Women in American Film and Television Production

This book offers a thorough analysis of how romantic love between Black men and women (referred to here as Black Love) is portrayed in Hollywood films, specifically from the perspective of Black female filmmakers.

The first book-length analysis of representations of Black femaleness in the feature films of Black women filmmakers. These filmmakers resist dominant ideologies about Black womanhood, deliberately and creatively reconstructing meanings of Blackness that draw from their personal experiences and create new symbolic meaning of Black femaleness within mainstream culture. Analyzes the cultural texts of filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Tanya Hamilton, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees.

This project offers a critical overview of how online activities and platforms are becoming an important source for the production and promotion of women's films. Inspired by a transnational feminist framework, Maule examines blogs, websites, online services and projects related to women's filmmaking in an interrogation of the very meaning of women's cinema at the complex intersection with digital technology and globalization.

Martin interrogates seventy-five years of American film representations of black women engaged in conjure, hoodoo, obeah, or Voodoo to discern what happens when race, gender, and African spirituality collide. Martin places the genre of film in conversation with black feminist/womanist criticism, offering an interdisciplinary approach to film analysis. Approaching the close reading of eight signature films from a black female spectatorship, Martin works chronologically to express the trajectory of the black priestess as cinematic motif over the last century of filmmaking. Includes writing on the work of directors Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons.

Fanvids, or vids, are short videos created in media fandom. The creators of fanvids - called vidders - are predominantly women, whose vids prompt questions about media historiography and pleasures taken from screen media itself.

Addressing the politics of representation and authorship both behind and in front of the camera, a range of international scholars now expand the theoretical and practical framework informing the current scholarship on documentary cinema, which has so far neglected questions of gender.

The Female Gaze comprises a list detailing the essential movies from the past and present made by women. It also features multiple mini-essays written by a variety of diverse female film critics, about a woman or a movie made by women that they love.

The twenty essays collected here demonstrate how feminist historiographies at once alter and enrich ongoing debates over visuality and identification, authorship, stardom, and nationalist ideologies in cinema and media studies. Drawing extensively on archival research, the collection yields startling accounts of women's multiple roles as early producers, directors, writers, stars, and viewers.

Sixteen of the world’s leading costume designers come together to share their inspiration and knowledge with the reader. They provide insights into the challenges of envisioning a character, working with budgets, and collaborating with production designers, actors and directors. Designers featured include Academy Award winners Aggie Guerard Rodgers, Janty Yates and Lindy Hemming.

Examining the significance of women's work in popular film genres, this book sheds light on women's contribution to genre cinema through an exploration of filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola and Kelly Reichard. Open Access e-book edition.

Girl Head shows how gender has had a surprising and persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen. For decades, feminist film criticism has focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation?

By 1920, Los Angeles had become the only western city where women outnumbered men. In Go West, Young Women, Hilary A. Hallett explores these relatively unknown new western women and their role in the development of Los Angeles and the nascent film industry. From Mary Pickford's rise to become perhaps the most powerful woman of her age, to the racist moral panics of the post-World War I years that culminated in Hollywood's first sex scandal, Hallett describes how the path through early Hollywood presaged the struggles over modern gender roles that animated the century to come.

The first book by influential filmmaker Barbara Hammer, whose life and work have inspired generations of queer, feminist and avant-garde artists and filmmakers.

In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television.

From the late 1970s into the early 1990s, a generation of female filmmakers took aim at their home countries' popular myths of the frontier.

Working in all aspects of the movie industry, women filmmakers have collaborated to create memorable images on the screen. This book pays tribute to the spirit, ambition, grit and talent of these filmmakers and artists. With more than 1200 women featured in the book, you will find names that everyone knows and loves--the movie legends. But you will also discover hundreds and hundreds of women whose names are unknown to you: actresses, directors, stuntwomen, screenwriters, composers, animators, editors, producers, cinematographers and on and on.

Collects original and previously published essays, interviews, and manifestos from some of the most defining and groundbreaking independent female filmmakers of the last 40 years.

Far from passive victims of coercive seven-year contracts, a number of classic Hollywood's best-known actresses worked on a freelance basis within the restrictive studio system. In leveraging their stardom to play an active role in shaping their careers, female stars including Irene Dunne, Janet Gaynor, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck challenged Hollywood's patriarchal structure.

Explores the films, practitioners, production and distribution contexts that currently represent American women's independent cinema.

Open access e-book. A philosopher-filmmaker, Kathleen Collins decisively redefined the parameters of African American film with The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982). This book uses detailed analyses of Collins's films to contextualize her work in the African American, feminist and world film traditions.

