Kathryn Bigelow has undoubtedly been one of Hollywood's most significant female filmmakers, well known in popular terms for films such as Point Break and Blue Steel, yet she remains relatively unexplored in academia. Soundbites about women and guns and speculation about the role of ex-husband James Cameron (Aliens, Titanic) in her career have often helped obscure rather than elucidate an understanding of her work and reputation. This collection explores how Bigelow can be seen to provide a point of intersection across a whole range of issues at the forefront of contemporary film studies and the transformation of Hollywood into a post-classical cinema machine, with a particular emphasis on her most ambitious and controversial picture to date, Strange Days. Her place within New Hollywood is as a filmmaker who blurs genre conventions, reinscribes gender identites and produces a breathless cinema of attractions. This important new study is therefore a timely appraisal of this most significant film director.

Sean Redmond is Lecturer in Film Studies at the Southampton Institute, UK, and a contributor to Contemporary North American Film Directors (Wallflower Press, 2002) and the editor of Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader (Wallflower Press, 2004)
Deborah Jermyn is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Surrey, Roehampton, UK, and a contributor to Contemporary North American Film Directors (Wallflower Press, 2002) and Screen Methods: Comparative Readings in Film Studies (Wallflower Press, 2005).

2003
192 pages
978-1-903364-42-0    £16.99 (pbk)
978-1-903364-43-7    £45.00 (hbk)


view contents


chapter samples
List of contributors
Introduction


reviews
'The first, long-awaited book-length study of one of the most visionary directors in contemporary Hollywood … This comprehensive, wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection explores Bigelow's controversial and utterly modern work from a variety of perspectives.'
Laura Rascaroli, National University of Cork

'Surely the only director to have successfully broken into the patriarchal stronghold of contemporary Hollywood … At last, we have a collection which discusses her entire oeuvre, not only the extraordinary Point Break but also the flawed and equally significant Strange Days.'
Pamela Church Gibson, The London Institute

‘Bieglow’s "radical androgyny" and the genre- and gender-bending traits that trademark her work since arthouse biker pic The Loveless (1981) have kept her academic stock buoyant long after audience indifference set in. From the Freudian "family romance" of Near Dark’s vampires to girl-and-gun fetishes of Blue Steel, the earlier work abounds in achingly fashionable "transgressive" themes which are mined in the first half of this smart-thinking collection to largely fruitful effect. Those flashy visual stylings get unpacked expertly too in Gavin Smith’s interview, which examines her hell-for-leather aesthetic, fuelled by Steadicam, storyboards and an apprenticeship in late-1970s structuralism … This compilation is destined to become a reading-list staple.’
Sight and Sound

‘Enough thoughtful ideas for anyone with a really intense interest in the brilliant Point Break/Strange Days director.’
Hotdog

‘More a preliminary survey of this enticing career than a set of conclusions, this diverse book of essays positions Bigelow on the cusp of the mainstream and the experimental, the border between action cinema and melodrama, the fault lines between men and women ... To look closely at Kathryn Bigelow's career is to examine what Hollywood became in the past two decades. To read this book is to see how layered director-centred film writing became during that period … In Hollywood corporate synergy, generic hybridity and hyphenated authorship have coerced the role of director to such an extent that the old Sarrisite verities of theme, preoccupation, "an élan of the soul" seem increasingly literary and unexamined. Meanwhile in the academy, industry studies, audience studies, genre, queer theory make the search for the things that transgression throws up in the films signed by Kathryn Bigelow more and more intriguing. This is a fine collection that over the past fortnight has brought insight to my viewing of Bigelow’s work.’
The Bindery

‘In their introduction to this first in-depth study of Bigelow’s directorial career, Jermyn and Redmond establish a biographical context and the various critical perspectives informing the essays: feminism, queer theory, cultural studies, authorship and psychology. An extract of Gavin Smith’s 1995 interview of Bigelow opens part 1, "Bigelow’s Moving Canvas" (the title acknowledges Bigelow’s 1970s avant-garde art activities and editorial technique). Robynn Stilwell discusses the overlooked use of sound in the early movies; Sarah Gwenllian-Jones shows how Bigelow’s Near Dark reworks the western genre by inserting vampires for Indians as the "other". Additional essays analyse other Bigelow signatures, such as fast-paced action and reconfigured gender conventions, especially in Point Break. Part 2, "The Strange Gaze of Kathryn Bigelow", focuses on Strange Days, the science fiction thriller set in Los Angeles on the eve of the millennium. Romi Stepovitch traces its production and distribution; Will Brooker discusses its reception and consumption. Christina Lane’s analysis identifies the cultural events to which Bigelow and writer James Cameron individually react. All essays corroborate the near impossibility of compartmentalising/labelling Bigelow’s work, which simultaneously challenges and uses cinematic conventions, and Bigelow herself … Essential.’
CHOICE

