The Gendered Screen

``The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers is an important contribution to Canadian film studies, ensuring the centrality and significance of Canadian women's contribution to filmmaking. This new collection of essays tackles the intersections of film authorship, gender and nation, and while these terms may be undergoing challanges as organized principles for the study of film, as the editors note in the introduction, they 'had not lost their troublesome fascination for us as teachers and scholars of film.' The editors refrain, however, from employing any rigid definitions, encouraging the debates and tensions that arise from the various usages of these potentially vexing terms to shape the anthology. A wide range of filmmakers, regions, and filmmaking practices is covered, and this expansiveness is easily the book's greatest strength.... An ambitious volume that covers a lot of ground. Many of the essays function as excellent introductions to a filmmaker's work and are easily adaptable to course curricula while also yielding some new insights and approaches to Canadian women's cinema.'' -- Liz Czach -- Canadian Literature, 209, Summer 2011, 201201
``The uniform excellence of insight and writing, the variety of critical approaches, and the range from unfamiliar to established artists (and critics) make this a substantial, groundbreaking study.'' -- M. Yacowar, emeritus, University of Calgary -- Choice, December 2010, 201012
``The Gendered Screen is a much-needed update that surveys the recent developments and contemporary field of Canadian women's cinema.... An especially significant dimension of this collection is the attention to filmmakers whose work has been largely neglected by critics and scholars.... The essays together ... address a wide cross-section of women's media production in this country. They examine the specificities of different regional contexts and address a variety of media approaches, from experimental film and video to independent features, television, and documentary production. More significant, the book investigates feminist and Canadian cinema beyond counter-cinema forms and art house aesthetics, respectively. The studies here attend to women producers not only working within the mainstream entertainment cinema but also presenting women-centered narratives and using humour as a means of critique. They demonstrate how the commercial sector, traditional women's genres, and comedy can function as sites of resistance that express feminist attitudes and politicized positions. In this way, The Gendered Screen expands the definitions of both feminist and Canadian cinema, contributing significantly to scholarship in both fields.'' -- Sylvie Jasen -- H-Net Reviews, January 2013, 201312
``The Gendered Screen expands the discursive space for scholarly engagement with women filmmakers in a predominantly masculinist terrain. The contributors provide fresh approaches to filmmakers of the canon and give solid first starts on filmmakers who had previously been left out of the picture of Canadian cinema studies.'' -- Susan Lord, Film and Media, Queen's University, co-editor with JanineMarchessault of Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinemas (2007), and withAnnette Burfoot, Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender andViolence (WLU Press, 2006) -- 201005