Kirjahaku

From the precocious charms of Shirley Temple to the box-office behemoth Frozen and its two young female leads, Anna and Elsa, the girl has long been a figure of fascination for cinema. The symbol of (imagined) childhood innocence, the site of intrigue and nostalgia for adults, a metaphor for the precarious nature of subjectivity itself, the girl is caught between infancy and adulthood, between objectification and power. She speaks to many strands of interest for film studies: feminist questions of cinematic representation of female subjects; historical accounts of shifting images of girls and childhood in the cinema; and philosophical engagements with the possibilities for the subject in film. This collection considers the specificity of girls' experiences and their cinematic articulation through a multicultural feminist lens which cuts across the divides of popular/art-house, Western/non Western, and north/south. Drawing on examples from North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Europe, the contributors bring a new understanding of the global/local nature of girlhood and its relation to contemporary phenomena such as post-feminism, neoliberalism and queer subcultures. Containing work by established and emerging scholars, this volume explodes the narrow post-feminist canon and expands existing geographical, ethnic, and historical accounts of cinematic cultures and girlhood.

Why have dynamic and shifting hairstyles, from Katniss Everdeen's Power Plait to JoJo Siwa's outsize bows, become such a significant part of how girlhood is articulated in contemporary visual cultures? What do they tell us about how girlhood combines the qualities of resilience and sparkle needed to survive and thrive in turbulent post-recessionary times?Drawing together analysis of popular film franchises, Disney animation, ground-breaking TV shows, music videos, girl celebrity personas and global art cinema, this book shows how across different cultural levels and aimed at different audiences, girls' hairstyles provide a complex dynamic site of interpretation and interaction.It documents the careful craft of hair-dressers and software engineers working in the screen industries to style and animate hair, bringing their work to a new visibility. It is in the very everydayness of hairstyling that we come to understand girls as the most resilient and the most sparkly of citizens.

She has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, and in 2004 became the first ever American woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. From The Virgin Suicides to The Bling Ring, her work carves out new spaces for the expression of female subjectivity that embraces rather than rejects femininity. Fiona Handyside here considers the careful counter-balance of vulnerability with the possibilities and pleasures of being female in Coppola's films - albeit for the white and the privileged - through their recurrent themes of girlhood, fame, power, sex and celebrity. Chapters reveal a post-feminist aesthetic that offers sustained, intimate engagements with female characters. These characters inhabit luminous worlds of girlish adornments, light and sparkle and yet find homes in unexpected places from hotels to swimming pools, palaces to strip clubs: resisting stereotypes and the ordinary. In this original study, Handyside brings critical attention to a rare female auteur and in so doing contributes to important analyses of post-feminism, authorship in film, and the growing field of girlhood studies.

From Brigitte Bardot in her bikini at the Cannes Film Festival, to François Ozon’s intimate portrayals of grief and loss, some of the most iconic and challenging moments in French cinema are associated with the beach. Cinema at the Shore argues that the Parisian cityscape is not the only significant definition of space in French cinema and instead explores the industrial, aesthetic and thematic relations of French cinema to the beach.Examining a range of films from the 1950s to the present day – including popular comedies by Jacques Tati and Patrice Leconte, the lively and ruminative documentaries of Agnès Varda, the classicism of Eric Rohmer, and the provocations of Catherine Breillat – this book showcases the dynamism and importance of the beach as a site for the reconfiguration of French cinematic identity itself. The beach offers a unique crystallization of our attitudes towards nature, culture, the body, space and time. In its constant mobility, its close, yet distinctive, relationship with nature, and its paradoxical centrality in the French cultural imaginary as a site of relaxation and holidays, the beachscape, re-framed and re-imaged by the camera, offers new ways of conceiving of the spatial politics of French cinema.

From Brigitte Bardot in her bikini at the Cannes Film Festival, to François Ozon’s intimate portrayals of grief and loss, some of the most iconic and challenging moments in French cinema are associated with the beach. Cinema at the Shore argues that the Parisian cityscape is not the only significant definition of space in French cinema and instead explores the industrial, aesthetic and thematic relations of French cinema to the beach. Examining a range of films from the 1950s to the present day – including popular comedies by Jacques Tati and Patrice Leconte, the lively and ruminative documentaries of Agnès Varda, the classicism of Eric Rohmer, and the provocations of Catherine Breillat – this book showcases the dynamism and importance of the beach as a site for the reconfiguration of French cinematic identity itself. The beach offers a unique crystallization of our attitudes towards nature, culture, the body, space and time. In its constant mobility, its close, yet distinctive, relationship with nature, and its paradoxical centrality in the French cultural imaginary as a site of relaxation and holidays, the beachscape, re-framed and re-imaged by the camera, offers new ways of conceiving of the spatial politics of French cinema.

She has received numerous accolades including an Academy Award and two Golden Globes, and in 2004 became the first ever American woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. From The Virgin Suicides to The Bling Ring, her work carves out new spaces for the expression of female subjectivity that embraces rather than rejects femininity. Fiona Handyside here considers the careful counter-balance of vulnerability with the possibilities and pleasures of being female in Coppola's films - albeit for the white and the privileged - through their recurrent themes of girlhood, fame, power, sex and celebrity. Chapters reveal a post-feminist aesthetic that offers sustained, intimate engagements with female characters. These characters inhabit luminous worlds of girlish adornments, light and sparkle and yet find homes in unexpected places from hotels to swimming pools, palaces to strip clubs: resisting stereotypes and the ordinary. In this original study, Handyside brings critical attention to a rare female auteur and in so doing contributes to important analyses of post-feminism, authorship in film, and the growing field of girlhood studies.

Why have dynamic and shifting hairstyles, from Katniss Everdeen’s Power Plait to JoJo Siwa’s outsize bows, become such a significant part of how girlhood is articulated in contemporary visual cultures? What do they tell us about how girlhood combines the qualities of resilience and sparkle needed to survive and thrive in turbulent post-recessionary times? Drawing together analysis of popular film franchises, Disney animation, ground-breaking TV shows, music videos, girl celebrity personas and global art cinema, this book shows how across different cultural levels and aimed at different audiences, girls’ hairstyles provide a complex dynamic site of interpretation and interaction. It documents the careful craft of hair-dressers and software engineers working in the screen industries to style and animate hair, bringing their work to a new visibility. It is in the very everydayness of hairstyling that we come to understand girls as the most resilient and the most sparkly of citizens.