thinking Cinema” series draws on feminist philosophers and theorists from Simone de Beauvoir on to offer readings of a range of the most important and memorable of these films from the 1990s and 2000s, focusing as it does so on how the films convey women's lives and identities. Mainstream entertainment cinema traditionally distorts the representation of women, objectifying their bodies, minimizing their agency, and avoiding the most important questions about how cinema can "do justice" to female subjectivity. Kate Ince suggests that the films of independent women directors are progressively redressing the balance, reinvigorating both the narratives and the formal ambitions of European cinema. Ince uses feminist philosophers to interpret such films as Sex Is Comedy, Morvern Callar, White Material, and Fish Tank anew, suggesting that a philosophical understanding of female subjectivity as embodied and ethical should underpin future feminist film study.
Download or read book America on Film written by Harry M. Benshoff and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-08-26 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in the Movies, 2nd Edition is a lively introduction to issues of diversity as represented within the American cinema. Provides a comprehensive overview of the industrial, socio-cultural, and aesthetic factors that contribute to cinematic representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality Includes over 100 illustrations, glossary of key terms, questions for discussion, and lists for further reading/viewing Includes new case studies of a number of films, including Crash, Brokeback Mountain, and Quinceañera
Download or read book Screening Sex written by Linda Williams and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-23 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years, kisses were the only sexual acts to be seen in mainstream American movies. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, American cinema “grew up” in response to the sexual revolution, and movie audiences came to expect more knowledge about what happened between the sheets. In Screening Sex, the renowned film scholar Linda Williams investigates how sex acts have been represented on screen for more than a century and, just as important, how we have watched and experienced those representations. Whether examining the arch artistry of Last Tango in Paris, the on-screen orgasms of Jane Fonda, or the anal sex of two cowboys in Brokeback Mountain, Williams illuminates the forms of pleasure and vicarious knowledge derived from screening sex. Combining stories of her own coming of age as a moviegoer with film history, cultural history, and readings of significant films, Williams presents a fascinating history of the on-screen kiss, a look at the shift from adolescent kisses to more grown-up displays of sex, and a comparison of the “tasteful” Hollywood sexual interlude with sexuality as represented in sexploitation, Blaxploitation, and avant-garde films. She considers Last Tango in Paris and Deep Throat, two 1972 films unapologetically all about sex; In the Realm of the Senses, the only work of 1970s international cinema that combined hard-core sex with erotic art; and the sexual provocations of the mainstream movies Blue Velvet and Brokeback Mountain. She describes art films since the 1990s, in which the sex is aggressive, loveless, or alienated. Finally, Williams reflects on the experience of screening sex on small screens at home rather than on large screens in public. By understanding screening sex as both revelation and concealment, Williams has written the definitive study of sex at the movies. Linda Williams is Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Porn Studies, also published by Duke University Press; Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson; Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film; and Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible.” A John Hope Franklin Center Book November 424 pages 129 illustrations 6x9 trim size ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4285-5 paper, $24.95 ISBN 0-8223-0-8223-4263-4 library cloth edition, $89.95 ISBN 978-0-8223-4285-4 paper, $24.95 ISBN 978-0-8223-4263-2 library cloth edition, $89.95
Download or read book Neo Feminist Cinema written by Hilary Radner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What lies behind current feminist discontent with contemporary cinema? Through a combination of cultural and industry analysis, Hilary Radner’s Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture shows how the needs of conglomerate Hollywood have encouraged an emphasis on consumer culture within films made for women. By exploring a number of representative "girly films," including Pretty Woman, Legally Blonde, Maid in Manhattan, The Devil Wears Prada, and Sex and the City: The Movie, Radner proposes that rather than being "post-feminist," as is usually assumed, such films are better described as "neo-feminist." Examining their narrative format, as it revolves around the story of an ambitious unmarried woman who defines herself through consumer culture as much as through work or romance, Radner argues that these films exemplify neo-liberalist values rather than those of feminism. As such, Neo-Feminist Cinema offers a new explanation as to why feminist-oriented scholars and audiences who are seeking more than "labels and love" from their film experience have viewed recent "girly films" as a betrayal of second-wave feminism, and why, on the other hand, such films have proven to be so successful at the box office.
