Search results

This dissertation is about cinema culture, modern femininity, and Mexico City between 1917 and 1931. It is a story about movie makers, movie spectators, and the movie texts that mediated between them. It is a study of on-screen divas, pelonas, and indigenas. It is also an account of an era that began with end of revolutionary bloodshed and ended with the beginning of Mexican sound cinema. The confluence of Mexican cultural nationalism and transnational modernity during this period prompted robust discourse around the categories "woman," "women," and "feminine," which meant that these terms were under constant revision at the same time that Mexican silent cinema culture was developing a foundation for the subsequent Golden Age (1940-1950). Accordingly, the discursive history that follows aims to elucidate the reciprocal relationship between women and silent cinema culture in Mexico City during the immediate postrevolution era. While scholars of North American cinema have revealed that women played a more powerful role in film culture during the silent era than any other time since, and though studies of Latin American cinema have recently begun to interrogate the specific characteristics of silent cinema in the region, the assumption that Mexican gender ideologies barred women from participation in silent film culture persists. Moreover, Mexican silent film culture is often dismissed or bracketed from discussions of later cinematic developments in that country on the assumption that, because few silent films were made in Mexico, the influence of the era was similarly constrained. How, then, did women engage with the movies as spectators, filmmakers, and characters on screen? How did this engagement interface with Mexican gender ideals, and how did it help guide the development of Mexican cinema? The discourses that articulated postrevolution cinema culture spoke also to the gendered balance of social and political power in modern Mexico, so my project joins a growing body of work that appraises the role of women ...

Archival Film Curatorship is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archive in Sheffield, UK serve as exemplary sites of historical mediation between early and silent cinema and the digital age. A range of elements, from preservation protocols to technologies of display and from museum architectures to curatorial discourses in blogs, catalogs, and interviews, shape what the author innovatively theorizes as the archive's hermeneutic dispositif. Archival Film Curatorship offers film and preservation scholars a unique take on the shifting definitions, histories, and uses of the medium of film by those tasked with preserving and presenting it to new digital-age audiences.

"As film stars, actresses have throughout film history contributed to the film industry's glamorous surface, providing audiences with visual attraction and different representations of femininity. To talk about women in film as "invisible" may thus seem odd or even wrong. This book, however, is concerned with the paradox that on the other side of the camera, women are clearly underrepresented. This is true of contemporary film culture, and has been true historically, despite significant variations between countries/geographical areas, historical time periods and different roles/professions in film production, distribution and exhibition. This anthology recovers forgotten aspects of women's work and memory, tracing women's film work through the lens of Swedish film history, with a few forays into international film ventures. Using a variety of methods and approaches, including careful study of previously neglected archival material, lived experiences, interviews, and theoretical reflections on feminist historiography, the book explores themes of women's agency and (lack of) visibility in a cultural context very different to Hollywood, thus providing readers with a healthy counterweight to the dominance of Anglo-American material in film scholarship published in English. The articles deal with women's agency in a wide range of roles, in film production, exhibition and criticism, but also with new perspectives on stars/actresses and their agency, and including LGBT and queer identities.
The research presents material evidence of women's involvement in film culture being obscured and ignored because of its status as "women's work", and/or of marginal rather than mainstream interest. The book is divided into two parts, where the first part collects chapters that cover neglected dimensions of silent film culture and the use of archival film as cultural memory in documentary work from various time periods, whereas the second part of the book is focussed mainly on films and filmmaking in the 1970s and 1980s."

The histories of New Zealand and Australian film production, distribution and exhibition have been characterized by significant exchanges in terms of culture, technology, creative personnel and policy approaches. Despite forming a persistent characteristic of the film industries of both countries, these connections have so far been either ignored or under-examined. This article investigates the technological, industrial, economic and cultural factors that influenced the relationship between Australian and New Zealand filmmaking during the early period of cinema until the 1930s. During this period, film production and distribution in New Zealand and Australia was conceived as an Australasian initiative characterized by both extensive labour mobility and an integrated film market. Early Australasian filmmakers moved seamlessly across the Tasman, producing films both in Australia and in New Zealand and contributing to both national cinematic traditions. This article argues that to fully grasp the histories of Australian and New Zealand film, it is essential to consider the contribution that these Australasian filmmakers made to the cultural, technological and industrial development of both national cinemas.

This study deals with Indonesian cinema. Perspectives of politics and culture employed to provide understanding of how Indonesian cinema from the early period of its development untill the recent times. This study demonstrates that Indonesian cinema could be associated significantly with politics primarily in the 1950s and 1960s when Indonesian cinema had really started to grow. In the period of New Order cinema becomes a manifestation of kitsch pursuing for capital gain. Yet after the fall of the regime significant shifts occur namely no longer have Indonesian cinemas strongly related to politics in their content of messages but the cinemas promote much moore various discoursive contents.

This dissertation examines how melodrama in early twentieth century Argentina and Colombia shaped sites of intelligibility to record multiple processes of modernization—including but not limited to massive immigration, the import of new technologies, and the (gendered) reshuffling of social orders. This dissertation also analyzes the ways in which melodrama recast different senses of community. With an archival perspective, it traces how diverse social actors appropriated melodrama for individual and group agendas, as they entered the modern political pact, the pact of representation. More specifically, and by bridging Latin American and Euro-American theories of melodrama, this dissertation traces key narrative conventions and argues that, across the social spectrum, actors recast the dynamics of representation during the period by visualizing classed, raced, and gendered anxieties vis-à-vis change through the interrelated media of literature, illustrated periodicals, and film.The first chapter addresses how the national imagination and state formations in Latin America were shaped through melodrama, correlatively determining dominant narrative tropes across media. I focus on José Mármol's Amalia (1851-1855) and Jorge Isaacs' María (1867) and the cross-media iterations of both works engendered around the Argentine and Colombian centennial celebrations. The second chapter turns to 1920s tabloid newspapers and weekly novels. These served as platforms for emergent writers, many of them immigrants, who harnessed melodramatic narratives in periodicals to denounce social problems and inequity, particularly regarding destitute subjects who were marginalized in rapid urbanization processes. Turning the focus to early cinema, the third chapter examines the tense relations between material progress, tradition, and social change/immobility visualized in three filmic genres—the Argentine cine de ambiente campero, the porteño cinedrama, and the Colombian patriarchal family melodrama. These genres told contrasting tales of modernization: Argentine cinema capitalized on modernity's changes, its thrills and anxieties, while Colombian cinema depicted tradition and religiosity as compulsory conditions for material progress. This dissertation ultimately proposes that melodrama was not an escapist form, as it is commonly defamed. Rather, it visualized the present moment, unbarred the public sphere, and pointed to an inclusive future.