‘Editors Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond, film studies lecturers at Southampton Institute UK, have compiled an intriguing, thoughtful and thought-provoking collection of essays on the work of director Kathryn Bigelow … The essays in the collection provide valuable insights and a new way of looking at Bieglow’s body of work. What is most valuable about the compilation is that, because the essays cover the span of Bigelow’s directorial career, it gives readers a comprehensive perspective of the themes and issues that appear repeatedly in her films … Taken together, the essays reveal a coherent and consistent thematic thread running through all of Bigelow’s work: going beyond the limitations of genre, blurring gender categories, examining race and class relations, exposing the (dys)functional nature of family relationships, and exploring the social/political aspects of sub- and counter-culture lifestyles. Additionally, Bigelow emerges in these analyses as something of an enigma; a successful female director in what is still a male-dominated industry, who has made a name for herself as one of the few female directors to successfully helm action-thriller films. But who refuses to specifically call herself a feminist or a director who brings a specifically female perspective to her films and characters … The essays are an eclectic mix of analytical approaches – psychoanalysis (Lacan and Freud), feminism, queer theory, cultural studies and authorship studies – making the book suited to an audience of film studies or film theory readers … I come away from this collection with a sense that I need to revisit Bigelow’s films, in order to form my own critical conclusions about her vision, narrative and sound transgressions. I suspect that others with an interest in film theory and criticism, and, certainly, film scholars and students will have the same reactions. Perhaps this is the best praise I can give this collection; it has inspired questions and a desire to look further into Bigelow’s works, which is exactly what the editors intended.'
www.cercles.com

‘The wide range of essays is a welcome contribution into the work of a director who is one of the most under-appreciated, misrepresented and misunderstood both within and outside the film industry.’
Film International

‘The Wallflower Press Directors Cuts' series explores the most significant international directors and it is interesting and timely that Bigelow should be considered as such. She is, after all, one of the few female directors to have broken into Hollywood and carved out a successful career. One of the key objectives of this book is to locate Bieglow as a filmmaker who is able to transcend the industrial and commercial constraints of Hollywood cinema to individually author her film in innovative and transgressive ways. The publication of The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor is long overdue, but arrives at a time when Bigelow’s career is a rather low point with the disappointing box office and critical reception of The Weight of Water and K19: The Widowmaker … The wide range of essays in the collection offers a fascinating insight into Bigelow’s work. There is a clearly structured and logical approach to the material for those wishing to investigate her work further … What emerges from this important and scholarly text is a picture of a director whose intentions are often distorted, who is clearly misunderstood and misrepresented within Hollywood and academia, but who must surely be recognised as a contemporary auteur … It is evident in this welcome and worthy text that Bigleow remains one of Hollywood’s most contradictory and complicated characters.’
www.popmatters.com

‘A book about Kathryn Bigelow has been long overdue, but recognition of her talent has at last emerged in the shape of Wallflower Press’s The Cinema of Kathryn Bieglow: Hollywood Transgressor, a collection of essays exploring different facets of her work … In this book much emphasis is placed on her position as a female auteur in a male-based industry and her decision to work in "traditionally" male genres – notably the action film. What emerges is a portrait of a sound and reasoned filmmaker who is unafraid to court controversy, or push the boundaries of what is technologically possible … Split into two main parts, the essay approach leads to a variety of perspectives on Bieglow’s work … The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow is a welcome study into the work of one of Hollywood’s most underappreciated directors … It provides a valuable springboard from which to launch further research.’
www.kamera.co.uk

