Sportswomen In Cinema

Sportswomen in Cinema considers both documentary and fiction films from a variety of periods and cultures, by directors including Kathryn Bigelow, Gurinder Chadha, Im Soon-rye, George Kukor, Ida Lupino, and Leni Riefenstahl. Drawing from psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories, the book presents a series of landmark close readings of films featuring a variety of different forms of athletic activity, including baseball, basketball, bodybuilding, boxing, climbing, football, rollerderby, surfing, tennis and track and field. In focusing on themes such as gesture, screen space and sound, it moves beyond a purely narrative analysis of sports films. What's more, as well as building on existing scholarship in sports studies to argue that sport should always be conceived of as more than simply competitive, the book also contributes to ongoing efforts in film theory to foster new feminist discourses on sexual difference. The ideas of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Bracha Ettinger, Griselda Pollock and Michel Serres are employed to explore how films featuring female athletes reflect changing perspectives on femininity and sexuality and also, potentially, contribute to transforming our perceptions about sportswomen and cinema. Sportswomen in Cinema is an important addition to the literature of film studies, gender studies and sports studies.

It's hard to find females in leading roles as athletes, coaches and owners in sports film story lines. With an abundance of male-focused stories, Hollywood continues to reinforce the association of athleticism with masculinity. Portrayals of women in prominent roles indicate social attitudes and values and--when looked at over time--also show what influence the women's movement has had on cinematic representation and social understandings. This discussion of sports film heroines begins with National Velvet (1944) and ends with Secretariat (2010). It addresses the question of whether these story lines do or do not empower women as characters and role models, while offering alternative cinematic choices that reflect the true and ever-growing history of women in sports.

A unique exploration of the history of the bicycle in cinema, from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films. Cycling and Cinema explores the history of the bicycle in cinema from the late nineteenth century through to the present day. In this new book from Goldsmiths Press, Bruce Bennett examines a wide variety of films from around the world, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters and slapstick comedies to documentaries, realist dramas, and experimental films, to consider the complex, shifting cultural significance of the bicycle. The bicycle is an everyday technology, but in examining the ways in which bicycles are used in films, Bennett reveals the rich social and cultural importance of this apparently unremarkable machine. The cinematic bicycles discussed in this book have various functions. They are the source of absurd comedy in silent films, and the vehicles that allow their owners to work in sports films and social realist cinema. They are a means of independence and escape for children in melodramas and kids' films, and the tools that offer political agency and freedom to women, as depicted in films from around the world. In recounting the cinematic history of the bicycle, Bennett reminds us that this machine is not just a practical means of transport or a child's toy, but the vehicle for a wide range of meanings concerning individual identity, social class, nationhood and belonging, family, gender, and sexuality and pleasure. As this book shows, two hundred years on from its invention, the bicycle is a revolutionary technology that retains the power to transform the world.

Sports have long fascinated filmmakers from Hollywood and beyond, from Bend It Like Beckham to Chariots of Fire to Rocky. Though sports films are diverse in their approach, style, and storytelling modes, National Pastimes discloses the common emotional and visual cues that belie each sports film’s underlying nationalistic impulses. Katharina Bonzel unravels the delicate matrix of national identity, sports, and emotion through the lens of popular sports films in comparative national contexts, demonstrating in the process how popular culture provides a powerful vehicle for the development and maintenance of identities of place across a range of national cinemas. As films reflect the ways in which myths of nation and national belonging change over time, they are implicated in important historical moments, from Cold War America to the class dynamics of 1980s Thatcherite Britain to the fragmented sense of nation in post-unification Germany. Bonzel shows how sports films provide a means for renegotiating the boundaries of national identity in an accessible, engaging form. National Pastimes opens up new ways of understanding how films appeal to the emotions, using myth-like constructions of the past to cultivate spectators’ engagement with historical events.

This ground-breaking interdisciplinary collection brings together leading international scholars working across the humanities and social sciences to examine ways in which representations of sports coaching in narrative and documentary cinema can shape and inform sporting instruction. The central premise of the volume is that films featuring sports coaches potentially reflect, reinforce or contest how their audiences comprehend the world of coaching. Despite the growing interest in theories of coaching and in the study of the sports film as a genre, specific analyses of filmic depictions of sports coaches are still rare despite coaches often having a central role as figures shaping the values, social situation and cultural expectations of the athletes they train. By way of a series of enlightening and original studies, this volume redresses the relative neglect afforded to sports coaching in film and simultaneously highlights the immense value that research in this emerging field has for sporting performance and social justice. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Sports Coaching Review.

Gesture has held a crucial role in cinema since its inception. In the absence of spoken words, early cinema frequently exploited the communicative potential of the gestures of actors. As this book demonstrates, gesture has continued to assume immense importance in film to the present day. This innovative book features essays by leading international scholars working in the fields of cinema, cultural and gender studies, examining modern and contemporary films from a variety of theoretical perspectives. This volume also includes contributions from an esteemed actor, and a world renowned psychologist working in the field of gesture, enabling a pioneering interdisciplinary dialogue around this exciting, emerging field of study. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis and psychology, the essays think through gesture in film from a range of new angles, pointing out both its literal and abstract manifestations. Gesture is analysed in relation to animal/human relations, trauma and testimony, sexual difference, ethics and communitarian politics, through examples from both narrative and documentary cinema. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal for Cultural Research.

This book provides a critical reappraisal of Barbara Creed’s ground-breaking work of feminist psychoanalytic film scholarship, The Monstrous-Feminine, which was first published in 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine married psychoanalytic thinking with film analysis in radically new ways to provide an invaluable corrective to conventional approaches to the study of women in horror films, with their narrow emphasis on woman’s victimhood. This volume, which will mark 25 years since the publication of The Monstrous-Feminine, brings together essays by international scholars working across a variety of disciplines who take up Creed’s ideas in new ways and fresh contexts or, more broadly, explore possible futures for feminist and/or psychoanalytically informed art history and film theory.

The process of converting the ‘past’ into ‘history’ involves engagement with a multitude of different sources and methods, and sports historians inevitably participate in the same debates over approaches and methodologies as their counterparts in other historical disciplines. At its heart, history remains a genre of empirical knowledge that is based upon the remains of the past, and without suitable evidence, there can be no sports history. A burgeoning range of sources has stimulated new ways of thinking and a significant expansion in the sports historian’s evidentiary base, as textual sources have been supplemented by photos, films and cartoons, uniforms, architecture, maps and landscapes, and material culture more generally. This book deals with some of these innovations. It is divided into two sections, the first offering chapter-length studies of particular methodologies, and the second, brief responses from experts in their fields to the question ‘what can sports historians learn from other disciplines?’