Helen Hanson – författare

These essays trace the femme fatale across literature, visual culture and cinema, exploring the ways in which fatal femininity has been imagined in different cultural contexts and historical epochs, and moving from mythical women such as Eve, Medusa and the Sirens via historical figures such as Mata Hari to fatal women in contemporary cinema.

Combining ink with dry coloured pencil is an innovative technique that integrates two very different media, resulting in rich and detailed work. This beautiful book looks at different methods of mark-making in ink and a repertoire of coloured pencil techniques, then explains how to work with them together successfully. Drawing on the author’s love of the countryside and its plant communities, it shows how the technique can be used to interpret the landscape in a new and highly individual way. Packed with step-by-step sequences and finished examples, this book will encourage beginners to get started and inspire artists looking for a new direction.

This practical book is an inspiring guide to the innovative technique that combines ink and dry coloured pencil, and explores a wealth of natural subjects from berries to butterflies. Packed with examples and learning points, it explains the different methods of mark-making in ink and drawing with coloured pencils. For those new to the technique, Helen Hanson encourages you to develop an individual style and, for those who enjoyed her first book, she explores a new world of subjects. This book is a treasure trove of ideas and examples that both artists and lovers of nature will enjoy.

These essays trace the femme fatale across literature, visual culture and cinema, exploring the ways in which fatal femininity has been imagined in different cultural contexts and historical epochs, and moving from mythical women such as Eve, Medusa and the Sirens via historical figures such as Mata Hari to fatal women in contemporary cinema.

The technical crafts of sound in classical Hollywood cinema have, until recently, remained largely ‘unsung’ by histories of the studio era. Yet film sound – voice, music and sound effects – is a crucial aspect of film style and has been key to engaging and holding audiences since the transition to sound by Hollywood’s major studios in 1929. This innovative new text restores sound technicians to Hollywood’s creative history. Exploring a range of films from the early sound period (1931) through to the late studio period (1948), and drawing on a wide range of archival sources, the book reveals how Hollywood’s sound designers worked and why they worked in the ways that they did. The book demonstrates how sound technicians developed conventions designed to tell stories through sound, placing them within the production cultures of studio era filmmaking, and uncovering a history of collective and collaborative creativity. In doing so, it traces the emergence of a body of highly skilled sound personnel, able to apply expert technical knowledge in the science of sound to the creation of cinematic soundscapes that are alive with mood and sensation.

The endangered and dangerous female figures of "Rebecca", of "Jagged Edge" and "What Lies Beneath" have a deserved and endures fascination. Helen Hanson re-examines these gothic heroines of Hollywood and their meanings, in two of Hollywood's key generic cycles, film noir and the female gothic film. Starting at the beginning, with the origin of these cycles and the ways in which they represented women in the American film industry and culture of the 1940s, she traces their revival in neo-noir and neo-gothic films from the 1980s to the present. She also places the female figures of the femme fatale, female investigator and gothic heroine within the shifting contexts of the film industry and debates in feminist film criticism. Hanson examines a wide range of films from both periods, including 'Suspicion', 'Gaslight' and 'Pacific Heights', and gives particular attention to their presentation of female stories, actions and perspectives. She reveals a diversity of female figures, representations and actions in film noir and the female gothic film, and argues that these women are part of a negotiation of female identities, desires and roles across a long historical period."Hollywood Heroines" therefore offers us new ways of thinking about classic and contemporary Hollywood heroines, and about the interrelationships of gender and genre.