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Shooting Women takes readers around the world to explore the lives of camerawomen working in features, TV news and documentaries. From pioneers like America's Jessie Maple Patton to China's first camerawomen to women in poverty empowered by cameras in rural India, this book reveals a world of women working with courage and skill in what has long been seen as a male field. Read an interview with Alexis Krasilovsky.

The Cinema Ideal surveys the recent application of psychoanalytic theory to film studies. It begins with a chapter of philosophical background, showing how this theory differs from traditional empiricism in the way it defines the cinema spectator as a \"subject\" and the cinema as an ideological apparatus which contributes to hegemonic control. It then discusses the sometimes contradictory implications of the theory for spectator studies, considering how aspects of the apparatus tend to position the spectator as a transcendental ego. Subsequent chapters analyze factors which might cause the spectator to cooperate with this process, making interaction with the cinema a regressive experience. Chapter Three glances at physiological perception, concluding that it inherently involves an inescapable level of participation in the film spectacle, while Chapter Four considers more complex forms of participation on the part of the spectator. Chapter Four explores psychoanalysis' concept of drives and object relations, particularly its explanation of disavowal, castration, fetishism, scopophilia, and sublimation--all of which theoretically affect the spectator's relation to the external world. In current practice such issues overlap with and are challenged by feminist film theory, as this chapter shows. Feminists also question whether we should study the group or individual character of film spectators. Chapter Five focuses on this problem through Freud's Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and Victor Turner's work on liminality. These two analyses cohere around the psychic agency known as the ego ideal. Repeated experience of the cinema, it is argued, can alter the ego ideal through a combination of identification, projection, hypnosis, and transference. For such an experience to occur, the spectator must interact with the cinema at the unconscious level. Chapter Six therefore examines the relation between film and phantasy, involving oneiric processes in films, as well as narrative structures characteristic of both cinema and unconscious phantasies. Overall, The Cinema Ideal tries to unify and explicate much recent writing on film. However unintentionally, such theory tends to posit an ideal spectator, and an alternative cinema. The title ultimately derives, though, from the cinema's effect on the individual spectator's ego ideal and thus society as a whole.