SITUATIONS WANTED

The history of cinema told through the stories of the women who built and sustained it; New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis will investigate the gender imbalance in our most popular medium from its creation through the present day.

SITUATIONS WANTED will be a sweeping but comprehensive, shadow history of film, told through the women who have shaped and steered the industry from its inception. Despite countless expressions of bias and restriction, the names of these women will be retrieved from the margins and placed above the marquee by the most impassioned, incisive film critic of the last generation. Each chapter will hinge on one or several women whose stories are extensions of the broader industrial, cultural or social changes of their time, personalizing the narrative of cinema's jagged progress/regress through the extraordinary women who have persisted through many layers of injustice to bring us to a moment that may yield lasting change.

Manohla Dargis has reviewed movies for The Village Voice, The L.A. Weekly, and the New York Times, where she has been co-chief film critic since 2004. This is her first book.

Manuscript available: Fall 2020. Tentative pub date: Fall 2021.