Liberating Hollywood examines the professional experiences and creative output of women filmmakers during a unique moment in history when the social justice movements that defined the 1960s and 1970s challenged the enduring culture of sexism and racism in the U.S. film industry.

Drawing on a range of materials untapped by previous historians, Shelley Stamp offers the first comprehensive study of Weber's remarkable career as director, screenwriter, and actress. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood provides compelling evidence of the extraordinary role that women played in shaping American movie culture.

Mary Ellen Bute: Pioneer Animator captures the personal and professional life of Mary Ellen Bute (1906-1983) one of the first American filmmakers to create abstract animated films in 1934, also one of the first Americans to use the electronic image of the oscilloscope in films starting in 1949, and the first filmmaker to interpret James Joyce's literature for the screen, Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a live-action film for which she won a Cannes Film Festival Prize in 1965.

During the early era of cinema, moviegoers turned to women editors and writers for the latest on everyone's favorite stars, films, and filmmakers. Richard Abel returns these women to film history with an anthology of reviews, articles, and other works. Drawn from newspapers of the time, the selections show how columnists like Kitty Kelly, Mae Tinee, Louella Parsons, and Genevieve Harris wrote directly to female readers. They also profiled women working in jobs like scenario writer and film editor and noted the industry's willingness to hire women.

Examines women's films and filmgoing in the 1910s, a period when female patronage was energetically courted by the industry for the first time. By looking closely at how women were invited to participate in movie culture, the films they were offered, and the visual pleasures they enjoyed, Shelley Stamp demonstrates that women significantly complicated cinemagoing throughout this formative, transitional era.

Introduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry--from the employees' wives who hand-colored the Edison Company's films frame-by-frame, to the female immigrants who toiled in MGM's backrooms to produce beautifully beaded and embroidered costumes. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor was essential to the industry and required considerable technical and interpersonal skills.

Since the turn of the millennium, a growing number of female filmmakers have appropriated the aesthetics of horror for their films. In this book, Patricia Pisters investigates contemporary women directors who put 'a poetics of horror' to new use in their work, expanding the range of gendered and racialised perspectives in the horror genre.

The last ten years have seen a shift in television storytelling toward increasingly complex storylines and characters. In this study, Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman zoom in on a key figure in this transformation: the archetype of the female antihero. Far from the sunny, sincere, plucky persona once demanded of female characters, the new female antihero is often selfish and deeply unlikeable.

Between 1930 and 1950, over 40% of film industry employees were women, 25% of all screenwriters were female, one woman ran MGM behind the scenes, over a dozen women worked as producers, a woman headed the Screen Writers Guild three times, and press claimed Hollywood was a generation or two ahead of the rest of the country in terms of gender equality and employment. The first comprehensive history of Hollywood's high-flying career women during the studio era, Nobody's Girl Friday covers the impact of the executives, producers, editors, writers, agents, designers, directors, and actresses who shaped Hollywood film production and style, led their unions, climbed to the top during the war, and fought the blacklist.

Joan Harrison was Alfred Hitchcock's confidante and one of the Oscar-nominated screenwriters of his first American film, Rebecca. Harrison had quickly grown from being the worst secretary Hitchcock ever had to one of his closest collaborators, critically shaping his brand as the "Master of Suspense." Harrison went on to produce numerous Hollywood features before becoming a television pioneer as the producer of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. A respected powerhouse, she acquired a singular reputation for running amazingly smooth productions--and defying anyone who posed an obstacle.

Women held more positions of power in the silent film era than at any other time in American motion picture history. Yet the pioneering filmmaking women vanished from memory. Using individual careers as a point of departure, Jane M. Gaines charts how women first fell out of the limelight and then out of the film history itself.

Postracial Resistance explores how African American women celebrities, cultural producers, and audiences employ postracial discourse--the notion that race and race-based discrimination are over and no longer affect people's everyday lives--to refute postracialism itself. In a world where they're often written off as stereotypical "Angry Black Women," Joseph offers that some Black women in media use "strategic ambiguity," deploying the failures of post-racial discourse to name racism and thus resist it.

Spanning from obscurity to notoriety, the films of director, screenwriter, actor and comic Elaine May have recently experienced a long-overdue renaissance. Although she made only four films -- A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987) -- and never reached the level of acclaim of her frequent collaborator Mike Nichols, May's work is as enigmatic, sophisticated and unceasingly fascinating as her own complicated, reluctant star persona.

In this close reading of her films and production methods, E. Dawn Hall defines Reichardt's auteur characteristics, arguing that she offers a contemporary and sustainable model for independent filmmakers in America.

Shooting Women takes readers around the world to explore the lives of camerawomen working in features, TV news, and documentaries. From first-world pioneers like African American camerawoman Jessie Maple Patton--who got her job only after suing the union--to China's first camerawomen who traveled with Mao, to rural India where poor women have learned camerawork as a means of empowerment, Shooting Women reveals a world of women working with courage and skill in what has long been seen as a male field.

