The Cinema Of Kathryn Bigelow

"Kathryn Bigelow is one of Hollywood's most significant female film-makers, well known in popular terms for films such as 'Near dark', 'Blue steel' and 'Point break', yet remaining relatively unexplored in academia... Placing particular emphasis on 'Strange days', her most ambitious and controversial picture to date, this collection explores Bigelow's role within New Hollywood as a film-maker that blurs genre conventions, reinscribes gender identities and produces a breathless cinema of attractions." -- Back cover.

Interviews with the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker and many other films

Director of Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker, and other films, Bigelow was the first female to win the Academy Award for Best Director.

Kathryn Bigelow si colloca fin dall’inizio della sua carriera al centro di una serie di questioni particolarmente importanti per la cultura statunitense, come la riflessione sul rapporto fra l’individualità, il potere e la violenza. Sguardi, corpi e dispositivi di rappresentazione, assieme ai contesti culturali e ai generi di riferimento, divengono strumenti imprescindibili per una configurazione estetica che usa consapevolmente azione e spettacolarità per produrre una riflessione anche teorica e filosofica. Ripercorrere la carriera di Bigelow permette così di affrontare la trasformazione avvenuta nelle relazioni fra soggettività, società, media audiovisivi e potere negli Stati Uniti a fronte del consolidarsi delle forme della globalizzazione. Il rapporto con l’estetica e la teoria del cinema, la messa in scena e l’ibridazione dei generi narrativi, la produzione del gender e della razza sono solo alcune delle questioni affrontate nelle analisi dei film (Near Dark - Il buio si avvicina, Point Break, Strange Days, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Detroit).

Examining the significance of women's work in popular film genres, this test sheds light on women's contribution to genre cinema through an exploration of filmmakers like Kathryn Bigelow, Diablo Cody, Sofia Coppola, and Kelly Reichard.

Sean Redmond's work fills an important gap in the scholarship on the European-inspired auteur working within the Hollywood cinema machine, Kathryn Bigelow. Structured to meet the needs of both the student and scholar, Redmond's volume situates Bigelow within her historical and critical context, exploring key collaborative relationships and new ways of watching her films. Beginning with Bigelow's biography, Redmond surveys the evolution of Kathryn's career as a Hollywood outsider with movies such as The Set-up (1978) and Near Dark (1987) to Hollywood blockbusters like Point Break (1991), The Hurt Locker (2010) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012).One of the key determinants of this volume is to locate Bigelow as a filmmaking artist who is able to transcend the collective, industrial, and commercial constraints of the Hollywood cinema machine to individually author her films in innovative and transgressive ways. Bigelow is contextualised as a contemporary auteur, with a distinct visual style who returns to the same themes and obsessions, and as a filmmaker who pushes cinematic boundaries, both in terms of film form and the representation of gender and sexuality.

From Mildred Pierce and Brief Encounter to Raging Bull and In the Mood for Love, this lively and accessible collection explores film culture's obsession with the past, offering searching and provocative analyses of a wide range of titles. Screening the Past engages with current debates about the role of cinema in mediating history through memory and nostalgia, suggesting that many films use strategies of memory to produce diverse forms of knowledge which challenge established ideas of history, and the traditional role of historians. Classic essays sit side by side with new research, contextualized by introductions which bring them up to date, and provide suggestions for further reading as the work of contemporary directors such as Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, Todd Haynes and Wong Kar-wai is used to examine the different ways they deploy creative processes of memory. Pam Cook also investigates the recent history of film studies, reviewing the developments that have culminated in the exciting, if daunting, present moment. The result is a rich and stimulating volume that will appeal to anyone with an interest in cinema, memory and identity.

American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11 is a ground-breaking collection of essays by some of the foremost scholars writing in the field of contemporary American film. Through a dynamic critical analysis of the defining films of the turbulent post-9/11 decade, the volume explores and interrogates the impact of 9/11 and the 'War on Terror' on American cinema and culture. In a vibrant discussion of films like American Sniper (2014), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Spectre (2015), The Hateful Eight (2015), Lincoln (2012), The Mist (2007), Children of Men (2006), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), noted authors Geoff King, Guy Westwell, John Shelton Lawrence, Ian Scott, Andrew Schopp, James Kendrick, Sean Redmond, Steffen Hantke and many others consider the power of popular film to function as a potent cultural artefact, able to both reflect the defining fears and anxieties of the tumultuous era, but also shape them in compelling and resonant ways.