Masculinity in Films

Author Steven Cohan draws on popular publicity to link narratives of masculinity and the personae of Hollywood's leading men like John Wayne, Cary Grant, Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, and others. Cohan analyzes the gender and sexual masquerades of their performances of masculinity and challenges the postwar ideal of the typical American male as that omnipresent, but invisible Man in a Gray Flannel Suit. 48 photos.

French Cinema in the 1980s is a set of critical essays on films which help to focus on a particular theme whose roots are in the 1970s, and which extends beyond the 1980s into the 1990s: the crisis of masculinity in contemporary French culture, and its interrelationship with nostalgia. After an introduction which gives a brief overview both of the crisis in the French film industry during the 1980s, and of the socio-political crisis of masculinity in the wake of 1970s feminism, there are three sections: the retro-nostalgic film, which emerged during the 1980s, and two more popular genres, the polar, or police thriller, and the comic film. Each section begins with a brief preface which highlights the major issues for the genre during the 1980s. The films discussed have all been distributed outside France, and are in many cases commercially available. The nostalgia section covers IUn amour de Swann, Un dimanche à la campagne, Jean de Florette/Manon des Sources, and Coup de foudre. The section on the police thriller begins with Truffaut's last film, Vivement dimanche!, and includes a chapter on three thrillers by a variety of directors (La Balance, Police, Détective). Its main focus, however, is on thrillers by the directors of the cinéma du look (Diva, Subway, Mauvais sang). The last section on the comic film looks at three films which were successful both in France and abroad: Trois hommes et un couffin (remade in Hollywood as Three Men and a Baby), La Vie est un long fleuve tranquille and, finally, Depardieu's gamble at cross-dressing, Tenue de soirée.

Studlar looks at four major Hollywood male stars of the silent era--Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, and Lon Chaney--to illuminate the cultural, ideological, and historical implications of these stars in relation to contemporary debates over changing sexual and social norms.

Men in India are attracted to Hindi films partly because of their attraction to depictions of "modern" lifestyles. Derne argues that films help men handle their ambivalence about modernity by rooting their sense of "Indianness" in women's acceptance of traditional food habits, clothing, and gender subordination. The book is one of the first ethnographic studies of filmgoing and one of the first to focus on mainstream male audiences.

This study argues that in Japanese popular cinema the 'tragic hero' narrative is an archetypal plot-structure upon which male genres, such as the war-retro and yakuza films are based. Two central questions in relation to these post-war Japanese film genres and historical consciousness are addressed: What is the relationship between history, myth and memory? And how are individual subjectivities defined in relation to the past? The book examines the role of the 'tragic hero' narrative as a figurative structure through which the Japanese people could interpret the events of World War II and defeat, offering spectators an avenue of exculpation from a foreign-imposed sense of guilt. Also considered is the fantasy world of the nagare-mono (drifter) or yakuza film. It is suggested that one of the reasons for the great popularity of these films in the 1960s and 1970s lay in their ability to offer men meanings that could help them understand the contradictions between the reality of their everyday experiences and the ideological construction of masculinity.

Challenging widely held assumptions about postwar gay male culture and politics, Homosexuality in Cold War America examines how gay men in the 1950s resisted pressures to remain in the closet. Robert J. Corber argues that a form of gay male identity emerged in the 1950s that simultaneously drew on and transcended left-wing opposition to the Cold War cultural and political consensus. Combining readings of novels, plays, and films of the period with historical research into the national security state, the growth of the suburbs, and postwar consumer culture, Corber examines how gay men resisted the "organization man" model of masculinity that rose to dominance in the wake of the Second World War.

By exploring the representation of gay men in film noir, Corber suggests that even as this Hollywood genre reinforced homophobic stereotypes, it legitimized the gay male "gaze". He emphasizes how film noir's introduction of homosexual characters countered the national "project" to render gay men invisible, and marked a deep subversion of the Cold War mentality. Corber then considers the work of gay male writers Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin, demonstrating how these authors declined to represent homosexuality as a discrete subculture and instead promoted a model of political solidarity rooted in the shared experience of oppression.

Homosexuality in Cold War America reveals that the ideological critique of the dominant culture made by gay male authors of the 1950s laid the foundation for the gay liberation movement of the following decade. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers, including students and scholars in the fields of American literature, film, and gaystudies.

In Recreational Terror, Isabel Cristina Pinedo analyzes how the contemporary horror film produces recreational terror as a pleasurable encounter with violence and danger for female spectators. She challenges the conventional wisdom that violent horror films can only degrade women and incite violence, and contends instead that the contemporary horror film speaks to the cultural need to express rage and terror in the midst of social upheaval.