Women In Film Research Articles

Painting, Literature, and Film in Colombian Feminine Culture, 1940–2005: Of Border Guards, Nomads, and Women

Deborah Martin's book is an intricate weaving of quotes and references around the production of what she calls “second-wave feminist” art, literary, and visual production in Colombia during the second half of the twentieth century. Her in-depth readings of the work of painter Débora Arango and the literary production of Laura Restrepo, in addition to the work of contemporary filmmakers Marta Rodríguez, the women's film collective Cine Mujer, and Margarita Martínez, are set in a framework of local and international feminist and cultural theory. The book is an exploration of such visions and practices amid the hegemonic constructions of female subjectivity and nation building. Martin's approach not only describes the works in certain detail while presenting the bibliography focused on them, but it also brings to the fore the most relevant cultural theory in her readings of each and every work. This focus on cultural theory is the most important feature of the book. Martin is preoccupied with establishing a space in which productions marginalized due to their subject matter's gender and national origin are situated in the current discourses of cultural theory, not only in the Colombian context but also in the global imaginary.It is this interest in dealing with the major currents of theory, from cultural criticism in the art world and literary psychoanalytic and feminist theory to cultural studies, that somehow diminishes the historical relevance of Martin's approach to the works in her study. The reader is immersed in complex discussions of the theoretical dimensions of cultural production while losing the historiography of particular moments in recent Colombian history that would be relevant to contextualize. For example, Martin's selection of films portraying the increasing urbanization in Colombia's major cities, which can also address similar phenomena in other societies of the South, is quite discerning. Films such as Chircales (1972), La mirada de Myriam (1986), and La sierra (2005) explore a genealogy of new urban settlers in the outer rings of today's megalopolis. Unfortunately, there is no mention of contextual information about such phenomena (beyond references to nomadism), and Martin does not explain the particular interest of the female authors in dealing with the subject while exploring feminine experiences in such locales. The same happens with the discussion of a major visual artist such as Débora Arango, whose work has not been valorized in depth by art critics in Colombia. Martin's arguments advance the scholarship on Arango's work and open new avenues for more critical approaches to it. However, Martin's critique of Arango's oeuvre relies on mainstream art historical approaches; she tries to level her discussion with those of other art historians while ignoring other dimensions of the works, among them a (most-needed) historical context as well the richness of alternative feminist and poststructuralist theory, both otherwise Martin's strengths. In regard to Laura Restrepo, Martin builds on the large body of work that calls the novelist the “new north” in Colombian literary production. Martin's discussion of El leopardo al sol (1993) reconciles a major literary novel with popular genres such as telenovelas while maintaining analytical rigor. The same can be said of her discussion of La novia oscura (1999), which emphasizes the subjectivity of the female protagonist vis-à-vis her relationship with the plot's other female characters. All the works Martin examines also share a major theme that, in the Colombian context, is no surprise: violence. Martin does not tackle it directly, but it is present in the book's organizing structure. Beginning and ending in Medellín with Arango in the 1940s and La sierra in the mid-2000s, Martin's work is another theoretical incursion into the origins of modern violence in Colombia. That dimension, which she avoids tackling directly in the text in trying to distance herself from the most common ground of Colombian scholarship, would complement the vast theoretical and critical map of an otherwise superb work.Deborah Martin's Painting, Literature, and Film in Colombian Feminine Culture, 1940–2005 shows how a scholar can draw from multiple areas of study, including art history, literary criticism, anthropology, cultural theory, and film studies, and tie together the production of otherwise unrelated cultural products, opening up spaces for new subjectivities amid hegemonic constructions of the ideas of nation and citizenship in contemporary Latin America.

