Search results for ""Author Judith Mayne""

Dorothy Arzner was the exception in Hollywood film history—the one woman who succeeded as a director, in a career that spanned three decades. In Part One, Dorothy Arzner's film career—her work as a film editor to her directorial debut, to her departure from Hollywood in 1943—is documented, with particular attention to Arzner's roles as "star-maker" and "woman's director." In Part Two, Mayne analyzes a number of Arzner's films and discusses how feminist preoccupations shape them, from the women's communities central to Dance, Girl, Dance and The Wild Party to critiques of the heterosexual couple in Christopher Strong and Craig's Wife. Part Three treats Arzner's lesbianism and the role that desire between women played in her career, her life, and her films.

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Widely regarded as one of the most innovative and passionate filmmakers working in France today, Claire Denis has continued to make beautiful and challenging films since the 1988 release of her first feature, Chocolat. Judith Mayne's comprehensive study traces Denis's career and discusses her major feature films in rich detail. Born in Paris but raised in West Africa, Denis explores in her films the legacies of French colonialism and the complex relationships between sexuality, gender, and race. From the adult woman who observes her past as a child in Cameroon to the Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in Paris and watches a serial killer to the disgraced French Foreign Legionnaire attempting to make sense of his past, the subjects of Denis's films continually revisit themes of watching, bearing witness, and making contact, as well as displacement, masculinity, and the migratory subject.

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One of the greatest contributions to the art of French cinema, Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Le Corbeau" (1943) tells the story of a small town inundated by letters from an anonymous sender operating under the curious name of 'Le Corbeau' - the raven. An enigmatic exploration of assumptions about gender, sexuality and authority, it is also a riveting mystery film whose key remains the question: who is the Corbeau? Seen by some as the ultimate collaborationist film and by others as a brilliant meditation on complicity and evil, "Le Corbeau" is situated by Mayne as a product of the French Occupation and as the emblematic film of French World War II cinema, and she illuminates the ways in which it has transcended its time. The French film industry survived and flourished under German rule and Mayne discusses the domination of the industry by Continental Films, the Nazi-owned film company for which Clouzot worked. She asks, crucially, how such a film came to be made, evoking as it does the intense paranoia of an era in which anonymous letters denouncing friends and neighbours were encouraged by the German occupier. Yet, she also pays attention to the complex cinematic ways in which the film conjures up this paranoid climate, compelling the viewer into a world rife with sexuality, intrigue, suspicion and shadows.

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"[The Woman at the Keyhole is one] of the most significant contributions to feminist film theory sin ce the 1970s." —SubStance" . . . this intelligent, eminently readable volume puts women's filmmaking on the main stage. . . . serves at once as introduction and original contribution to the debates structuring the field. Erudite but never obscure, effectively argued but not polemical, The Woman at the Keyhole should prove to be a valuable text for courses on women and cinema." —The IndependentWhen 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. In all of the films discussed, the threshold between subject and object, between inside and outside, between virtually all opposing pairs, is a central figure for the reinvention of cinematic narrative.

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