Who decides how, when, and where Americans fall in love and get married? Virginia Wexman's acute observations about movie stars and acting techniques show that Hollywood has often had the most powerful voice in demonstrating socially sanctioned ways of becoming a couple. Until now serious film critics have paid little attention to the impact of performance styles on American romance, and have often treated "patriarchy," "sexuality," and the "couple" as monolithic and unproblematic concepts. Wexman, however, shows how these notions have been periodically transformed in close association...

During the 1960s, when cinema first entered the academy as a serious object of study, the primary focus was on "auteurism," or on films authorship. Burgeoning cinema studies courses demonstrated how directors were the authors of work that undermined (or succeeded in spite of) all the constraints that Hollywood threw at them. New critical methods were introduced as the field matured, and studies of the author/director, for the most part, were considered obsolete.

Virginia Wright Wexman has pulled together some of the freshest writing available on the topic of film authorship. Spanning...

In outstanding films that are sharply focused on unusual women Jane Campion has gained worldwide admiration and respect. This New Zealand director first attracted international attention with her 1989 film Sweetie, an acerbic study of two sisters in a wildly dysfunctional family. She followed this in 1990 with the television miniseries An Angel at My Table, based on the autobiography of New Zealand author Janet Frame. Subsequently released in theatres, the film chronicles the early trials of the young writer. Poor, timid, and physically awkward, Frame was misdiagnosed as...