Year: 2005
Type: article
Abstract: This omnibus collection of twenty essays offers many things to a variety of readers, especially those with interests in the history and theory of film, feminism, race, sexuality, technology, and the material cultures of the fin de sie `cle and World War I periods.The project evolved from ''Early Women Stars,'' a special issue of Camera Obscura (January 2002).Bean and Negra arranged this more broadly defined collection into five cinematic categories, though the purpose is as often to challenge and reconceive as simply to employ these terms: ''Reflecting Film Authorship'' (authorship), ''Ways of Looking'' (spectatorship), ''Cultural Inversions'' (historical topicality), ''Performing Bodies'' (stardom), and ''The Problem with Periodization'' (periodicity).The authors undertake their antiessentialist ''feminist film archeological'' project from an intentionally feminist and predominantly New Historical-and thus self-reflective-perspective, a stance meant to historicize ''gaze'' theory and to complicate what they see as the ''ahistorical, abstracted female subject'' of earlier scholarship.This premise, of course, distorts the breadth of second-wave film criticism.The authors do succeed, however, in creating a richly detailed and kaleidoscopic vision of gender as filtered through the lens of the early film industry of the United States, Europe, and China, a period of approximately three-plus decades.A complex range of accepted and newly considered categories, subjects, and evidence is thoughtfully and usefully interrogated, from vampires to flappers, from America's sweetheart Mary Book Reviews
Source: The Journal of American Culture
Author: Marshall W. Fishwick
Institution: Virginia Tech
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1982109737