Download or read book Feminist Film Theory written by Sue Thornham and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1999-04 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past twenty-five years, cinema has been a vital terrain on which feminist debates about culture, representation, and identity have been fought. This anthology charts the history of those debates, bringing together the key, classic essays in feminist film theory. Feminist Film Theory maps the impact of major theoretical developments on this growing field-from structuralism and psychoanalysis in the 1970s, to post-colonial theory, queer theory, and postmodernism in the 1990s. Covering a wide range of topics, including oppressive images, "woman" as fetishized object of desire, female spectatorship, and the cinematic pleasures of black women and lesbian women, Feminist Film Theory is an indispensable reference for scholars and students in the field. Contributors include Judith Butler, Carol J. Clover, Barbara Creed, Michelle Citron, Mary Ann Doane, Teresa De Lauretis, Jane Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Molly Haskell, bell hooks, Claire Johnston, Annette Kuhn, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, Tania Modleski, Laura Mulvey, B. Ruby Rich, Kaja Silverman, Sharon Smith, Jackie Stacey, Janet Staiger, Anna Marie Taylor, Valerie Walkerdine, and Linda Williams.
Download or read book Chick Flicks written by B. Ruby Rich and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part journalistic chronicle, part memoir, and 100% pure cultural historical odyssey, "Chick Flicks" captures the birth and growth of feminist film as no other book has done. 22 photos.
Download or read book Spectacular Bodies written by Yvonne Tasker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-10-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While films such as Rambo, Thelma and Louise and Basic Instinct have operated as major points of cultural reference in recent years, popular action cinema remains neglected within contemporary film criticism. Spectacular Bodies unravels the complexities and pleasures of a genre often dismissed as `obvious' in both its pleasure and its politics, arguing that these controversial films should be analysed and understood within a cinematic as well as a political context. Yvonne Tasker argues that today's action cinema not only responds to the shifts in gendered, sexual and racial identities which took place during the 1980s, but reflects the influences of other media such as the new video culture. Her detailed discussion of the homoeroticism surrounding the muscleman hero, the symbolic centrality of blackness within the crime narrative, and the changing status of women within the genre, addresses the constitution of these identities through the shifting categories of gender, class, race, sex, sexuality and nation. Spectacular Bodies also examines the ambivalence of supposedly secure categories of popular cinema, questioning the existing terms of film criticism in this area and addressing the complex pleasures of this neglected form.
Download or read book Cinema Sex Sirens written by Lee Pfeiffer and published by Omnibus Press. This book was released on 2011-11-29 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an introduction by Sir Roger Moore, Cinema Sex Sirens centres around a select number of actresses, from cinematic legends to some whose names are barely known by the general public who capitalised on their natural beauty during this era. Each chapter focuses on one actress, with a biography, commentary, complete filmography and full colour photos, rare international movie poster artwork and magazine covers. Actresses featured include Sophia Loren, Raquel Welch, Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, Ursula Andress and Gina Lollobrigida
Download or read book Simone de Beauvoir s Philosophy of Individuation written by Laura Hengehold and published by EUP. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laura Hengehold presents a new, Deleuzian reading of Simone de Beauvoir's phenomenology, the place of recognition in The Second Sex, the philosophical issues in her novels and the important role of her student diaries. Most studies of Simone de Beauvoir situate her with respect to Hegel and the tradition of 20th-century phenomenology begun by Husserl and Heidegger, and often stress the importance of Hegel's struggle for recognition. Hengehold, in comparison, reads de Beauvoir through a Deleuzian lens, and looks at de Beauvoir's early interest in Bergson and Leibniz. Hengehold clarifies the elements of Deleuze's thought - alone and in collaboration with Guattari - that may be most useful to contemporary feminists who are simultaneously rethinking the becoming of gender and the becoming of philosophy.--From publisher.
