Overview

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. 

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9783030709969

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Reviews

Mary Harrod's Heightened Genres and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood is a clever, challenging, yet satisfying read for an audience wishing to explore the representation of women on screen and the work of female directors of Hollywood in the contemporary, post-MeToo era. (Fruzsina Papp, European Journal of American Studies, February 27, 2023) Harrod's is an important and timely addition to the expanding scholarship on women-authored genre films and roles in major film industry contexts. ... In particular, her construction of the concept of 'heightened genre' is useful in that it builds upon recognizable terminology and an established subfield of film studies, while revising the terms of genre theory in ways that actively counter gender bias in reference to the films under discussion. (Sonia Lupher, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 20 (1), 2022)

Harrod's is an important and timely addition to the expanding scholarship on women-authored genre films and roles in major film industry contexts. ... In particular, her construction of the concept of 'heightened genre' is useful in that it builds upon recognizable terminology and an established subfield of film studies, while revising the terms of genre theory in ways that actively counter gender bias in reference to the films under discussion. (Sonia Lupher, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 20 (1), 2022)

Author Information

Mary Harrod is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (I.B. Tauris, 2015) and the co-edited collections The Europeanness of European Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2015), Women Do Genre in Film and Television (Routledge, 2017, winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Edited Collection Prize 2019) and Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Routledge, 2021).

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