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ReFocus: The American Directors Series

ReFocus: The Films of Doris Wishman

Edited by Alicia Kozma and Farrah Freibert

Format

£105.00

In stock

About this book

Offers the first book length contribution to Doris Wishman
  • Covers Wishman’s vast filmography inclusive of her less discussed later films, hardcore films and nudist films
  • Situates Wishman within larger contexts and movements in American film history including women’s filmmaking, avant-garde and experimental cinema and genre film
  • Considers the cultural, historical, and industrial significance of Wishman with focuses on gender studies, genre studies, film narrative, feminist history, queer history and adult film history

Producer, distributor, and director Doris Wishman (1912–2002) was a pioneering woman in the film industry, leaving a body of work almost 30 films strong. Largely overlooked by critical and cultural analysis, Wishman worked in the normatively neglected film genre of sexploitation and adult film, but works like Hideout in the Sun (1960), Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965), Double Agent 73 (1974) and Each Time I Kill (2007) demonstrate an interest in complicated, ideological and often troubling social performances of the contemporary human condition.

ReFocus: The Films of Doris Wishman positions Wishman as a significant and overlooked force in American independent film, with an impact on how we currently understand the categories of cult, exploitation, horror, experimental and avant-garde cinema.

Reviews

This book is a must for scholars in a range of different areas. The collection explores the sexual politics of Wishman’s films and provoke fascinating questions about our understanding of genre. It also explores what it means to consider Wishman an "artist" and, in the process, explores her relationship to other filmmakers and film movements. In short, this book is much more than a study of a fascinating figure: it provides a fascinating take on film history in particular, and cultural history more generally, that demands to be read by those who have never heard of Wishman and who may consider themselves uninterested in lowbrow culture more generally.
Table of contents

Notes on Contributors ix

Acknowledgements xi

Foreword xii

Joan Hawkins

Introduction: Making Films in Hell 1

Alicia Kozma and Finley Freibert

PART 1 Gender and Genre

1 The Body as Apparatus: Doris Wishman’s Double Agent 73 18

Elena Gorfinkel

2 The Girls in the Mirror: Women’s Horror Filmmaking and Doris 43

Wishman’s Each Time I Kill (2007)

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

3 Trans/sexual negativity and the ethics of (s)exploitation in 64

Let Me Die a Woman

Harper Shalloe

PART 2 Cultural History and Adult Film Studies

4 Hardcore Wishman 94

Whitney Strub

5 Bad Bis Go to Hell: Bisexuality as Transgressive and Lucrative in 112

Doris Wishman’s Roughies

Finley Freibert

6 "It’s Strange, but It’s Wonderful": Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon 147

Karen Joan Kohoutek

PART 3 Comparative Approaches to Authorship

7 Depicting Female Bodies: Doris Wishman, Carolee Schneemann, and 172

Legacies of Subversion

Hannah Greenberg

8 Revolutionization of the Erotic Screen: The Films and Doris Wishman 203

and Wakamatsu Koji

Molly Kim

9 "You can’t say you’re not getting a horror film here!": Authorship, 224

Genre, and the Accidental Avant-Garde in Doris Wishman’s A Night to Dismember"

Jamie Hook

10 My Teenage Cinematic Love Affair with Doris Wishman 252

Rebekah McKendry

About the contributors

Alicia Kozma

Alicia Kozma is an educator, writer, and researcher who specializes in the everyday work of the media, including a dual focus on how the film industry runs, the composition of industry employees, and the form and function of their labor; and the industrial, financial, and technological evolutions of film exhibition and its impacts on independent film. She is the author of The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking, and co-editor of Refocus: The Films of Doris Wishman and Mobilized Identities: Mediated Subjectivity and Cultural Crisis in the Neoliberal Era. Her work has been published widely, including in Media Industries, Film Comment, Camera Obscura, Television and New Media, and other venues. Kozma is the Director of the Indiana University Cinema, where she oversees programming, operations, and academic and industry initiatives. She is affiliate faculty in IU's Media School and the IU Wells Scholar Professor for 2025. Dr. Kozma holds a PhD in communication and media studies from the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Farrah Freibert

Farrah Freibert is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies in the School of Media Arts at Southern Illinois University. With research that spans media history and industry studies, global media circulations and LGBTQ+ history, she has published widely in peer-reviewed scholarly venues such as Film Criticism, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of Anime and Manga Studies, Monstrum, Porn Studies, the Journal of Homosexuality, Spectator, Synoptique, and Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture. Dr. Freibert is coeditor with Alicia Kozma of Refocus: The Films of Doris Wishman (2021).

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