Tuesday 9 December 2008

Book Research

Feminism and Film

Contributors: Maggie Humm - author.
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press.
Place of Publication: Edinburgh.
Publication Year: 1997.


"From Jane Fonda's brief flirtation with independence and inevitable marriage to
Klute in the 1970s, to Dead Ringers' masculine appropriation of repro­
duction in the 1980s, to today, every Hollywood woman 'is someone
else's Other' ( Gentile 1985)" -P3

"Liberal feminism argues that women's liberation will
come with equal legal, political and economic rights, following Betty
Friedan's attack on media's 'feminine mystique' which, she argues,
prevented women from claiming equality ( Friedan 1963)"- P6

"The work of Laura Mulvey, Annette Kuhn, E. Ann Kaplan and bell hooks, I suggest, describes how the eroticisation of women on the screen comes about through the way
in which film assumes the spectator to be a white male and encourages
his voyeurism through specific camera and narrative techniques
( Mulvey 1975; Kuhn 1985; Kaplan 1980; hooks 1992)." -P39


Women and Film. Volume:4

Author: Janet Todd
Publisher: Holmes & Meier.

Place of Publication: New York.
Publication Year: 1988.

"When dealing with American commercial cinema, the critical project has
unmasked the absence of woman as a viable, active force and dis­
covered instead an empty space that has been filled in and articulated
by filmmakers with the stereotypes created out of male fantasy and
fear. Women do not exist in American film. Instead we find another
creation, made by men, growing out of their ideological imperatives.
Gaye Tuchman has called the phenomenon the symbolic annihilation
of women, the replacement of reality by the patriarchal fantasies of
subservience or its opposite, the fantasy of the voracious, destructive
woman (who must, in her turn, be destroyed)"- P30


All That Hollywood Allows: Re-Reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama

Author: Jackie Byars
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press.

Place of Publication: Chapel Hill,
NC. Publication Year: 1991

Heidi Hartman: "Biology is always mediated by society.Sex we're born with; gender we learn."- P2 ( Hartman, "The Family as Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle"p. 371.)

Issues in Feminist Film Criticism

Author: Patricia Erens
Publisher: Indiana University Press (January 1991)

(Gaylyn Studler in "Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema)
"Studler asserted that film viewing relied on a regression to the preoedipal stage rather than the later oedipal stage discussed by Mulvey. As such, the image of woman, tied to the child's earliest view of the mother, had a significantly different symbolic value. Rather than representing the threat of castration, women represented memories of plentitude." P-xxi

"feminist scholars have taken a closer look at several Hollywood genres, including film noir, the womans picture, and the maternal melodrama, films which either depicted a strong, sexual heroine or seemed to address a female audience......Gentlemen prefer Blondes, Stella Dallas and a Letter from an Unknown Woman. In all of these works the central characters are female. Furthermore, in A Letter From an Unknown Woman, the story is narrated by the heroine. Such films intrigued feminist critics because they focused on women's issues( home, family, emotionality), presented subversive heroines who went against society's norms, and seemed to provide a feminine discourse." -P xxii

"in its own way, the women's film is capable of accomplishing much the same work as a deconstructive cinema: revealing women's plight in a sexist society and subverting the traditional propaganda that reinforces this ideology." -P xxii


Feminist Film Theory: A Reader

Author: Sue Thornham
Publisher: NYU Press (April 1, 1999)

"sex role stereotyping"

- In her account, films both reflect social structures and changes and misrepresent them according to the fantasies and fears of their male creators. P10
(The Image of Women in Film: Some suggestions for Future Research- Sharon Smith)


David Gauntlett: Media, Gender and Identity

*"advertisers have by now realised that audiences will only laugh at images of the pretty housewife" P57


Notes on Women's Cinema

Author- Claire Johnston
Publisher: Society for Education in Film and Television (1973)

"From the outset the Women's movement has assumed without question the importance of film in the women's struggle...The reason for this interest in the media is nor difficult to locate: it has been the level of image that the violence of sexism and capitalism has been experienced"

Cracks in the Pedestal: Ideology and Gender in Hollywood

Author: Green, Philip
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press

"The triple male gaze" is the key to an initial understanding of the production and consumption of visual culture (cinematic visual culture, at any rate). The triple male gaze is the gaze of the camera, which (via the cinematographer/ director) chooses what is to be shown on the screen; of the male protagonist on the screen who directs our gaze to the female objects of his gaze, and, most crucial, the gaze of the male viewers in the audience, whose fantasies it is uniquely the intention of classical cinema to activate. As Mulvey described it, male voyeurism therefore controls both what is shown on the screen and what is seen emanating from the screen." -P10

Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream

Author: Marjorie Rosen
Publisher: Avon (1973)

“films have been a mirror held up to society’s porous face. They therefore reflect the changing societal image of women—which, until recently, has not been taken seriously enough.”

Women and Film: Both sides of the Camera

Author: E. Ann Kaplan
Publisher:
Routledge; 1 edition (December 31, 1990)

"Using psychoanalysis to deconstruct Hollywood films enables us to see clearly the patriarchal myths through which we have been positioned as Other (enigma, mystery), and as eternal and unchanging. We can also see how the family melodrama, as a genre geared specifically to weomen, functions both to expose the constraints and limitations that the capitalist nuclear family imposes on women and, at the same time, to "educate" women to accept those constraints as "natural", inevitable- as "given"." - P25

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