Film Studies

The Editor: Alexandra Heidi Karriker, Associate Professor of Modern Languages, Film, and Women’s Studies at the University of Oklahoma, received her Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures from Brown University. Her articles, translations, and reviews have appeared widely in professional journals and in collections. Her monograph, Turmoil on the Screen: Shifting Perspectives in Soviet and Post-Communist Cinema, was published in 1993.

• Contents: Alexandra Heidi Karriker: Preface – Susan Smith Nash: Female Desire in Paraguayan Filmmakers Maneglia and Schembori’s Artefacto de la Primera Necesidad: Revenge Fantasy, Camp, or Postdictatorship Self-Loathing? – Katherine J. Patterson: Deflecting Desire: Destabilizing Narrative Univocality and the Regime of Looking in Agnes Varda’s French Film Vagabond – Karen Boyle: «Not All Angels Are Innocent» - Violence, Sexuality, and the Teen Psychodyke – Davinia Thornley: Executing the Commoners: Examining Class in Heavenly Creatures – Ann Hardy: The Heroine’s Journey? Women and Spiritual Questing in New Zealand Film and Television - A Production Study – Paul Sutton: La Femme Nikita: Violent Woman or Amenable Spectacle? – Jane Knox-Voina: The Myth of Beauty and Eroticism: Female Icons in Recent Russian Film, Advertising, and Popular Journals – Margaret Allison: Women Behind the Grave – Amanda L. Maxfield: The Quest for External Validation in Female Coming-of-Age Films – Binnie Brook Martin: Sound and Visual Misprecision in Faces of Women: Visual Difference Redefined in Thought.

«After a superb analytical preface, Alexandra Heidi Karriker presents ten sterling essays on the representation of women in world cinema from the regional and international women and film conferences held at the University of Oklahoma during the 1990s. It is unlike other film studies anthologies, which limit themselves to a genre, an ‘auteur’, or a national cinema and tend to be narrow in scope or geographical region. Karriker’s book focuses on a specific theme – women in film – and expands its range to incorporate essays from several world film scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. The result is most felicitous, for it provides us with a multiplicity of cultural views – analytical, feminist, psychological, political, postcolonial, and queer – on how women are portrayed in film and gives the reader a sound and unbiased sample of important mainstream and independent films. ‘Film Studies’ is an essential book for all scholars in the humanities.» (A. Robert Lauer, Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics, Film and Video Studies, The University of Oklahoma)