Representations of femininity in American genre cinema: the woman's film, film noir, and modern horror

Femininity and Film Genres Freud and the Death-Mother Transformations of the Woman's Film Modern Horror as the Concealed Woman's Film Medusa in the Mirror: Brian De Palma's Carrie Demeter and Persephone in Space: Transformation, Femininity, and Myth in the Alien Films The Finalizing Woman: Horror, Femininity, and Queer Monsters The Brave One

Eric Rohmer: Interviews

Arguably the leading French proponent of the ‘talking picture’, Éric Rohmer (1920–2010) was among those directors who most frequently rewarded journalists and critics with formal interviews — invariably with the proviso that all personal questions be left aside, to the sole end of illuminating the filmmaker's craft. This well-conceived collection spanning some four decades fills a significant gap in English-language documentation of Rohmer's storied career. Despite his staunch pro-Americanism at the head of Cahiers du cinéma from 1957 to 1963, Rohmer claimed to have ‘no knowledge of English at all’ (p. 49): whence Fiona Handyside's turn to French sources, translated here for the first time for ten of eighteen selections. Striking in these periodic snapshots is the interviewee's thematic range and rather stubborn constancy. Rohmer proves equally comfortable, and variously opinionated, discussing the drawbacks of neon versus incandescent lighting; the photogenic potential of the new urbanism or of riverbanks; the circular nature of art's progress through history; or the relation of aspect ratio to the expressive qualities of human gesture (1.33:1 is always best). Discontented by the professionalization of the French cinema industry after 1980 and seduced by emergent televisual practices, the self-described auteur emphasizes with increasing vigour the virtues of economy (reduced crews, limited takes) as a condition for artistic freedom. Although his tone is not overtly self-congratulatory, Rohmer cultivates the image of an outsider vindicated in his wish to attract a small but committed public of literate viewers by performing variations on a theme. If several interviews turn on individual releases (Conte de printemps, L'Anglaise et le duc), Handyside rightly favours those in which a broad exchange of ideas ensues. Historically symptomatic are a wonderfully dogged attempt by Beverly Walker, writing for Women in Film in 1973, to make Rohmer side ethically with the ‘temptresses’ of the Contes moraux (Maud, Chloé), and the non-committal discussion of ‘politics’ in L'Arbre, le maire et la médiathèque twenty years later. A good balance obtains between literary and creative concerns — for example, the status of screenplays and the exigencies of adapting such neglected classics as Perceval and Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon — and the nuts and bolts of cinematography, lovingly detailed in Priska Morrissey's long interview of 2004. The one surprise is the minor billing given to Cahiers du cinéma, from which Handyside culls but one of the nearly twenty interviews Rohmer granted that journal, and the corresponding overemphasis on the later years (three interviews co-conducted by Noël Herpe in 2004, 2007, and 2010 are featured). Handyside includes exhaustive credits for each film, down to the names of the carpenters, hair stylists, and car hire firms; trimming the twenty-two pages of filmography might have enabled one or two additions, perhaps from the 1960s, absent here. Fronted by a fleet thematic introduction, this judicious overview in its depiction of a creative modus operandi as punctilious as it is unique will prove essential for Rohmer enthusiasts and for students of French film after the New Wave.

How to (Marry a Woman Who Wants to) Marry a Millionaire

How to (Marry a Woman Who Wants to) Marry a Millionaire

The Male Sojourner, the Female Director, and Popular European Cinema: The Worlds of Susanne Bier

This article discusses contemporary Danish director Susanne Bier, whose recent features have received international exposure and acclaim. It situates Bier as a female filmmaker, analyzing what her status as a female director might add to a reading of the circulation of her work in the contemporary global terrain of film festivals and criticism. Bier's recent work demonstrates properties of both art cinema and popular European genre cinema; as a result, estimations of her films' critical and cultural worth have frequently been divergent and arguably gendered. The discussion focuses on three films: Brothers (Brødre, 2004), After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet, 2006), and In a Better World (Hævnen, 2010). Concerned with addressing a local and transnational audience, these films depict the intimacy of the Danish nuclear family while also developing distinctly transnational plotlines centered on the figure of a male sojourner who travels to undertake humanitarian work. These films confuse the categories of popular cinema and art cinema, fueling the divergent appraisals of Bier's oeuvre. The author argues that the films deploy the popular and gendered dimensions of melodrama in ways that critique the masculine underpinnings of art cinema. Central to this reading of Bier's director image and her films are the increasingly transnational dimensions of women's film practice and the broader decentering of paradigms of national cinema over the past two decades.

