How does she look
Bigelow’s vision/visioning Bigelow
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21783368 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Deborah Jermyn (0000-0001-9261-9887, University of Roehampton, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 367-382 |
| Publication date | 2021-07-03 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Review of Film and Television Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1740-0309 • E-ISSN: 1740-7923 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17400309.2021.1952036 |
| OpenAlex | W3197748588 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
The critical and popular reception of Bigelow’s work has long pivoted on her gaze: what constitutes the ‘Bigelow look’?; how is it distinctive, unsettling, or otherwise surprising? This curiosity, frequently centred on her command of action and violence, is key also to her unusually heightened visibility as a woman filmmaker who can claim membership of what Deborah M. Sims terms the ‘celebrity directors’ club; that is, ‘an elite community of auteur filmmaking [coded] as masculine’ (2014). At the same time, interwoven in this status is the gaze on Bigelow, since her recognition factor has unquestionably been bolstered too by her photogenic looks, style, and deportment. Yet analysis of this regime of visibility remains limited in feminist film criticism, no doubt because it risks compounding the kind of gendered scrutiny and conservative discourses of judgmental comparison that feminist film criticism seeks to challenge. Analysing images of Bigelow that have circulated in the public domain as well as the critical reception of her work, this article interrogates the duality of the question, ‘How does she look?’, identifying how the entangled practices of looking surrounding Bigelow have fuelled the cultural prominence she holds as a woman director in contemporary US cinema
Aesthetics · Art · Club · Criticism · Film director · Filmmaking · Irish · Literature · Movie theater · Political science · Scrutiny · Sociology · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Law · Medicine · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture
| Highly cited | No |
|---|