The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood TransgressorDeborah Jermyn, Sean Redmond Kathryn Bigelow has undoubtedly been one of Hollywood's most significant female players, well known in popular terms for films such as Point Break and Blue Steel, yet relatively unexplored in academia. Soundbites about women and guns and speculation about the role of ex-husband James Cameron (Aliens, Titanic) in her career have often helped obscure rather than elucidate an understanding of her work. This collection explores how Bigelow can be seen to provide a point of intersection to a whole range of issues at the forefront of contemporary film studies and of the transformation of Hollywood into a post-classical cinema machine, with a particular emphasis on her most ambitious and controversial picture, Strange Days. Her place within new Hollywood is as a filmmaker that blurs genre conventions, reinscribes gender identites, and produces a breathless cinema of attractions. |
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Page 3 - Ultimately, the auteur theory is not so much a theory as an attitude, a table of values that converts film history into directorial autobiography. The auteur critic is obsessed with the wholeness of art and the artist. He looks at a film as a whole, a director as a whole. The parts, however entertaining individually, must cohere meaningfully.
Page 4 - The idea that art is universal and thus potentially androgynous is basically an idealist notion: art can only be defined as a discourse within a particular conjuncture — for the purpose of women's cinema, the bourgeois, sexist ideology of male dominated capitalism. It is important to point out that the workings of ideology do not involve a process of deception/intentionality.
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Bibliographic information
| Title | The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor Directors' cuts |
| Editors | Deborah Jermyn, Sean Redmond |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Wallflower Press, 2003 |
| ISBN | 1903364426, 9781903364420 |
| Length | 232 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |