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What lies behind current feminist discontent with contemporary cinema? Through a combination of cultural and industry analysis, Hilary Radner's Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture shows how the needs of conglomerate Hollywood have encouraged an emphasis on consumer culture within films made for women. By exploring a number of representative \"girly films,\" including Pretty Woman, Legally Blonde, Maid in Manhattan, The Devil Wears Prada, and Sex and the City: The Movie, Radner proposes that rather than being \"post-feminist,\" as is usually assumed, such films are better described as \"neo-feminist.\" Examining their narrative format, as it revolves around the story of an ambitious unmarried woman who defines herself through consumer culture as much as through work or romance, Radner argues that these films exemplify neo-liberalist values rather than those of feminism. As such, Neo-Feminist Cinema offers a new explanation as to why feminist-oriented scholars and audiences who are seeking more than \"labels and love\" from their film experience have viewed recent \"girly films\" as a betrayal of second-wave feminism, and why, on the other hand, such films have proven to be so successful at the box office.

In the early part of the twentieth century, migrants made their way from rural homes to cities in record numbers and many traveled west. Los Angeles became a destination. Women flocked to the growing town to join the film industry as workers and spectators, creating a \"New Woman.\" Their efforts transformed filmmaking from a marginal business to a cosmopolitan, glamorous, and bohemian one. By 1920, Los Angeles had become the only western city where women outnumbered men. In Go West, Young Women, Hilary A. Hallett explores these relatively unknown new western women and their role in the development of Los Angeles and the nascent film industry. From Mary Pickford's rise to become perhaps the most powerful woman of her age, to the racist moral panics of the post–World War I years that culminated in Hollywood's first sex scandal, Hallett describes how the path through early Hollywood presaged the struggles over modern gender roles that animated the century to come.

\"Much ground has been covered in terms of (post)feminist analyses of popular film and television, and box office successes such as Bridget Jones's Diary and television phenomena such as Sex and the City have become established parts of the now canonical critical texts on postfeminism, media and popular culture. By analyzing the negotiation of femininities and masculinities within contemporary Hollywood cinema, by charting trends in film production and media reception, and by focusing on the largely neglected intersections between postfeminism and queer theory, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema presents diverse interrogations of popular cinema. The chapters in this collection position contemporary commercial production as a space where female empowerment is both celebrated and undermined, and signal the necessity of further debate surrounding the formation of gender identity in postmillennial Hollywood cinema. \"-- Provided by publisher.

Tracing the transformation of the film industry into a legitimate \"big businessof the 1920s, and explaining the fate of the female filmmaker during the silent era, Mahar demonstrates how industrial growth and change can unexpectedly open--and close--opportunities for women.

What lies behind current feminist discontent with contemporary cinema? Through a combination of cultural and industry analysis, Hilary Radner’s Neo-Feminist Cinema: Girly Films, Chick Flicks and Consumer Culture shows how the needs of conglomerate Hollywood have encouraged an emphasis on consumer culture within films made for women. By exploring a number of representative \"girly films,\" including Pretty Woman, Legally Blonde, Maid in Manhattan, The Devil Wears Prada , and Sex and the City: The Movie , Radner proposes that rather than being \"post-feminist,\" as is usually assumed, such films are better described as \"neo-feminist.\" Examining their narrative format, as it revolves around the story of an ambitious unmarried woman who defines herself through consumer culture as much as through work or romance, Radner argues that these films exemplify neo-liberalist values rather than those of feminism. As such, Neo-Feminist Cinema offers a new explanation as to why feminist-oriented scholars and audiences who are seeking more than \"labels and love\" from their film experience have viewed recent \"girly films\" as a betrayal of second-wave feminism, and why, on the other hand, such films have proven to be so successful at the box office. Hilary Radner is Professor and Foundation Chair of Film and Media Studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She is author of Shopping Around: Feminine Culture and the Pursuit of Pleasure and co-editor of several books including New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting History (forthcoming); Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity ; Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s ; Constructing the New Consumer Society ; and Film Theory Goes to the Movies , also published by Routledge. \"Radner's work is both compelling and thought provoking, and she successfully pinpoints the media's version of contemporary society's ideal woman.\" —Adrienne Urbanski in Elevate Difference , January 2011 Scholars and women are continually perplexed in our attempts to articulate the overlaps between the \"feminist\" and the \"feminine\" and to understand the historical transformations of these terms, and the recent development of \"postfeminism(s)\" and new forms of femininities. In this spectacular and important new work of feminist film theory, Radner significantly advances the debate about feminism and its \"posts\" with her theory of neo-feminist culture. Using popular Hollywood films effectively to illustrate her argument, Radner traces the history of our culture’s simultaneous incorporation and transformation of feminism in its political, personal, and social dimensions. Her theoretically sophisticated analysis of the complicated influence feminism has had on our popular culture and thinking will be equally useful to cultural and film theorists, students, and general readers. Neo-Feminist Cinema is culturally sophisticated film theory at its best. —Andrea L. Press, University of Virginia author of Women Watching Television, Speaking of Abortion, The New Media Environment, and co-editor of The Communication Review . This is a compelling and much-needed book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. —CHOICE June 2011 issue; reviewed by G.A. Foster, University of Nebraska-Lincoln . Introduction: Reassessing Feminism and Popular Culture. 1. Neo-feminism and the Rise of the Single Girl 2. Pretty Woman and the Girly Film: Defining the Format 3. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion: Female Friendship in the Girly Film 4. Legally Blonde: \"A Pink Girl in a Brown World\" 5.Jennifer Lopez: Neo-Feminism and the Crossover Star 6. Maid in Manhattan: A New Fairy Tale 7. Hit Movies for \"Femmes\" 8. The Devil Wears Prada: The Fashion Film 9. Sex and the City: The Movie: The Female Event Film 10. Something’s Gotta Give: Nancy Meyers, Neo-Feminist Auteur. Conclusion: Post-feminism and Neo-feminism

\"During the early era of cinema, moviegoers turned to women editors and writers for the latest on everyone's favorite stars, films, and filmmakers. Richard Abel returns these women to film history with an anthology of reviews, articles, and other works. Drawn from newspapers of the time, the selections show how columnists like Kitty Kelly, Mae Tinee, Louella Parsons, and Genevieve Harris wrote directly to female readers. They also profiled women working in jobs like scenario writer and film editor and noted the industry's willingness to hire women. Sharp wit and frank opinions entertained and informed a wide readership hungry for news about the movies but also about women on both sides of the camera. Abel supplements the texts with hard-to-find biographical information and provides context on the newspapers and silent-era movie industry as well as on the professionals and films highlighted by these writers. An invaluable collection of rare archival sources, Movie Mavens reveals\"-- Provided by publisher.

Examine women's contributions to film—in front of the camera and behind it! An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930 is an A-to-Z reference guide (illustrated with over 150 hard-to-find photographs!) that dispels the myth that men dominated the film industry during its formative years. Denise Lowe, author of Women and American Television: An Encyclopedia, presents a rich collection that profiles many of the women who were crucial to the development of cinema as an industry—and as an art form. Whether working behind the scenes as producers or publicists, behind the cameras as writers, directors, or editors, or in front of the lens as flappers, vamps, or serial queens, hundreds of women made profound and lasting contributions to the evolution of the motion picture production. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930 gives you immediate access to the histories of many of the women who pioneered the early days of cinema—on screen and off. The book chronicles the well-known figures of the era, such as Alice Guy, Mary Pickford, and Francis Marion but gives equal billing to those who worked in anonymity as the industry moved from the silent era into the age of sound. Their individual stories of professional success and failure, artistic struggle and strife, and personal triumph and tragedy fill in the plot points missing from the complete saga of Hollywood's beginnings. Pioneers of the motion picture business found in An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films include: Dorothy Arnzer, the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America and the only female director to make a successful transition from silent films to sound Jane Murfin, playwright and screenwriter who became supervisor of motion pictures at RKO Studios Gene Gauntier, the actress and scenarist whose adaptation of Ben Hur for the Kalem Film Company led to a la