Full Description
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 "early cinema" 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 topics—from the dangerous sexuality of the urban flâneuse to the childlike femininity exemplified by Mary Pickford, from the Shanghai film industry to Italian diva films—looking along the way at birth-control sensation films, French crime serials, "war actualities," 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
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema / Jennifer M. Bean 1
I. Reflecting Film Authorship
Circuits of Memory and History: The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blache / Amelie Hastie 29
Nazimova's Veils: Salome at the Intersection of Film Histories / Patricia White 60
Of Cabbages and Authors / Jane M. Gaines 88
Reevaluating Footnotes: Women Directors of the Silent Era / Radha Vatsal 119
II. Ways of Looking
The Gender of Empire: American Modernity, Masculinity, and Edison's War Actualities / Kristen Whissel 141
Making Ends Meet: "Welfare Films" and the Politics of Consumption during the Progressive Era / Constance Balides 166
Irma Vep, Vamp in the City: Mapping the Criminal Feminine in Early French Serials / Kristine J. Butler 195
The Flapper Film: Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics / Lori Landay 221
III. Cultural Inversions
The Queer Career of Jim Crow: Racial and Sexual Transformation in A Florida Enchantment / Siobhan B. Somerville 251
Taking Precautions, or Regulating Early Birth-Control Films / Shelley Stamp 270
The New Woman and Consumer Culture: Cecil B. DeMille's Sex Comedies / Sumiko Higashi 298
"So Real as to Seem Like Life Itself": The Photoplay Fiction of Adela Rogers St. Johns / Anne Morey 333
IV. Performing Bodies
Oh, "Doll Divine": Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze / Gaylyn Studlar 349
Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology / Diane Negra 374
Technologies of early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body / Jennifer M. Bean 404
Femininity in Flight: Androgyny and Gynandry in Early Silent Italian Cinema / Angela Dalle Vacche 444
Greta Garbo and Silent Cinema: The Actress as Art Deco Icon / Lucy Fischer 476
V. The Problem with Periodization
An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress as Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture / Zhang Zhen 501
Technology's Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity / Mary Ann Doane 530
Parallax Historiography: The Flaneuse as Cyberfeminist / Catherine Russell 552
Contributors 571
Index 575
