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

Despite the widely publicised prejudice faced by women in Hollywood, since around 1990 a significant minority of female directors have been making commercially and culturally impactful films there across the full range of genres. This book explores movies by filmmakers Amy Heckerling, Nora Ephron, Nancy Meyers, Catherine Hardwicke, Sofia Coppola, Kimberly Peirce, Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig, including many which are still critically neglected or derided, seeing them as offering a new understanding of genre filmmaking. That is, like many other contemporary films but in a striking proportion within the smaller set of mainstream movies by women, this body of work revels in a heightened genre status that allows its authors to simultaneously address ‘intellectual’ cinephilic pleasures and bodily-emotive ones. Arguing through close analysis that these films demonstrate the inseparability of such strategies of engagement in contemporary genre cinema, Heightened Genre reclaims women’s mainstream filmmaking for feminism through a recalibration of genre theory itself. Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: Little Women and Cine-filles Works Cited Chapter 2: Genre as Pastiche in Women’s Filmmaking Gendering Film Authorship, Genre and Affective Address The Woman Director as Author Interpreting Film Genre Genre Pastiche, Affect and Women in Film Theory Heightened Genericity and the Female Director Defining Heightened Film Genre The Rise of the Cine-fille Embodied Directorial Address The Emotional Politics of Cultural Forms Works Cited Websites Chapter 3: Pastiching the Popular Remaking Romantic and Family Comedy Theorising the Female-Directed Remake You’ve Got Mail (1998) and the ‘Ephron-esque’6 Romcom as Remake Transhistorical Replication in The Parent Trap (Meyers 1998) Timelessness and Transience in Amy Heckerling’s Teen-Worlds: From Clueless (1995) to I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007) and Vamps (2012) Textuality as Teen Aesthetic in Clueless and I Could Never Be Your Woman Melancholic Genericity in Vamps (2012) Twilight (Catherine Hardwicke, 2008) as Teen Gothic ‘Cross-Gender’ Generic Participations Inside/Outside Culture, Genre, Discourse Adaptation and Style Cycles of War: Stop-Loss (Kimberly Peirce, 2008) Iraq War films: The Hurt Locker and Beyond The Shadow of ‘Nam Works Cited Websites Chapter 4: Art Imitating Life Imitating Art The War on Terror as Procedural Thriller in Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow, 2013) Realism and Torture Porn Maya’s (Anti-)Heroic Narrative The Art of the Genre Embodying History in Detroit (Bigelow, 2017) ‘Looks Like Fuckin’ Nam’: Detroit as War Film The Trauma of Black Sacrifice Constructing Hate Historical Biography and Heritage: Marie Antoinette (Sofia Coppola, 2006) Genre Baroque Heightened Heritage The Sports Movie as Docudrama in Lords of Dogtown (Hardwicke, 2005) Generic Textuality Heightened Style: Performativity and the Arabesque Works Cited Websites Chapter 5: Conclusion: Communal Autofiction and Public Subjectivity in The Bling Ring (Coppola, 2013) Works Cited Website References Websites Index