Synopses & Reviews
A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema marks a new era of feminist film scholarship. The twenty essays collected here demonstrate how feminist historiographies at once alter and enrich ongoing debates over visuality and identification, authorship, stardom, and nationalist ideologies in cinema and media studies. Drawing extensively on archival research, the collection yields startling accounts of women's multiple roles as early producers, directors, writers, stars, and viewers. It also engages urgent questions about cinema's capacity for presenting a stable visual field, often at the expense of racially, sexually, or class-marked bodies.
While fostering new ways of thinking about film history, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema illuminates the many questions that the concept of andquot;early cinemaandquot; itself raises about the relation of gender to modernism, representation, and technologies of the body. The contributors bring a number of disciplinary frameworks to bear, including not only film studies but also postcolonial studies, dance scholarship, literary analysis, philosophies of the body, and theories regarding modernism and postmodernism.
Reflecting the stimulating diversity of early cinematic styles, technologies, and narrative forms, essays address a range of topicsandmdash;from the dangerous sexuality of the urban flandacirc;neuse to the childlike femininity exemplified by Mary Pickford, from the Shanghai film industry to Italian diva filmsandmdash;looking along the way at birth-control sensation films, French crime serials, andquot;war actualities,andquot; and the stylistic influence of art deco. Recurring throughout the volume is the protean figure of the New Woman, alternately garbed as childish tomboy, athletic star, enigmatic vamp, languid diva, working girl, kinetic flapper, and primitive exotic.
Contributors. Constance Balides, Jennifer M. Bean, Kristine Butler, Mary Ann Doane, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Amelie Hastie, Sumiko Higashi, Lori Landay, Anne Morey, Diane Negra, Catherine Russell, Siobhan B. Somerville, Shelley Stamp, Gaylyn Studlar, Angela Dalle Vacche, Radha Vatsal, Kristen Whissel, Patricia White, Zhang Zhen
Review
andrdquo;Despite the enormous amount of work that has been done in the last two decades on women and early cinema, this anthology is the first of its kind. It is outstanding.andrdquo;andmdash;Judith Mayne, author of Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture
Review
andrdquo;This collection is a persuasive reminder that the hottest current topics in film theoryandmdash;cultural intersections, questions of authorship, fantasy and technology, representation and the bodyandmdash;demand and are illuminated by feminist inquiry.andrdquo;andmdash; Linda Mizejewski, author of Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema
Synopsis
The first anthology in a rapidly expanding area of cinema studies.
About the Author
”Despite the enormous amount of work that has been done in the last two decades on women and early cinema, this anthology is the first of its kind. It is outstanding.”—Judith Mayne, author of Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture”This collection is a persuasive reminder that the hottest current topics in film theory—cultural intersections, questions of authorship, fantasy and technology, representation and the body—demand and are illuminated by feminist inquiry.”— Linda Mizejewski, author of Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema
Table of Contents
Circuits of memory and history: The memoirs of Alice Guy-Blachâe / Amelie Hastie -- Nazimova's veils: Salome at the intersection of film histories / Patricia White -- Of cabbages and authors / Jane M. Gaines -- Reevaluating footnotes: women directors of the silent era / Radha Vatsal -- The gender of empire: American modernity, masculinity, and Edison's war actualities / Kristen Whissel -- Making ends meet: "welfare films" and the politics of consumption during the progressive era / Constance Balides -- Irma vep, vamp in the city: mapping the criminal feminine in early French serials / Kristine J. Butler -- The flapper film: comedy, dance, and jazz age kinaesthetics / Lori Landay -- The queer career of Jim Crow: racial and sexual transformation in a Florida enchantment / Siobhan B. Somerville -- Taking precautions, or regulating early birth-control films / Shelley Stamp -- The new woman and consumer culture: Cecil B. Demille's sex comedies / Sumiko Higashi -- "So real as to seem like life itself": the photoplay fiction of Adela Rogers St. Johns / Anne Morey -- Oh, "doll divine": Mary Pickford, masquerade, and the pedophilic gaze / Gaylyn Studlar -- Immigrant stardom in imperial America: pola negri and the problem of typology / Diane Negra -- Technologies of early stardom and the extraordinary body / Jennifer M. Bean -- Femininity in flight: androgyny and gynandry in early silent Italian cinema / Angela Dalle Vacche -- Greta Garbo and silent cinema: the actress as art deco icon / Lucy Fischer -- An amorous history of the silver screen: the actress as vernacular embodiment in early Chinese film culture / Zhang Zhen -- Technology's body: cinematic vision in modernity / Mary Ann Doane -- Parallax historiography: the Flãaneuse as cyberfeminist / Catherine Russell.