‘Hollywood Transgressor – this seemingly oxymoronic title perfectly sums up the tensions and contradictions that characterize Kathryn Bigelow, one of the most interesting action directors in recent film history and the subject of this essential anthology of critical writings. On the one hand, Bigelow is firmly entrenched in the Hollywood establishment as a filmmaker who often works with big budgets, big stars, and big studios on projects that could be perceived as formula fare. Yet like Sam Fuller, Budd Boetticher, and other old Hollywood masters, Bigelow both satisfies and transcends the demands of formula to create cinema that’s ideologically complex, viscerally thrilling, and highly personal. Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond’s introduction to the collection addresses the complexity of Bigelow as a subject, suggesting that she’s a European-style auteur who challenges social, political, and sexual orthodoxy, yet does it from within the Hollywood industrial machine. The editors give attention to all the facets of Bigelow’s sensibility in a manner that’s refreshing given the general lack of comprehension one finds in most writings about the director. Whereas Bigelow’s detractors see her as a skilled technician who wastes her formidable intelligence on dopey popcorn movies, her supporters sometimes err on the side of denying her genuine love of and talent for Hollywood action cinema in order to force her into the position of art house auteur – a designation that is just as inappropriate as that of mainstream hack … As Jermyn and Redmond note in their introduction, they and their contributors “are acknowledging how [Bigelow’s] work partly falls within and partly infringes the parameters of Hollywood cinema”. This idea is elaborated upon to great effect in two early essays in the collection, Sara Gwenllian Jones and Stephen Jay Schneider’s pieces on Bigelow’s vampire Western Near Dark. Jones focuses on the manner in which the director plays with the conventions of both the horror film and the western to create a highly original work that explores homosexuality and “white America’s illusion of safety and control”. Schneider reaches a similar conclusion via a different method; like Jones, he feels that Near Dark is a politically radical text, but he uses psychoanalysis rather than genre criticism to make his case. Robert T. Self uses a similar approach in his insightful assessment of Blue Steel, an aggressively feminist thriller that uses the conventions of male-oriented cop movies to undermine masculine authority. Bigelow has directed or co-directed seven feature films, but over a third of the book is devoted to her most conceptually ambitious and politically controversial film, the science-fiction thriller Strange Days. Strange Days certainly warrants the attention … The movie encompasses an astonishing number of issues and subjects, including but not limited to: racial politics in post-Rodney King America; the complex relationship between technology and intimacy in the age of virtual reality and the internet; and the use of technology as a source of both liberation and oppression. Strange Days tackles these huge subjects and many others with precision and intelligence, yet Jermyn and Redmond’s introduction refers to it as a thought-provoking but flawed film. Three of the four pieces chosen to represent the movie more or less support this assessment and in some cases focus as much on the film’s box-office failure as any thematic or technical considerations. Romi Stepovich provides a meticulous account of the manner in which the film was financed and distributed and argues that Strange Days was doomed to box-office failure from the start due to co-writer and producer James Cameron’s deal with Twentieth Century Fox. The issue of artistic achievement is irrelevant in this piece, which views the movie as a failure simply because it didn’t make money.
Ironically, Will Brooker’s essay on the internet fan base of Strange Days reinforces the notion that the movie isn’t any good by quoting supporters whose defenses of the film are barely literate. This leaves the two remaining Strange Days commentators to do the heavy lifting of explicating the film’s sophisticated content, and thankfully they’re up to the task. Christina Lane’s analysis places the movie in a historical context, examining it as a series of responses to various cultural crises. Steven Shaviro looks at Strange Days as a movie about the act of seeing itself. He makes instructive comparisons with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and analyzes the film’s most notorious sequence (a scene in which the story’s “SQUID” technology causes a woman to experience her own assault from the point of view of her attacker as she’s being raped) in this context. … [The volume also includes] intelligent analyses of Bigelow’s more underrated pictures, specifically the editors’ own contributions focusing on The Weight of Water (Jermyn) and Point Break (Redmond). The Weight of Water is Bigelow’s most overlooked work; an independent production financed and produced on a modest scale, the movie went straight to video after a perfunctory theatrical run. Because of the film’s limited locations and relative absence of physical action, many critics saw it as an anomaly in Bigelow’s work, but Jermyn points out fascinating parallels between it and the director’s earlier movies by viewing many of Bigelow’s films as a dark family melodramas. She also uses The Weight of Water as a springboard for discussing the critical reception of Bigelow’s filmography as a whole, and of Bigelow herself as a cultural icon. As Jermyn notes, most of the writing about Bigelow has focused on what it means to be a “woman director”, an “action director”, or an “auteur”, and in various ways The Weight of Water – and Bigelow’s career in general – both fulfils and complicates these classifications. Like The Weight of Water, Point Break initially seems like a departure for a director whose previous film (Blue Steel) is an overtly feminist work that deals with the various ways that male-dominated institutions seek to subjugate and control women. Yet in his essay on the male-oriented surfing and robbery epic, Redmond situates it within Bigelow’s oeuvre by pointing out that the film focuses on a group of outsiders who form their own community in opposition to the traditional family unit – a theme that runs through The Loveless and with which Blue Steel’s depiction of domestic violence dovetails … While Redmond’s essay on Point Break dissects Bigelow’s manipulations of time and space, Robynn Stilwell contributes a superb piece on the use of sound in the director’s first three films. Whereas film scholars’ tendency to prioritize the visual over the aural has led to extensive analyses of the cinematography, editing, and action choreography of Bigelow’s work, her equally audacious use of sound has been almost entirely overlooked. Stilwell corrects this problem by dissecting the sound design and scoring of Bigelow’s early works and revealing how sound adds another layer of irony and commentary to the movies … The fact that the only complaint that can be levied at this collection is that there’s so much more to be said about Bigelow and her films is a testament to both the breadth of the director’s work and to the editors’ achievement in filling such a gaping void in film studies. As the first collection devoted entirely to the career of this provocative director, Hollywood Transgressor covers a wide range of perspectives and topics – it incorporates auteur criticism, feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, and other academic approaches while examining Bigelow’s films as aesthetic, economic, and political artefacts … the pieces raise challenging questions and force the reader to reexamine not only Bigelow but the Hollywood in which she makes her living.’
Lim Hemphill

