This thesis explores the position of female film directors working in Hollywood. It is intended to address an area in feminist film theory which has often been overlooked. Although it is incorrect to say there has been no feminist analysis of the "mainstream" woman director, most of the work which has been done concentrates either on finding the feminism or femininity of her films, or studies only a select few directors. This research widens the debate by validating the study of all women directors, and moves away from the search for definitive feminist meaning in the cinematic text. It employs a contextual and multi-theoretical approach to interrogate the multiplicity of meanings embodied by the phrase "woman director". The first chapter interrogates auteur theory because any discussion of female authorship must confront this critical perspective. The female director makes a problematic auteur since that figure is traditionally gendered as masculine. Chapter two is a "state of the industry" examination of the position of the woman director in Hollywood, with a special emphasis on mentoring. Chapter three examines the marketing of Mimi Leder's films The Peacemaker (1997) and Deep Impact (1999). Chapters four, five and six explore the construction of the woman director as "star", presenting in-depth case studies of Jodie Foster and Penny Marshall. Chapters seven and eight look at the reception of Blue Steel (1990) and Strange Days (1995) directed by Kathryn Bigelow, and Clueless (1995) directed by Amy Heckerling. Each chapter is designed to contextualise and historicise the woman director in order to better understand why her gender has prevented her from being seen as a "natural" director: that is, why directing has been viewed as a suitable job for a man but "no job for a lady".

The first study to examine the status of plot in the modernist novel and the integral role that commercial narrative film played in shaping it, Missing Story reads the modernist novel in conjunction with the evolution of cinematic narrative. It argues that an exemplary subset of modern novelists detected in narrative cinema of the early twentieth century an attempt to co-opt realist storytelling, and to ignore the social, political, economic, and philosophical reasons why modernist authors sought to displace realism. Plot has been considered anathema to a modernist narrative difficulty meant to challenge the ideology of Enlightenment progress and bourgeois values for which realist plot was assumed an aesthetic proxy. Missing Story, however, reveals that far from expunging realist plot, the modernist novel attempted to recuperate it in complex ways, and that cinema’s increased reliance on realist storytelling played a hitherto un-recognized role in this aesthetic crisis. Narrative film forced modern novelists to acknowledge the affordances of realist plot—its ability, in the nineteenth-century realist tradition, to generate coherent selfhood over time, to lend narrative shape to the changing tides of history, and to secure social belonging. My project shows how the novel’s relinquishment of realist plot thus generated a surge of contradictory textual dynamics and affective intensities in modernist narrative form and its characters. Demonstrating that modernist novelists were drawn to film’s powers of storytelling rather than abstraction, my project also revises recent scholarship on modernism and the new media. Even though media histories of modernism have broadened their purview to include a diversity of mass cultural—rather than solely avant-garde—texts, they still tend to focus on the breakdown of form and the ways that modernist literature sees itself in popular culture’s fissures and lapses. Through readings of works by Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Tod Browning, and Max Ophuls, I argue that it was commercial film’s ability to suture stories together—not to break them apart— that generated a formal and ideological crisis in the modern novel. That crisis, I contend, resulted from an intense ambivalence toward plot, ambivalence fueled by critique and colored by longing. / 2021-11-12T00:00:00Z

In a media landscape that continues to be characterized by heteronormativity, queer female audiences are continuously finding ways to make popular texts their own. Previous scholarship on queer female reception has largely approached queer meaning-making as a text-audience relationship, a perspective which disregards the position of films as commodities surrounded by an extensive promotional network. This thesis investigates the role of commodification in the process of queer meaning-making in popular film through a reception study of the film Ocean’s 8 (Gary Ross, 2018). Using a netnographic method that places social media reception in dialogue with the film and its promotional materials, it challenges the idea that queer meaning is always either embedded in the film text or brought in by the audience “(in)appropriating” the text. Rather, the film and its promotional context create an ambiguity that allows queer readings to flow freely, and actively interacts with a pre-existing Cate Blanchett-as-lesbian fantasy amongst audiences to steer those readings in particular directions. Queer female meaning-making, then, is far from a one-directional action, but rather a complex and constant renegotiation of queerness between commercial actors and audiences alike.

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Eva Dahlbeck was one of Sweden’s most respected and popular actresses from the 1940s to the 1960s and is now remembered for her work with Ingmar Bergman, who allegedly nicknamed her “Pansarskeppet kvinnligheten” (“H.M.S. Femininity”). However, Dahlbeck had already established herself as a star long before her collaborations with Bergman. The popularity of Bergman’s three comedies (Waiting Women (Kvinnors väntan, 1952), A Lesson in Love (En lektion i kärlek, 1954), and Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende, 1955)) suggests that they catered to the Swedish audience’s desire to see the star Dahlbeck. To explore the interrelation between Swedish post-war popular film culture and the auteur Bergman, this thesis examines the stardom of Dahlbeck, who can, as inter-texts between various films, bridge the gap between popular film and auteur film. Focusing on the decade from 1946 to 1956, the process whereby her star image was created, the aspects that constructed it, and its relation to her characters in three Bergman titles will be analysed. In doing so, this thesis will illustrate how the concept “Pansarskeppet kvinnligheten” was interactively constructed by Bergman’s films, the post-war Swedish film industry, and the media discourses which cultivated the star cult as a part of popular culture.