Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader (Culture And The Moving Image) - Softcover

Cook, Pam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566391431 ISBN 13: 9781566391436

Publisher: Temple University Press, 1993

Synopsis

Brought together for the first time, these lively, sophisticated essays bring into focus contemporary debates regarding the representation of women in film and analyze women's practices as filmmakers and actors. Sight and Sound, the pioneering magazine of film criticism, has enlisted a distinguished group of cultural commentators—critics, scholars, novelists—to consider the roles of gender and sexuality in classic and recent cinema.

Like Sight and Sound itself, the essays in this book are international in scope and represent the newest perspectives in cultural theory and criticism in a readily accessible style. Challenging dominant myths and the status quo in the industry, these provocative writers consider a wide range of fascinating topics that define the boundaries of traditional cinema and explore unmapped territory.

Essays are generously illustrated with stills of films discussed, and each section contains a comprehensive bibliography and filmography.

About this title

About the Author

Pam Cook, Associate Editor of Sight and Sound at the British Film Institute, has published widely on feminism and film and is co-author and editor of The Cinema Book.

Philip Dodd, Editor of Sight and Sound, has written numerous articles on film and television and published several books, including Englishness, Politics and Culture, 1880-1920.

Contributors: Karen Alexander, Carole Angier, Stephen Bourne, Stella Brooks, Carol Clover, Jenny Diski, Richard Dyer, Thomas Elsaesser, Lizzie Franke, Julia Knight, Gertrud Koch, Irene Kollatz, Alison Light, Angela McRobbie, Berenice Reynaud, B. Ruby Rich, Cherry Smyth, Andrea Stuart, Amy Taubin, Ginette Vincendeau, Linda Ruth Williams, Elizabeth Wilson, Jeanette Winterson, and the editors.

From the Inside Flap

"Women and Film's scope and depth, its variety—from cultural criticism to one on one interviews—reflect an important new direction in the changing attitudes and debates that surround the representation of women in all aspects of contemporary cinema.
—Susan Seidelman

"This is a delightful collection of essays—smart, witty, socially informed and on-target. In its delicate, and all too rare, balance of intellectual sophistication and stylistic grace and accessibility, it offers a treat to both the general reader and the student of gender and film theory."
—Elayne Rapping

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

And as if this weren't bad enough, into the fray stepped Spike Lee, who called Whoopi Goldberg a sell-out. But though Goldberg's remarks - 'I want to be considered an actress not a black actress'; 'I figure you look at me and you see I'm black, I don't have to say it'-were hardly designed to win friends among political black people, and indeed still enrage today, she managed to sink her teeth firmly into Lee's Achilles' heel by asking 'How many black women who look like me do you see in Spike's films?' Many applauded-Spike's bevy of brown babes and depiction of women in general have not made him popular in the US.

Edition details

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566391431
• ISBN 13: 9781566391436
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 287