‘This collection is an impressive and wide ranging study of Kathryn Bigelow’s work, and an important addition to the rather small body of work, which focuses on women directing film. Its greatest strength is that, though a number of the essays recognise the role that gender inevitably plays in relation to audience or critical reaction, the collection does not overplay the importance of retaining that equilibrium in their introduction, as they frame the book as being guided by feminist impulses yet go on to reframe that in Bigelow’s own resistance to being perceived as a female or feminist director.
Later, in her chapter on The Weight of Water, Deborah Jermyn also addresses the often failed attempts to appropriate Bigelow’s work to feminist ends and the criticism it engenders for its ambiguous representations of women and complicity with male voyeurism. This balances out the focus on gender further, which in many essays is concentrated particularly on the transgressive aspects of Bigelow’s gender representation. Jermyn critiques the desire to seek out positive representations of women or a ‘female sensibility’, and instead celebrates their ambiguity, thus locating Bigelow’s transgressive quality in her refusal to make justifications for women in her work.
The notion of Bigelow as transgressor, as the title of the book suggests, is central to the collection and gives it a good sense of coherence considering the range of approaches taken in the essays. The three elements contributors most consistently picked out as carrying this disruptive force, are these ambiguous representations of sexual and gendered identity; the blurring of genre boundaries; and the representations of counter cultures as desirable alternatives. These elements and many of the devices Bigelow uses are about difference uncontained, whether it be cultural, sexual and generic identity, and the most striking essays in this collection are those which begin to get to grips with this.
In this vein, Robert T. Self offers a fascinating examination of the instabilities generated by the interplay between ambiguous representations of gender and authority in Blue Steel and thus the film’s critique of the narrative structures in which it plays itself out. Steven Jay Schneider and Sara Gwenllian Jones both argue for a more positive, radical reading of the vampire culture of Near Dark, though from different perspectives, and likewise, Sean Redmond makes a convincing argument for the transgressive force of Point Break. He draws our attention to the intrusion of body genre into action film; the further intrusion of homoerotics into that; and the eventual rejection of the dominant hegemony in favour of the sub cultural alternative.
Other high points in the book are the interview which begins the collection and gives an insight into the technical and aesthetic experimentation that runs through Bigelow’s work; Steven Shaviro’s excellent discussion of vision and affect in Strange Days; and the attention Robynn Stilwell gives to the musical scoring in Bigelow’s first three features.
This book is organised into two parts. The chronologically ordered first section, subtitled ‘Bigelow’s Moving Canvas’, is coherent and held together by the strong introduction and clear through-line … [Steven] Shaviro and [Christina] Lane both continue the thread of the argument that runs through most of the collection, with Shaviro proposing that the camera in Strange Days constructs two alternative gazes in the film, which draw the nature of cinematic gaze into question; and Lane exploring the respective inputs of Bigelow and Cameron and the ways in which we can see Bigelow as auteur in the more seditious elements of the film.
The final essay in the collection, ‘Rescuing Strange Days: Fan Reaction to a Critical and Commercial Failure’ by Will Brooker, explores the reaction of fans attempting to reclaim the film. The psychology of fan response and their desire to claim cult status for the film is interesting, as is the realisation that part of this process involves the displacing of Bigelow as auteur in favour of Cameron. The essay also sits well following on from Stepovich’s essay at the beginning of this section
The collection … assembles a selection of compelling arguments for Bigelow’s status as transgressive auteur, and maintains an awareness of the problematic nature of the labels that can and often are applied to her work. On the whole, the book generates a sense of knowing what it wants to do and doing it.’
Kate Adams, www.film-philosophy.com

books of related interest
Contemporary North American Film Directors
Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen
Feminist Film Studies: Writing the Woman into Cinema
Feminist Auteurs: Reading Women's Films
The Cinema of Emir Kusturica: Notes from the Underground
The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People
The Cinema of Wim Wenders: The Celluloid Highway
The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory
The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead
The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America
The Cinema of Andrzej Wajda: The Art of Irony and Defiance
The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions
The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski: Variations on Destiny and Chance
The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries
The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real
The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror
The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World
The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven Allows
The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light