A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema

by Bean, Jennifer M.; Negra, Diane; Hastie, Amelie (CON); Gaines, Jane M. (CON)

• ISBN13: 9780822330257
• ISBN10: 0822330253
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

"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

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema	1	(28)
Jennifer M. Bean
I Reflecting Film Authorship
Circuits of Memory and History: The Memories of Alice Guy-Blache	29	(31)
Amelie Hastie
Nazimova's Veils: Salome at the Intersection of Film Histories	60	(28)
Patricia White
Of Cabbages and Authors	88	(31)
Jane M. Gaines
Reevaluating Footnotes: Women Directors of the Silent Era	119	(22)
Radha Vatsal
II Ways of Looking
The Gender of Empire: American Modernity, Masculinity, and Edison's War Actualities	141	(25)
Kristen Whissel
Making Ends Meet: ``Welfare Films'' and the Politics of Consumption during the Progressive Era	166	(29)
Constance Balides
Irma Vep, Vamp in the City: Mapping the Criminal Feminine in Early French Serials	195	(26)
Kristine J. Butler
The Flapper Film: Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics	221	(30)
Lori Landay
III Cultural Inversions
The Queer Career of Jim Crow: Racial and Sexual Transformation in A Florida Enchantment	251	(19)
Siobhan B. Somerville
Taking Precautions, or Regulating Early Birth-Control Films	270	(28)
Shelley Stamp
The New Woman and Consumer Culture: Cecil B. DeMille's Sex Comedies	298	(35)
Sumiko Higashi
``So Real as to Seem Like Life Itself'': The Photoplay Fiction of Adela Rogers St. Johns	333	(16)
Anne Morey
IV Performing Bodies
Oh, ``Doll Divine'': Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze	349	(25)
Gaylyn Studlar
Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology	374	(30)
Diane Negra
Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body	404	(40)
Jennifer M. Bean
Femininity in Flight: Androgyny and Gynandry in Early Silent Italian Cinema	444	(32)
Angela Dalle Vacche
Greta Garbo and Silent Cinema: The Actress as Art Deco Icon	476	(25)
Lucy Fischer
V The Problem with Periodization
An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress as Vernacular Embodiment in early Chinese Film Culture	501	(29)
Zhang Zhen
Technology's Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity	530	(22)
Mary Ann Doane
Parallax Historiography: The Flaneuse as Cyberfeminist	552	(19)
Catherine Russell
Contributors	571	(4)
Index	575