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Sexual Politics and Narrative Film
Hollywood and Beyond
by Robin Wood
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Book Presentation:
One of the most distinctive voices in film criticism explores relationships between narrative style and sexual politics. Robin Wood, well known for his books Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Hitchcock's Films Revisited, probes the political and sexual ramifications of fascism and cinema, marriage and the couple, romantic love, and representations of women, race, and gender in contemporary films from the United States, Europe, and Japan. He looks closely at the works of Leo McCarey and Jacques Rivette, Ozu's "Noriko Trilogy," and the recent Generation X films Before Sunrise and The Doom Generation. In a chapter on fascism and cinema that juxtaposes Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Alain Resnais's Night and Fog, Wood finds that what is most important is not these films' record of another time and place but "the light they can throw on our contemporary cultural situation." Wood's central concern in these chapters is the ways in which the films relate to sexual politics and the organization within our culture of gender and sexuality. Seeing humanity as a "battleground" of a struggle between forces for Life and those of Death, Wood holds out hope for a joining of the forces of feminism, antiracism, lesbian and gay rights, and environmentalism necessary for authentic movement toward liberation.
About the Author:
Robin Wood, recently retired as professor of film studies at Atkinson College, York University, Canada, is the author of Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and Hitchcock's Films Revisited (both Columbia).
Press Reviews:
Wood has a rare and welcome grasp of the difficulties of fashioning a film narrative that both satisfies a mass audience and remains critical of its own achievement. K. Tölölyan, Wesleyan University, Choice
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
> From the same author:
Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (2003)
A Revised and Expanded Edition of the Classic Text
by Robin Wood
The Wings of the Dove (1999)
Henry James in the 1990s
by Robin Wood
Subject: One Film > The Wings of the Dove
> On a related topic:
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Gay Men at the Movies (2016)
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Reversing the Lens (2003)
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In the Name of National Security (1993)
Hitchcock, Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America
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Bad Sex (2025)
Sexuality, Gender and Affect in Contemporary TV
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