Book review: Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II

Book review: Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II

Introduction: Mildred Pierce, pedagogy and the canon

Told for the most part in a deceptive flashback, the Hollywood classic Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945) charts the obsessive relationship between the entrepreneurial, divorced working mother Mildred (Joan Crawford) and her spoilt and snobbish daughter Veda (Ann Blyth), which develops into a murderous love triangle after the manipulative playboy Monte1 (Zachary Scott) enters their lives. Although in its heyday it was often dismissed by critics as a ‘woman's film’ and ‘merely’ a star vehicle for Crawford, since the 1970s Mildred Pierce has been a key text in film studies for its centrality to debates about gender, genre and narrative, but also about history, authorship and critical methodology. E. Ann Kaplan's edited collection, Women in Film Noir (figure 1), first published in 1978 and revised and republished several times, contains Pam Cook's influential essay ‘Duplicity in Mildred Pierce’.2 This text has featured on countless course syllabuses and been read by generations of students, notably including Todd Haynes, whose television miniseries Mildred Pierce (HBO, 2011) introduced the text to new audiences, as well as bringing back into focus James M. Cain's original novel (1941), to which it bears a closer resemblance than it does to Curtiz's film. Haynes's adaptation occasioned a revival of interest in Mildred Pierce, not only by inviting comparison with the classic Hollywood film, but also by reminding us of the foundational debates that preoccupied film studies during the highly significant phase of its development as an academic discipline in the 1970s and 1980s. The film served as a useful case study for teaching genre, lighting codes and mise-en-scene, and stardom. This dossier aims to resuscitate interest in Mildred Pierce, demonstrating that its many pleasures, far from being locked in the past, continue to stimulate academic debate. As well as appraising why the original film was integral to some of the most important phases of film studies, we consider its new connectivity with academia and beyond.

Challenging images of women in the media: reinventing women's lives

Introduction Part 1. Reinscribing Women's Roles Chapter 1. Feeling Good Never Looked Better: Examining Representations of Women in Special K Advertisements By Vanessa Reimer and Rukhsana Ahmed Chapter 2. Tales from the Oh-Oku: The Shogun's Inner Palace and The Outer (Mediated) World By Kimiko Akita Chapter 3. Pakistani Media and Disempowerment of Women By Saman Talib and Zara Idrees Chapter 4. Women in Film ... Treading Water but fit for the Marathon By Lisa French Part 2. Political Issues Chapter 5. Mass Media Explain the Global Sex Trade By Anne Johnston, Barbara Friedman, and Autumn Shafer Chapter 6. Gendered Construction of Illness: A Post-Structuralist Critique of Gardasil By Nicole Defenbaugh and Kimberly Kline Chapter 7. Who's Afraid of the Pink Chaddi?: New Media, Hindutva, and Feminist Agency in India By Saayan Chattopadhyay Part 3. Westernizing Women Chapter 8. Representation of the Modern Chinese Woman in a Discourse of Consumerism By Wei Luo Chapter 9. From Babushki to Sexy Babes: The Sexing-up of Women in Bulgarian Advertising By Elza Ibroscheva Part 4. Political Individuals Chapter 10. Dorothy Jurney, Fran Harris, and Professional Journalist Networks By Steven Carl Smith Chapter 11. The Media Manipulation of Angela Merkel By Lynn Kutch Chapter 12. All Hail the Queen: The Metamorphosis or Selling out of Queen Latifah By Elizabeth Johnson Chapter 13. 18,000,000 Cracks or How Hillary Almost Became President By Lori Montalbano Part 5. Reflective Essays Chapter 14. Big, Black, Boisterous Badasses: Why Queen-Sized African American Women are Never Really Royalty By Deatra Sullivan-Morgan Chapter 15. Lesbian Comics: Negotiating Queer Visibility By Theresa Carilli

