ABSTRACT
Nicole Holofcener’s career illustrates many of the attributes of the new woman’s film as it develops in the twentieth-first century. As a case history, her oeuvre illustrates the mode of production that characterizes independent cinema, including films made by and for women. The shape of Holofcener’s career and of her films, taken as group, illustrates the role of female auteur directors in developing the new woman’s film of the twenty-first century, in particular its relations to the girly film or chick flick of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its commonalities and differences. Between 1996 and 2013, she directed five films that, taken as a corpus, chronicle the lives of a generation of women belonging to a specific class who come of age in the late 1980s and 1990s. While not chick flicks, each film reprises themes common to chick flicks, while, in the words of feminist film scholar Linda Badley, “they refuse … the romance formulas, conspicuous consumerism and fake feminism” that she associates with the genre. 2 As such, Holofcener’s films represent a prominent example of the smart-chick film, each revolving around a conceit typical of earlier forms of the woman’s film.
