Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know

(Paperback)

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Description

This book takes a broad perspective and analyses the ways in which the British film industry has dealt with women and their creativity from 1930 to the present. The first part of the book deals comprehensively with different historical periods in British film culture, showing how the 'agency' of production company, director, distribution company or scriptwriter can bring about new patterns of female stereotyping. The second part looks at the input of women workers into the film process. It assesses the work of women in a variety of roles: directors such as Wendy Toye and Sally Potter, producers such as Betty Box, scriptwriters such as Clemence Dane and Muriel Box, costume designers such as Shirley Russell and Jocelyn Rickards, and editors and art directors. This is a polemical book which is written in a lively and often confrontational manner. It uses fresh archival material and takes energetic issue with those explanatory models of film analysis which impose easy answers onto complex material.

Reviews

"Written in an engagingly direct style...an accessible and thorough account....a valuable source of reference and a mapping of the terrain for future research." --Journal of Popular British Cinema, 2002
"A nicely condensed and even racy sense of narrative."--The Stage
"Written with a zeal for its subjects which makes the book both a pleasure to read and a valuable social document....Harper...has done as much as anyone to examine the importance of the representation and function of women in British cinema."--Australian Journal
"successfully melds the methods of empirically-based historical research (...) with textual analysis. It is also lucidly and forcefully written...capable of insight and erudition....informed, insightful, illuminating and often innovative...this book is indeed written with a passion for the British cinema and for the place of women within it." --HJFRT, March 2002
"Women in British Cinema is a major contribution to this growing body of literature. [Sue Harper] combines a combative and engaged feminism with a scholarly analysis of a wide variety of primary sources that allow her to contextualize her acute analysis." -Andrew Spicer, Journal of Contemporary History, 2004

Author Bio

Sue Harper is reader in film history at the University of Portsmouth. Her most recent book is Picturing the Past: The Rise and Fall of the British Costume Film.