Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers

Interested in the relationship been genre and gender, Paszkiewicz proposes that genre is both constricting and liberating for female filmmakers. She examines recent films directed by female auteurs in genres considered "male":　Jennifer’s Body (2009), a horror film directed by Karyn Kusama; The Hurt Locker (2008), a war film by Kathryn Bigelow; Meek’s Cutoff (2010), a western by Kelly Reichardt; Marie Antoinette (2006), a costume drama by Sofia Coppola; and The Intern (2015), a romantic comedy by Nancy Meyers. Each of these women demonstrates not only an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre in which she is working but also a willingness to play with and on the conventions of the genre, imbuing it with a feminine perspective. Paszkiewicz’s own knowledge, both of genres and of the scholarly literature on the subject, is equally encyclopedic, and one would say that she has mastered her own particular genre—the academic theoretical essay.' -- W. A. Vincent, Michigan State University * CHOICE *
Katarzyna Paszkiewicz ’s book on Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers is a meticulously researched and detailed analysis of women’s cinema, a study field that so far has hardly received booklength attention by film and cultural critics. The writer compellingly explores the strategies of women auteurs who create genre films that deviate from what are stereotypically defined as “women’s films”. Paszkiewicz contextualizes these films in a wide array of aesthetic, political, theoretical and commercial issues and displays how a dialogical and interactive relationship is also possible between feminist film scholars and women filmmakers. -- Honorable Mention * Esse Book Awards 2020 *
Genre, Authorship and Contemporary Women Filmmakers is a challenging,complex and critically intelligent work. It offers new perspectives on the cinema¹s fraught relationship with women directors and their significant contribution to popular genre cinema from the war and horror film to the western and biopic. An important addition to feminist film theory, Paszkiewicz's book is essential reading for anyone interested in the most recent debates around gender, genre and the achievement of women filmmakers.' -- Professor Barbara Creed, The University of Melbourne, author of The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis