Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Impossible Liaisons? Genre and Feminist Film Criticism
- 1 Subversive Auteur, Subversive Genre
- 2 Repeat to Remake: Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body
- 3 Hollywood Transvestite: Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker
- 4 Genre in the Margins: Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff
- 5 Genre on the Surface: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette
- 6 What a Woman Wants? Nancy Meyers’s The Intern
- Afterword: Desperately Seeking Wonder Women
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Subversive Auteur, Subversive Genre
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Impossible Liaisons? Genre and Feminist Film Criticism
- 1 Subversive Auteur, Subversive Genre
- 2 Repeat to Remake: Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body
- 3 Hollywood Transvestite: Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker
- 4 Genre in the Margins: Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff
- 5 Genre on the Surface: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette
- 6 What a Woman Wants? Nancy Meyers’s The Intern
- Afterword: Desperately Seeking Wonder Women
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Perhaps it is that we have learned to love our hegemonic fantasies – the more hegemonic the better – and not only to consume but also to critique because the pleasure of analysis is in finding the ‘shred’ of something, of anything remotely utopian, in the most crudely escapist entertainment.
(Gaines 2011: 111–12)AUTEUR
Any reference to female auteurs – especially those perceived to be working within the so-called ‘mainstream’, whether in terms of the financial parameters or use of more ‘conservative’ forms – runs the risk of reproducing a prestructuralist, romantic discourse, according to which the auteur is an empirical being able to transcend industrial, commercial or even collective limitations, in order to individually ‘author’ her films in transgressive and innovative ways. This conceptualisation of film authorship, along with the category ‘auteur cinema’, is mainly associated with a series of publications that appeared in the French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, according to which a film director is an individual agent who controls the entire creation process of the film. Referring to this concept of film authorship, John Caughie remarks that the intervention and critical revolution of the politique des auteurs ironically involved the simple installation of a figure that had dominated the other arts for a long time: the romantic artist, who is individual and self-expressive (1981: 10). According to Caughie:
Within its distinguishable currents […] auteurism shares certain basic assumptions: notably, that a film, though produced collectively, is most likely to be valuable when it is essentially the product of its director […]; that in the presence of a director who is genuinely an artist (an auteur) a film is more than likely to be an expression of his individual personality; and that this personality can be traced in a thematic and/or stylistic consistency over all (or almost all) of his films. (1981: 9)
It is no surprise that feminist film theorists, much as the literary critics before them, did not readily adopt these tenets. The defenders of the avant-garde film practice criticised auteur theory for its almost exclusive focus on commercial cinema, which left little space for the exploration of experimental filmmaking – the field that boasted the highest number of female directors from the 1970s onwards.
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- Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers , pp. 34 - 59Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018