Sofia Coppola

Sofia Coppola is currently one of the most discussed female filmmakers in Hollywood and one of the most prominent “indie” directors working over the last decade. Coppola has also divided critics, especially with her third and fourth features, Marie Antoinette and Somewhere both drawing heavy criticism. This article draws on a range of popular and scholarly sources in order to chart the different narratives that construct Coppola's public image, including the style of her filmmaking. I focus on perspectives of Coppola's work, investigating how the director's biographical details have become bound up with the reception of her films in ways that dismiss her films as too preoccupied with frivolity and privilege. Coppola's important position as a female director of independent features, specifically her unique position as a successful woman working in the masculinized arena of independent Hollywood, and her place within a lineage of women's cinema, is frequently elided in discussions of her success and style. It is the question of Coppola's status as a female director, the ambivalent process by which this status is acknowledged and disavowed in the reception of her work, that is most compelling for feminist film theory.

The Changed and Unchanged Situation in the Representation of Women in Contemporary Cinema

The second feminist wave in the 1960s has influenced feminists to increase their campaign against patriarchy in almost all areas. One of the areas which has made women very vulnerable is the issue of women in cinema. This article analysed some changes in the representation of women in cinema by comparing four movies: Stepford Wifes (1975), Orlando (1992), When Night Is Falling (1995), and Stepford Wives (2004). This study was conducted by using modern hermeneutics method. From the analysis, these four films appear to contain three changed aspects regarding women, including the equality of work, the expression of sexual identity, and the image of ‘higher-education-woman’. The films also show some remain unchanged aspects in the representation of women, such as the expectation of motherhood, the myth of sexuality, and the position of women as victims.

The Changed and Unchanged Situations in the Representation of Women in Contemporary Cinema

The second feminist wave in the 1960s has influenced feminists to increase their campaign against patriarchy in almost all areas. One of the areas which has made women very vulnerable is the issue of women in cinema. This article investigates some changes in the representation of women in cinema by comparing four movies: Stepford Wives (1975), Orlando (1992), When Night Is Falling (1995), and Stepford Wives (2004). This study was conducted by using modern hermeneutics method. The results indicate that these four films appear to contain three changed aspects regarding women, that is, the equality of work, the expression of sexual identity, and the image of ‘higher- education-woman’. The films also show that some aspects in the representation of women, such as the expectation of motherhood, the myth of sexuality, and the position of women as victims, remain unchanged.

The Times of The Hours: Queer Melodrama and the Dilemma of Marriage

This article explores Stephen Daldry's The Hours (US/UK, 2002) as a feminist and queer meditation on the dilemma of marriage. An important queer-authored crossover film in the tradition of the family melodrama and the woman's film, The Hours offers a considered return to the iconic cultural form of the white middle-class nuclear family in a context where norms of heterosexual family and conjugal life are at once firmly entrenched and widely contested. Largely overlooked in film criticism, The Hours is characterized by its baroque and generative temporality and intertextuality that contribute to a nuanced meditation on women's experience of conjugal and family life. While much of the literature on melodrama draws on psychoanalysis and theories of spatiality, this article develops three distinct yet interrelated temporal and affective readings: Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Virginia Woolf's modernist “moment of being”; the performativity of gender and kinship (Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick); and theories of queer time and affect (Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Lauren Berlant). These readings probe The Hours's return to mediated cultural ideals of white conjugal and family life across time through the prism of feminist and queer cultural production and critique. Daldry's film is treated as a dense and fascinating work in itself, but it is also read against a small but influential cycle of recent queer-authored melodramas: Far from Heaven (dir. Todd Haynes, US, 2002), Savage Grace (dir. Tom Kalin, Spain/US/France, 2007), and A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford, US, 2009). Released at a historical conjuncture when queer debates about marriage and conjugal life are deeply polarized, these works share an ambivalent and stylized fascination with the white bourgeois family melodrama that is at once problematic and generative. I situate the film at the crossroads of two complementary and sometimes contradictory genealogies: the “thinking woman's film,” engaged with female subjectivity and authorship belonging to an influential white liberal feminist genealogy, and the genealogy of queer, white male – authored melodrama.