Originally published in 1977 as Early Women Directors, Anthony Slide's The Silent Feminists was the first volume to recognize and honor the work of female directors in the American silent film industry. With a new foreword by the author, this invaluable resource documents these pioneering women's lives and careers and provides an introduction to the notable yet often overlooked history of female film directors.

Drawing on insights from feminist philosophy and psychology, the author here takes an original approach to Coppola, exploring vital themes from the subversion of patriarchy in The Virgin Suicides to the "female gothic" in The Beguiled. As Rogers shows, far from endorsing a facile and depoliticized postfeminism, Coppola's films instead deploy beguilement, mood, and pleasure in the service of a robustly feminist philosophy.

Hennefeld focuses on silent film comediennes and the function of the female body in early slapstick. Laughter is a kind of grating against the absurdity of society, argues Hennefeld. But while male bodies in slapstick tried to violently fight or "escape" their surroundings--slipping on a banana peel and falling, for example--female bodies exhibited a fluidity that reflected an attempt to morph into their changing surroundings.

Examines depictions of African-descended women and girls in twentieth and twenty-first century filmmaking. Topics include a discursive analysis of stereotypes; roles garnered by Halle Berry, the only Black woman to receive an Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role; the promise of characters, relationships, and scripts found in works ranging from Altered Carbon, Lovecraft Country, and HBO's Watchmen series; and a closing chapter that considers the legacy of Black women in horror.

From a leading cultural journalist, a definitive look at the rise of the female showrunner--and a new golden era of television.

Revolutionary thinking around gender and race merged with new film technologies to usher in a wave of women's documentaries in the 1970s. Driven by the various promises of second-wave feminism, activist filmmakers believed authentic stories about women would bring more people into an imminent revolution.

A rich account that combines media industry history and cultural studies, Their Own Best Creations looks at women writers' contributions to some of the most popular genres of postwar TV: comedy-variety, family sitcom, daytime soap, and suspense anthology. During the 1950s, when the commercial medium of television was still being defined, women writers navigated pressures at work, constructed public personas that reconciled traditional and progressive femininity, and asserted that a woman's point of view was essential to television as an art form.

Between 1912 and 1919, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company credited eleven women with directing at least 170 films, but by the mid-1920s all of these directors had left Universal and only one still worked in the film industry at all. In this trailblazing study, Mark Garrett Cooper approaches the phenomenon as a case study in how corporate movie studios interpret and act on institutional culture in deciding what it means to work as a man or woman.

The interviews collected here showcase the ingenuity, enthusiasm, and aesthetic pleasures that attract people to careers in the film and television industries. They also reflect critically on changes in the workplace brought about by corporate conglomeration and globalization. Ranging across job categories--from showrunner to make-up artist to location manager--this collection features multiple voices of media labor. Open Access Luminos e-book edition.

Cari Beauchamp combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from 1912 through the 1940s.

When we imagine a "woman" and a "keyhole," it is usually a woman on the other side of the keyhole, as the proverbial object of the look, that comes to mind. In this work the author is not necessarily reversing the conventional image, but rather asking what happens when women are situated on both sides of the keyhole. The question is not only who or what is on either side of the keyhole, but also what lies between them, what constitutes the threshold that makes representation possible. Open access e-book edition.

This monograph revises our understanding of this important era in American film by examining the contributions that women made not only as directors, but also as screenwriters, editors, actors, producers, and critics. Including essays on film history, film texts, and the decade's film theory and criticism, this collection showcases the rich and varied cinematic products of women's creative labor, as well as the considerable barriers they faced.

Provides biographical information and critical analysis of the lives and works of women directors of American and international film.

In looking at the early film industry as an "industry"--a place of work--Mahar not only unravels the mystery of the disappearing female filmmaker but untangles the complicated relationship among gender, work culture, and business within modern industrial organizations.

When the movie business adopted some of the ways of other big industries in 1920s America, women--who had been essential to the industry's early development--were systematically squeezed out of key behind-the-camera roles. Yet, as female producers and directors virtually disappeared for decades, a number of female film editors remained and rose to the top of their profession, sometimes wielding great power and influence.

Alexandra Juhasz asked twenty-one women to tell their stories -- women whose names make up a who is (and who will be) who of independent and experimental film and video.

Women Screenwriters is a study of more than 300 female writers from 60 nations, from the first film scenarios produced in 1986 to the present day. Divided into six sections by continent, the entries give an overview of the history of women screenwriters in each country, as well as individual biographies of its most influential.

Women's Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the 1950s and many of whom are still working today. Open access e-book edition.