[Commlist] New book: Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood - The Rise of the Cine-Fille

*Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood - The Rise of the 
Cine-fille | Mary Harrod | Palgrave Macmillan* 
<https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030709938#aboutBook>

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_About the book:_

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.

_Endorsements:_

Mary Harrod’s /Heightened Genre and Women’s Filmmaking in 
Hollywood/ breathes new life into the feminist film theory debates we 
had nearly forgotten. Noting the increase in popular genre films 
directed by women, she  responds to this important development with a 
challenge to us in the form of new theoretical terminology. Affect 
theory meets and mingles with genre convention in her concept of 
“heightened genre.” And if the female director is a “cine-/fille,/” as 
Harrod proposes, she may be even more “cineliterate” than male 
counterparts who may not be crediting their audiences with as much genre 
knowledge as they deserve. I predict that we’ll be engaging with 
“heightened genre” for years to come.

-Jane M. Gaines, Professor of Film, Columbia University

//

Harrod’s study of women filmmakers' work in genre cinema represents an 
important contribution to feminist film studies and to genre studies. 
The book articulates persuasively the necessity of accounting for 
self-reflexive techniques as an element of genre filmmaking, one that 
involves powerfully emotive connections with audiences. Harrod’s lucid 
analyses of women filmmakers’ genericity gives space to films and 
filmmakers much discussed – /Clueless/, Bigelow – and those too rarely 
elaborated in the frame of authorship (notably Hardwicke’s /Twilight/). 
Across multiple genres including the gothic and horror, teen film, war 
movie and rom-com, Harrod’s analysis is consistently nuanced and 
perceptive. /Heightened Genre/ fully demonstrates the feminist potential 
of genericity, analysing women filmmakers’ participation in genre, 
rather than extolling them for subverting genre codes.

-Yvonne Tasker, Professor of Media and Communication, University of Leeds

Perceptively identifying what she calls “women’s aptitude for heightened 
genre filmmaking,” Mary Harrod incisively diagrams how a renewed 
attention to affect as both an aesthetic and an emotion can 
re-politicize not only films but also entire genres long thought to be 
incapable of that work. Analyzing female filmmakers’ self-conscious use 
of intertextual relay that goes beyond pastiche in order to make emotive 
address, Harrod upends received wisdom about genre film making. In so 
doing, she persuasively recuperates female-directed roms-coms, teenpics, 
fantasy film, and action movies for both the discipline of film studies, 
and—perhaps even more importantly—for their impassioned audiences.

- Suzanne Leonard, Professor of English, Simmons University

Through a theoretically informed and detailed examination of the 
aesthetics of a range of films by contemporary women filmmakers, Harrod 
examines how women filmmakers imprint their authorial signatures through 
foregrounding personal style in the midst of generic conventions. In her 
close analysis of teenpics to rom coms and war films to sport films, as 
well as the heritage film and docudramas, Harrod shows how the 
filmmakers heighten the conventions of mainstream genres, harnessing 
their affective power to negotiate the intimate relationship between 
experience and ideology, drawing the spectator into the cinephilic 
feminist orbit of the cine-/fille/ filmmaker. In the midst of a new rise 
in popular feminism, this book opens up new space for feminist film 
studies to rethink the relationship between women and popular forms of 
cinema.

-Shelley Cobb, Associate Professor of Film, University of Southampton.


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