Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood: The Rise of the Cine-fille

Since 1990, a minority of female directors have been making commercially and culturally impactful films in Hollywood, challenging the widely publicized prejudice faced by women in the industry. This book explores the work of filmmakers such as Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Kathryn Bigelow, and Greta Gerwig, who are often overlooked or derided. These films demonstrate the inseparability of intellectual cinephile pleasures and bodily-emotive ones, reclaiming womens mainstream filmmaking for feminism through a recalibration of genre theory.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 26 May 2022
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Despite the pervasive discrimination women in Hollywood have faced since the 1990s, a notable minority of female directors has emerged to create commercially successful and culturally significant films across a diverse range of genres. This book delves into the works of filmmakers such as Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Kathryn Bigelow, and Greta Gerwig, exploring many films that have been overlooked or criticized in the past. These films, like many other contemporary films, but in a particularly significant proportion within the smaller set of mainstream movies by women, embrace a heightened genre status that enables their authors to simultaneously engage with intellectual cinephile pleasures and bodily-emotive ones. Through a rigorous close analysis, Heightened Genre argues that these films exemplify the inseparability of such engagement strategies in contemporary genre cinema, reclaiming womens mainstream filmmaking for feminism through a recalibration of genre theory itself.

Weight: 420g
Dimension: 210 x 148 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783030709969
Edition number: 1st ed. 2021