Film's Feisty Femmes

It would be difficult to overestimate the importance, originality, and success of current Polish female directors, whose bold, vivid features have taken the film industry by storm. Film’s Feisty Femmes spotlights nine of the most productive, internationally acclaimed women in a profession traditionally dominated by men but characterized in 21st-century Poland by receptivity to creative talent regardless of gender. With the transition to a market economy, institutional innovations appreciably transformed the country’s filmmaking—a transformation of which audiences are the primary beneficiaries. The volume’s seven chapters combine textual analysis with assessment of camerawork, situating each director’s major works in a cultural context that includes significant developments in Poland as well as international trends in cinema and gender politics. A major issue addressed throughout entails the directors’ relationship to feminism in narratives that are unapologetically gynocentric.

After an invaluable early education at a grammar school in Rugby, England, Helena Goscilo received her BA from Queens College (NY) and her PhD from Indiana University (Bloomington). She chaired the Slavic Department at the University of Pittsburgh and at Ohio State University while publishing over twenty volumes. During the last few years, she has focused on Polish film. Vincent Albarano is an Ohio-based independent writer and researcher focusing on underground and genre cinema. He received his MA in Film Studies from The Ohio State University in 2022. His first book, Aesthetic Deviations: A Critical View of American Shot-on-Video Horror, 1984-1994, was published by Headpress in 2023.