Download or read book Women in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium written by Ya-chen Chen and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-04-12 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women and Gender in Chinese Martial Arts Films of the New Millennium, by Ya-chen Chen, is an excavation of underexposed gender issues focusing mainly on contradictory and troubled feminism in the film narratives. In the cinematic world of martial arts films, one can easily find representations of women of Ancient China released from the constraints of patriarchal social order to revel in a dreamlike space of their own. They can develop themselves, protect themselves, and even defeat or conquer men. This world not only frees women from the convention of foot-binding, but it also "unbinds" them in terms of education, critical thinking, talent, ambition, opportunities to socialize with different men, and the freedom or right to both choose their spouse and decide their own fate. Chen calls this phenomenon "Chinese cinematic martial arts feminism." The liberation is never sustaining or complete, however; Chen reveals the presence of a glass ceiling marking the maximal exercise of feminism and women's rights which the patriarchal order is willing to accept. As such, these films are not to be seen as celebrations of feminist liberation, but as enunciations of the patriarchal authority that suffuses "Chinese cinematic martial arts feminism." The film narratives under examination include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (directed by Ang Lee); Hero (Zhang Yimou); House of the Flying Daggers (Zhang Yimou); Seven Swords (Tsui Hark); The Promise (Chen Kaige); The Banquet (Feng Xiaogang); and Curst of the Golden Flower (Zhang Yimou). Chen also touches upon the plots of two of the earliest award-winning Chinese martial arts films, A Touch of Zen and Legend of the Mountain, both directed by King Hu.
Download or read book The Independent Woman written by Simone De Beauvoir and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Like man, woman is a human being.” When The Second Sex was first published in Paris in 1949—groundbreaking, risqué, brilliantly written and strikingly modern—it provoked both outrage and inspiration. The Independent Woman contains three key chapters of Beauvoir’s masterwork, which illuminate the feminine condition and identify practical social reforms for gender equality. It captures the essence of the spirited manifesto that switched on light bulbs in the heads of a generation of women and continues to exert profound influence on feminists today.
Download or read book A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema written by Jennifer M. Bean and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-21 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema marks a new era of feminist film scholarship. The twenty essays collected here demonstrate how feminist historiographies at once alter and enrich ongoing debates over visuality and identification, authorship, stardom, and nationalist ideologies in cinema and media studies. Drawing extensively on archival research, the collection yields startling accounts of women's multiple roles as early producers, directors, writers, stars, and viewers. It also engages urgent questions about cinema's capacity for presenting a stable visual field, often at the expense of racially, sexually, or class-marked bodies. While fostering new ways of thinking about film history, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema illuminates the many questions that the concept of "early cinema" itself raises about the relation of gender to modernism, representation, and technologies of the body. The contributors bring a number of disciplinary frameworks to bear, including not only film studies but also postcolonial studies, dance scholarship, literary analysis, philosophies of the body, and theories regarding modernism and postmodernism. Reflecting the stimulating diversity of early cinematic styles, technologies, and narrative forms, essays address a range of topics—from the dangerous sexuality of the urban flâneuse to the childlike femininity exemplified by Mary Pickford, from the Shanghai film industry to Italian diva films—looking along the way at birth-control sensation films, French crime serials, "war actualities," and the stylistic influence of art deco. Recurring throughout the volume is the protean figure of the New Woman, alternately garbed as childish tomboy, athletic star, enigmatic vamp, languid diva, working girl, kinetic flapper, and primitive exotic. Contributors. Constance Balides, Jennifer M. Bean, Kristine Butler, Mary Ann Doane, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Amelie Hastie, Sumiko Higashi, Lori Landay, Anne Morey, Diane Negra, Catherine Russell, Siobhan B. Somerville, Shelley Stamp, Gaylyn Studlar, Angela Dalle Vacche, Radha Vatsal, Kristen Whissel, Patricia White, Zhang Zhen
Download or read book African American Women and Sexuality in the Cinema written by Norma Manatu and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The representation of African American women is an important issue in the overall study of how women are portrayed in film, and has received serious attention in recent years. Traditionally, "women of color," particularly African American women, have been at the margins of studies of women's on-screen depictions--or excluded altogether. This work focuses exclusively on the sexual objectification of African American women in film from the 1980s to the early 2000s. Critics of the negative sexual imagery have long speculated that control by African American filmmakers would change how African American women are depicted. This work examines sixteen films made by males both white and black to see how the imagery might change with the race of the filmmaker. Four dimensions are given special attention: the diversity of the women's roles and relationships with men, the sexual attitudes of the African American female characters, their attitudes towards men, and their nonverbal and verbal sexual behaviors. This work also examines the role culture has played in perpetuating the images, how film influences viewers' perception of African American women and their sexuality, and how the imagery polarizes women by functioning as a regulator of their sexual behaviors based on cultural definitions of the feminine.
