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
Author,
Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?
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.