At the Intersections of Mode, Genre, and Media: A Dossier of Essays on Melodrama

Melodrama has never yet been a term of praise, though its derogatory status has not stopped it from being broadly applied to print and playhouse, across live and film, video, and digitally recorded performances screened at drive-ins, shopping malls, or art-house cinemas, to nondramatic art forms such as novels and paintings, and even to other forms of social or political life susceptible to cultural and rhetorical analysis. We think we know what we mean when we use term to describe exaggerated emotional manipulation, but slight definitional pressure reveals enormous variation. When theater historians tell story of melodrama's emergence in wake of French Revolution, they identify a modern, multimedia genre of drama featuring integration into plays themselves of music, dance, and pantomime-performance elements usually kept discreet-where they serve to amplify and diversify play's expressive capacities. Recent film criticism, by contrast, tends to treat melodrama as a mode that includes silent film and classic woman's film, as well as aspects of westerns, buddy movies, and almost any other kind of narrative film. Apart from a recent suggestion that mode exists below, rather than above, genre-that is to say, that it works closer to scene of human production-little attention has been paid to relations between these categories.1As either mode or genre, however, melodrama has been persistently associated with modernity, whether this is modernity of cinematic technology or that of subjectivity ushered in by French Revolution.2 Lauren Berlant has recently proposed that contemporary films of precarity-those, that is, that dramatize the impact of neo-liberalism on everyday life of formerly protected classes-be understood as postmelodramatic because they explore what comes after coimplication of sentimental and liberalism in fantasy of the good life.3 Berlant treats melodrama less as a mode than as an ideologeme, and, as such, a periodizing tool, though its double status as both historical genre and transhistorical mode of representation makes this use somewhat tricky. We don't need to decide whether our own moment is postmelodramatic to observe that perhaps moonlit contours of melodrama are edging into visibility as sun of modernist aesthetics sets. As one of great disavoweds of modernism, under whose aegis we have been operating and to whose longevity even by now more than twenty-year-old heralds of postmodernism themselves paradoxically attest, melodrama may have something to tell us about status of such categories as media, mode, and genre as they contribute to standards of realism, as well as about modernist aesthetics.The role melodrama has played in modern organization of literary and nonliterary forms and styles has yet to be fully theorized and described, in part because some of most sophisticated work on it has taken place in different disciplines. The essays assembled in this issue of Criticism were written for an interdisciplinary workshop, funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, whose goals were to study melodrama in its historical emergence, as well as at other moments, including our own as a way to explore terms media, mode, and genre, and their interrelations. Contributors each ruminate on texts of their choice and treat melodrama more or less explicitly as a mode, a genre, and/or a critical tool. To introduce what these essays do, I describe what concept melodrama has been and can be used for. The goal is not to define melodrama for once and for all, nor to police its future uses but rather to see how it functioned as a multimedia genre in its moment of emergence, to identify its contributions as a mode to representation, and to examine its usefulness as a tool to enrich our critical practices.Melo-drame: term was first used to signify dramatic speech accompanied by music but quickly came to signify dramatic performances that included dance and pantomime elements, in addition to musical accompaniment of speech, as well as song, often with spectacular scenery, an exotic setting, and a repertory of plot elements that feature persecuted innocence overcoming apparently insurmountable obstacles and a cast of characters that often included mute, lame, blind, deaf, or simple people and sometimes animals. …

<em>Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women's Cinema</em> by Florence Martin

<em>Screens and Veils: Maghrebi Women's Cinema</em> by Florence Martin

The Barbara Stanwyck Show: Melodrama, Kitsch, and the Media Archive

To write history means giving dates their physiognomy.-Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940)'The Barbara Stanwyc Show lasted only one season on NBC from September 1960 to July 1961 and has been more or less relegated to a footnote in Stanwyck's long career. As an anthology drama series, each week featured a new story, a new cast of characters and guest stars, and a new setting. The show was directed and written by a rotating series of men, including directors Jacques Tourneur and Robert Florey. Stanwyck was very much the driving force behind the series, starring in all but two episodes,2 and it was she who pushed for the series in light of the paucity of roles she was being offered at the age of fifty-three. Notorious throughout her career for being a hard worker, she outdid in the series, playing a wide range of working women, including businesswomen, scientists, a lawyer, a couple of sheriffs and bar owners, a journalist, and a fashion designer.Stanwyck already appeared in several other anthology shows and was one of many movie stars who made the move to TV in the 1950s. Christine Becker has argued that the small screen offered many top stars opportunities to restart their careers and to maintain more control over them. She also suggests that the professional involvement of A-list actors was instrumental to the aesthetics and standards of the new medium.3 Later in the 1960s, Stanwyck starred in the long-running Western TV series The Big Valley (1965-69) as the widowed matriarch of a family dominated by hardy men. While that series may have helped solidify the formulaic moralism of the Western-as-family drama, its predictability and conservatism are in stark contrast to the idiosyncrasy of the shortlived Barbara Stanwyc Show (figure 1).Stanwyck introduces each episode of her show while wearing a new gown designed by Daniel Werle (who went by the couturier handle of Werle). Most commentators say that she had trouble being herself in these intros, and she does indeed seem somewhat uncomfortable in the role of fashion model reading from a teleprompter. Loretta Young perfected the gesture of introduction in her long-running Letter to Loretta (1953-61) in which she spins into her living room and reads a viewer's letter introducing the week's story. Stanwyck's short introductions usually credit the director, the writers, and her costars, and briefly describe the upcoming drama. These are frequently pitched as some kind of melodrama: a melodrama of decision, a melodrama set in the High Sierras, a dark melodrama, or a comic melodrama. Generically, the episodes borrowed heavily from a variety of film genres, including Westerns, film noir, adventure films, the woman's film, and comedies, but the general term melodrama pointed at the time to a combination of action (which was how the term was used in the popular press at the time)4 and emotional tension.As a critical methodology, melodrama is an invaluable tool for rescuing cultural productions that have been neglected by historians, particularly works produced by and for women. In conjunction with Walter Benjamin's conception of allegory, they can be frequently viewed as variations of mourning plays (Trauerspiel). For Benjamin, these seventeenth-century plays a playful aspect, and he is not above punning on the word spiel as a form of play, and, following Friedrich von Schiller, he emphasizes the effect of art over its structure.5 Resolutely secular, these mourning plays privileged emotions over action,6 and, like melodrama, they displayed a baroque excess of signification. Given the parallels between melodrama and Trauerspiel, we may be able to recognize the value of kitsch for a cultural anthropology invested in the desires and unfulfilled futures of the past. In this sense, the melodramatic impulse within the kitschiest examples of popular culture may enable them to be redeemed as exemplary of the dreamworld of cultural history. …

What if I had been the hero?: investigating women's cinema

What if I had been the hero?: investigating women's cinema

Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema , and: Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II (review)

Reviewed by: Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema, and: Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II Robyn A. Epstein (bio) and Mel Michelle Lewis (bio) Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema by Robert J. Corber. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 240 pp., $66.00 hardcover, $24.00 paper. Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II by Yvonne Tasker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 328 pp., $70.00 hardcover, $25.00 paper. Robert Corber’s Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema and Yvonne Tasker’s Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II consider the cinematic characters of the femme lesbian and the military woman, respectively, both of whom are contradictory and influential representations of women. These interdisciplinary studies scrutinize how onscreen portrayals of women’s gender and sexuality model dynamic historical, social, and cultural norms. The gender expression of the cold war femme is seemingly incongruous with lesbian sexual identity, thus creating an always-already taboo subject through which to render the value of normativity, the dangers of female desire, and the penalties of nonconformity. Similarly, the military woman’s subjectivity is contentious, pivoting between romanticized feminine altruism and tropes of masculine heroism; she is at once glamorous and mannish, angelic and disruptive, inaccessible and sexy. Her power evokes anxiety and challenges normative constructions of femininity. Corber’s Cold War Femme observes and analyzes the role of a purposeful femme lesbian subjectivity in the Hollywood-imagined world of women’s homosocial relationships during the period of the cold war (1940s to mid-’60s). In addition to illuminating this subjectivity, Corber brands a genealogy of the sociocultural invention and positioning of femme lesbians in cold war cinema. Through a reading of McCarthy-era anti-communist discourse and the crafted threat of homosexuals as hidden, seditious Americans, Corber establishes that fictitious femme lesbians displaced fictitious butch lesbians as the greater social threat to the U.S. nation-state. Hollywood reproduced and cultivated this gender category, steering it into acutely provocative characters. With primarily heterosexual aesthetic presentations and attractions to feminine women, these cold war and Hollywood-created femme lesbians roused alarm and curiosity as they challenged normative sexual-identity arrangements. The cold war femme demonstrated a “lack of congruity between gender identity, sexual practice, and object choice” (30). Corber asserts that directors and screenwriters summoned the cold war femme by depicting women’s sexual desire and social autonomy as mysterious and menacing, while carefully avoiding violating the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) by excluding any explicit indication of lesbianism. His strongest examples include films like All About Eve (1950) and The Children’s [End Page 136] Hour (1961), in which the stories are shown to swivel and are directed through female relationships that are latently yet more reasonably interpreted as lesbian. Revealing these partially hidden scripts, Cold War Femme contributes to feminist and queer film theory, as well as to cold war cinema studies; Corber explains that even while the subjectivity of the cold war femme is created to underscore the communist threat to “American” capitalist, heterosexual, and patriarchal culture, the cross-film identity creates a successful archetypical legacy of this kind of femme. Still, the sophistication of Corber’s lens is somewhat undermined by the surprising absence of raced and classed analyses. The nationalism driving the production of cold war–era ideology was highly informed by racial and socioeconomic politics, which are ignored in the text; whiteness has been central to the construction of the “real American,” especially during the time of the cold war femme’s cinematic run. This omission confuses the historicity of the subject of the text, although the contribution to theorizing the cold war femme is still of important value. The book is divided into two parts: “Part I: Screening the Femme,” which attends directly to an explicit cold war femme construction; and “Part II: Female Stardom,” which contends with messy gender-crossings between actresses’ personas and their characters in film. In both sections, Corber presents interesting close readings of films, through which the reader is able to watch the interplay...

Yvonne Trasker, Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011, $24.95). Pp. 328. isbn978 0 8223 4847 4.

Yvonne Trasker, Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011, $24.95). Pp. 328. isbn978 0 8223 4847 4. - Volume 46 Issue 4

Towards an African women in cinema studies

The focus of this article is the conceptualization of an approach to the study of African women in cinema, proposing tenets for constructing a historiography, developing a theoretical framework and formulating a feminist critic of African women’s cinematic practices, as well as gendered representations as a whole. The article considers the extent that African transnational expression has influenced its makers from the very beginning of African cinema history. Avoiding reductive declarations of a monolithic African women in cinema studies, the article attempts to discern key components that are representative of African women and their cinematic gaze

Falling, Looking, Caring: Red Road as Melodrama

This article examines Red Road as a melodrama and woman's film. It argues that the film is traductively real and melodramatic, and that conceiving the film in melodramatic terms is contrary to the way in which it has been defined in public discourses and academic analysis. Red Road is film melodrama in a number of related ways, via: tropes of narrative and character; a tendency to look back, work through and act out in a melancholy and melodramatic fashion; an emphasis on familialism and redemption; and the nomination of its central character as a woman and mother. Red Road is a maternal text in familiar and complex ways – for example, in the way in which CCTV is inscribed with guardianship and care, and also via Jackie's presentation as a sexual and narrative riddle and other-worldly figure. Jackie's sphinx-like status, the paper argues, connects with Red Road's multiple and twilight qualities, and this is supported by the film's affective elements, including its treatment of the Red Road flats. This treatment helps to engender Red Road's qualities not only of redemption and rebirth, but also of memory and revision.