Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (Film and Culture Series) - Softcover

Wood, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231076053 ISBN 13: 9780231076050

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 1999

Synopsis

Wood explores the relationships between narrative form and style and sexual politics, probing the political and sexual ramifications of fascism and cinema, marriage and the couple, romantic love, and representations of women, race and gender in films from the United States, Europe, and Japan.

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Review:

Wood has a rare and welcome grasp of the difficulties of fashioning a film narrative that both satisfies a mass audience and remains critical of its own achievement.--K. Tölölyan, Wesleyan University "Choice "

Synopsis:

One of the most distinctive voices in film criticism explores relationships between narrative style and sexual politics. Robin Wood, well known for his books "Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan" and Hitchcock's "Films Revisited", probes the political and sexual ramifications of fascism and cinema, marriage and the couple, romantic love, and representations of women, race, and gender in contemporary films from the United States, Europe, and Japan. He looks closely at the works of Leo McCarey and Jacques Rivette, Ozu's "Noriko Trilogy," and the recent "Generation X films Before Sunrise" and "The Doom Generation".In a chapter on fascism and cinema that juxtaposes Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" and Alain Resnais's "Night and Fog", Wood finds that what is most important is not these films' record of another time and place but "the light they can throw on our contemporary cultural situation." Wood's central concern in these chapters is the ways in which the films relate to sexual politics and the organization within our culture of gender and sexuality.

Seeing humanity as a "battleground" of a struggle between forces for Life and those of Death, Wood holds out hope for a joining of the forces of feminism, antiracism, lesbian and gay rights, and environmentalism necessary for authentic movement toward liberation.

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0231076053
• ISBN 13: 9780231076050
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 364