In Search of First Contact

The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery

Autor: Kolodny, Annette
Editor: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822352822
eISBN Pdf: 9780822395539
Lugar de publicación: Durham , Estados Unidos
Año de publicación digital: 2002
Mes: Noviembre
Páginas: 592
DDC: 791.43/652042
Idioma: Ingles

Descripción

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
Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema
I. Reflecting Film Authorship
- Circuits of Memory and History: The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blaché
- Nazimova’s Veils: Salome at the Intersection of Film Histories
- Of Cabbages and Authors
- Reevaluating Footnotes: Women Directors of the Silent Era
II. Ways of Looking
- The Gender of Empire: American Modernity, Masculinity, and Edison's War Actualities
- Making Ends Meet: ‘‘Welfare Films’’ and the Politics of Consumption during the Progressive Era
- Irma Vep, Vamp in the City: Mapping the Criminal Feminine in Early French Serials
- The Flapper Film: Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics
III. Cultural Inversions
- The Queer Career of Jim Crow: Racial and Sexual Transformation in A Florida Enchantment
- Taking Precautions, or Regulating Early Birth-Control Films
- The New Woman and Consumer Culture: Cecil B. DeMille’s Sex Comedies
- ‘‘So Real as to Seem Like Life Itself ’’: The Photoplay Fiction of Adela Rogers St. Johns
IV. Performing Bodies
- Oh, ‘‘Doll Divine’’: Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze
- Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology
- Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body
- Femininity in Flight: Androgyny and Gynandry in Early Silent Italian Cinema
- Greta Garbo and Silent Cinema: The Actress as Art Deco Icon
V. The Problem with Periodization
- An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress as Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture
- Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity
- Parallax Historiography: The Flâneuse as Cyberfeminist
Contributors
Index