Feminist Film Criticism

The first study to apply a broad range of theory to contemporary film. With dazzling insight and critical aplomb, Maggie Humm highlights and explains feminist issues and offers a fascinating array of original film analyses. She draws on the work of Laura Mulvey, Annette Kuhn, E. Ann Kaplan and bell hooks to examine films such as Klute, Dead Ringers, A Question of Silence, Orlando and Daughters of the Dust.

Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema provides the first detailed consideration of women directors working before the Civil War and during Franco's dictatorship, and is the first to explore the impact of feminism on filmmaking in Spain. Part I focuses on three directors, Rosario Pi, Ana Mariscal, and Pilar Miro, whose careers span the history of sound cinema in Spain. The book highlights their struggle to achieve agency within the male-dominated film industry and draws on extensive archival research as well as in-depth textual analysis to reveal their negotiation with questions of authorship, female subjectivity and national cinema. Part II explores six films by women and men directors--three each from the Francoist and post-Franco periods--that foreground a number of issues of fundamental importance to feminism, from the indoctrination and "performance" of gender, to the fraught effort to reconcile power with sexual pleasure. The Afterword treats the remarkable recent boom in women directors and traces the shift in their work towards the exploration of multiple forms of difference.

In 1936, Goebbels stated that 'a government that controls art will remain forever', and the German film industry became inextricably linked with National Socialist propaganda. This book is an historical evaluation of the role and image of women in the feature films of the Third Reich. The author challenges current perceptions of the National Socialist position with regards to women and examines the creation of a female film culture, as well as the 'blurring' of gender distinctions as a result of the war.Goebbels and his wife personally selected young movie actresses at their home to portray mothers, vamps, girls-next-door and exotic love interests. His interest in film opens up an array of important issues central to this book: Were women compliant with Nazism or were they the victims of a regime imposing policies ultimately detrimental to their condition? Is it true that the war helped to emancipate women who were not only romantic and patriotic heroines on screen but employed as drivers, technicians and even managers of government affiliated film departments? Did all films produced under the auspices of the Third Reich serve as propaganda and if so, how successful were they? And finally, what can the study of cinema contribute to the historical debate surrounding National Socialism?This book fills a considerable gap in the research of the Nazi star system and makes a crucial contribution not only to cinema history, but also to our view of the perceived role of women in the Third Reich.'This book will change the way that we look at Nazi Germany.'Richard Taylor, University of Swansea

German society' inability and/or refusal to come to terms with its Nazi past has been analyzed in many cultural works, including the well-known books Society without the Father and The Inability to Mourn . In this pathfinding study, Susan Linville challenges the accepted wisdom of these books by focusing on a cultural realm in which mourning for the Nazi past and opposing the patriarchal and authoritarian nature of postwar German culture are central concerns—namely, women' feminist auto/biographical films of the 1970s and 1980s. After a broad survey of feminist theory, Linville analyzes five important films that reflect back on the Third Reich through the experiences of women of different ages—Marianne Rosenbaum' Peppermint Peace , Helma Sanders-Brahms' Germany, Pale Mother , Jutta Bruuml;ckner' Hunger Years , Margarethe von Trotta' Marianne and Juliane , and Jeanine Meerapfel' Malou . By juxtaposing these films with the accepted theories on German culture, Linville offers a fresh appraisal not only of the films' importance but especially of their challenge to misogynist interpretations of the German failure to grieve for the horrors of its Nazi past.