Date of Publication: 2008-09-01

Marcelline Block (BA, Harvard; MA, Princeton), is completing a PhD at Princeton, and two Graduate Certificates: one in the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality and the second in Media and Modernity. She published in Excavatio: Realism and Naturalism in Film Studies (vol. 22); The Harvard French Review (vol. 2); LINE (vols. 1 and 2); Vingtième Siècle: Revue d’Histoire (vol. 96). She co-edits Critical Matrix. Her anthology Prescribing Gender in Medicine and Narrative will appear in 2009

“Feminist film theory presented in the lucid critical polyphony gathered with unerring critical instinct by Marcelline Block will insist upon a dynamic and mobile attitude facing the gaze.”

-Jean-Michel Rabaté, Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania

“This volume, given the breadth of the editor’s choices, makes a splendid contribution to an array of feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural studies, media studies, postmodernism and postfeminism.

The book may have the effect of inciting readers to reconsider stable methodologies and to conceptualize previously unthought-of ways to approach the gendered/cinematic gaze, performativity of gender and the reshaping of classic feminist film theory in the 21st century.

This book lends its readers ‘new eyes’ with which to view canonical texts.

Having edited and in some sense created a many-pagèd anthology, I am in a sub-set of those who can utterly empathize with Ms. Block’s task in writing the Introduction to such disparate essays. She has carried it off well, indeed very well, using talents of synthesis, which I hope the book’s literary critics will appreciate. The book, upon publication, may very well play a role as a significant scholarly resource; nor is this to forget its other role, that of a textbook for upper/lower-level university courses in departments of film, gender studies, cultural and media studies, among others.

I fully recommend this book. I can even imagine I, myself, teaching parts of the book in my seminars on semiotics.”

Marshall Blonsky, PhD, New School University

“I have read the manuscript of Marcelline Block’s edited collection Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema with great interest, and I am pleased to submit the following observations. I will say at the outset that the volume makes valuable, original, and often unique contributions to a remarkably wide array of feminist and cinematic fields. Its essays should be required reading for scholars, students, and general readers who care about cinema’s increasingly complex interactions with contemporary culture at large.”

“The range and variety of the chapters constitute one of the book’s best assets, especially since their diversified contents rarely lose sight of the collection’s unifying concern(s) with the ways in which major issues of feminist and postfeminist theory are currently articulated by and through engagements with the politics, aesthetics, and practices of gender, sexuality, authorship, and representation in today’s moving-image media.”

“A welcome byproduct of Marcelline Block’s approach is the rare (and badly needed) consideration given to filmmakers whose unconventional methods and techniques are chronically overlooked (even by many supposedly enlightened critics) precisely because they grow from a recognition that female/feminist filmmakers must conduct risky experiments with the medium if there is to be a chance of overturning the commercial-patriarchal cinema (a cinéma du papa in every sense) that has dominated and determined patterns of production, distribution, exhibition, and reception since the early days of cinema.”

“I must add a note of appreciation for Marcelline Block’s introduction, which amounts to a concisely written summary of where feminist and postfeminist theory have recently been and are situated at the present time, and a richly suggestive view of where they are likely to be in the near future. Marcelline Block and her colleagues are in the forefront of the growing number of scholars who remember that Mulvey’s influential essay concludes with a call for using film theory as a political weapon capable of challenging, disputing, and ultimately overturning the engines of patriarchal bias that have operated for more than a century through the easily exploited conduits of mass-media visual expression. Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema will play an important part in academic, sociopolitical, and film-cultural skirmishes for a long time to come.”

-David Sterritt, Ph.D.

Adjunct Professor, School of the Arts, Columbia University

Adjunct Faculty in Liberal Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art

Professor Emeritus of Theater and Film, Long Island University

Chair, National Society of Film Critics

“This volume will be invaluable in helping readers to look afresh at questions of gender, sexuality, and representation in the light of the methodological, aesthetic, and strategic shifts outlined here…Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema includes fresh, bold, and new voices alongside very well established scholars in the field, and will no doubt make an important and dynamic contribution to conversations about the role of feminism in contemporary film theory and history. I look forward to teaching sections of this book in a variety of courses, including my courses on film theory, women and film, and the Road Movie.”

-Karen Beckman, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies, Director, Program in Cinema Studies, University of Pennsylvania

“Marcelline Block has edited a compelling collection of essays which includes illuminating discussions of contemporary European and North American filmmakers in which issues pertaining to film theory and women’s studies intersect…This is a rich volume and important new book that recontextualizes key concepts by renowned feminist film theorists, and succeeds in reframing those crucial early insights within a new conceptual and historical configuration of feminist film theory in tune with recent cinematic production and historical and cultural realities.”

-Gabriel Riera, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, University of Illinois, Chicago

“I wish to emphasize how strong a contribution Marcelline Block’s edited volume makes to scholarship about gender, power, and film in the post-World War II era. Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema uniquely impacts this field…This project makes an important contribution to the fields of women and gender studies, film and cultural studies. It is a major resource for research and teaching in undergraduate and graduate programs across the humanities, visual arts, and social sciences. I intend to use this book in my own program at Brooklyn College Graduate Center.”

-Immanuel Ness, Professor, Brooklyn College Graduate Center, City University of New York

“Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema should be required reading for scholars, students, and general readers who care about cinema’s increasingly complex interactions with contemporary culture at large. Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema will play an important part in academic, sociopolitical, and film-cultural debates for a long time to come.”

-David Sterritt, Ph.D. Adjunct Professor, School of the Arts, Columbia University, Adjunct Faculty in Liberal Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art, Professor Emeritus of Theater and Film, Long Island University, Chair, National Society of Film Critics

“This volume, given the breadth of the editor’s choices, makes a splendid contribution to an array of feminist and cinematic fields, as well as cultural studies, media studies, postmodernism and postfeminism.

The book may have the effect of inciting readers to reconsider stable methodologies and to conceptualize previously unthought-of ways to approach the gendered/cinematic gaze, performativity of gender and the reshaping of classic feminist film theory in the 21st century.

This book lends its readers ‘new eyes’ with which to view canonical texts.

Having edited and in some sense created a many-pagèd anthology, I am in a sub-set of those who can utterly empathize with Ms. Block’s task in writing the Introduction to such disparate essays. She has carried it off well, indeed very well, using talents of synthesis, which I hope the book’s literary critics will appreciate. The book, upon publication, may very well play a role as a significant scholarly resource; nor is this to forget its other role, that of a textbook for upper/lower-level university courses in departments of film, gender studies, cultural and media studies, among others.

I fully recommend this book. I can even imagine I, myself, teaching parts of the book in my seminars on semiotics.”

Marshall Blonsky, PhD

New School University