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In Precocious Charms, Gaylyn Studlar examines how Hollywood presented female stars as young girls or girls on the verge of becoming women. Child stars are part of this study but so too are adult actresses who created motion picture masquerades of youthfulness. Studlar details how Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones, and Audrey Hepburn performed girlhood in their films. She charts the multifaceted processes that linked their juvenated star personas to a wide variety of cultural influences, ranging from Victorian sentimental art to New Look fashion, from nineteenth-century children’s literature to post-World War II sexology, and from grand opera to 1930s radio comedy. By moving beyond the general category of "woman," Precocious Charms leads to a new understanding of the complex pleasures Hollywood created for its audience during the half century when film stars were a major influence on America’s cultural imagination.
In a major revision of feminist-psychoanalytic theories of film pleasure and sexual difference, Studlar's close textual analysis of the six Paramount films directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Marlene Dietrich probes the source of their visual and psychological complexity. Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze's psychoanalytic-literary approach, Studlar shows how masochism extends beyond the clinical realm, into the arena of artistic form, language, and production of pleasure. The author's examination of the von Sternberg/Dietrich collaborations shows how these films, with the mother figure embodied in the alluring yet androgynous Dietrich, offer a key for understanding film's "masochistic aesthetic." Studlar argues that masochism's broader significance to film study lies in the similarities between the structures of perversion and those of the cinematic apparatus, as a dream screen reviving archaic visual pleasures for both male and female spectators.
Silent Film offers some of the best recent essays on silent cinema, essays that cross disciplinary boundaries and break new ground in a variety of ways. Some focus on the "materiality" of early cinema: the color processes used in printing nitrate film stocks, the choreographic styles of film acting, and the wide range of sound accompaniment. Others focus on questions of periodicity and nationality: on the shift from a "cinema of attractions" to a "classical narrative cinema," on the relationship between changes in production and those in exhibition, and on the historical specificity of national cinemas. Still others focus on early cinema's intertextual relations with various forms of mass culture (from magazine stories or sensational melodramas in the United States to the tango craze in Russia), and on reception in silent cinema (from black audiences in Chicago to women's fan magazines of the 1920s). Taken together, the contributors to this volume suggest provocative parallels between silent cinema at the turn of the last century and "postmodern" cinema at the end of our own. This book is an important contribution to the study of silent film and a key addition to this new series.
Probing the large body of emotion-laden, controversial films, From Hanoi to Hollywood is concerned with the retelling of history and the retrospection that such a process involves. In this anthology, an awareness of film as a cultural artifact that molds beliefs and guides action is emphasized, an awareness that the contributors bring to a variety of films.
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 F...
The Western is arguably the most popular and longlived form in cinematic history, and the acknowledged master of that genre was John Ford. His Westerns, including The Searchers, Stagecoach, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, have had an enormous influence on contemporary U.S. filmmakers, and on everything from Star Wars to Taxi Driver.In nine majors essays from some of the most prominent scholars of Hollywood film, John Ford Made Westerns: Filming The Legend in The Sound Era situates the sound era westerns of John Ford within contemporary critical contexts and regards them from fresh perspectives. These range from examining Ford's relation to other art forms (most notably literature, pain...
A series of in-depth examinations of the motion picture many consider to be Hollywood's finest western film.
Scholars from communication studies as well as film and television studies address a variety of texts, from Ken Burns's The Civil War to the midnight cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Part one focuses on perennial subject areas related to authorship and reception. Part two addresses an assortment of postmodern and multicultural screen representations, paying closest attention to matters of gender, race, ethnicity, and the disabled. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.