Janice Loreck

Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema explores the representation of homicidal women in six contemporary films: Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis, 2001), Baise-moi (Coralie Thinh Thi and Virginie Despentes, 2000), Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994), Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003) and The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008). Violent women in cinema pose an exciting challenge to viewers—when women kill, they overturn cultural ideas of 'typical' feminine behaviour. Janice Loreck explores how cinema creatively depicts the violent woman in response to this challenge. Departing from earlier studies that focus on popular and exploitation cinema, the book takes a unique focus on violent women in art films and other critically-distinguished forms. It explores the appeal that the violent woman holds for spectators within this viewing context. Furthermore, the book also examines how cinema responds to the cultural construction of the violent woman as a conundrum and enigma.

Violent Women in Contemporary Cinema

Violent women in cinema pose an exciting challenge to spectators, overturning ideas of 'typical' feminine subjectivity. This book explores the representation of homicidal women in contemporary art and independent cinema. Examining narrative, style and spectatorship, Loreck investigates the power of art cinema to depict transgressive femininity.

Whitney Monaghan

Kirsten Stevens

Screening Scarlett Johansson: Gender, Genre, Stardom provides an account of Johansson’s persona, work and stardom, extending from her breakout roles in independent cinema, to contemporary blockbusters, to her self-parodying work in science-fiction. Screening Scarlett Johansson is more than an account of Johansson’s career; it positions Johansson as a point of reference for interrogating how femininity, sexuality, identity and genre play out through a contemporary woman star and the textual manipulations of her image. The chapters in this collection cast a critical eye over the characters Johansson has portrayed, the personas she has inhabited, and how the two intersect and influence one another. They draw out the multitude of meanings generated through and inherent to her performances, specifically looking at processes of transformation, metamorphosis and self-deconstruction depicted in her work.

Janice Loreck

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