{"title":"How Asta Nielsen Transformed the Screen","authors":"Pamela Hutchinson","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.131","url":null,"abstract":"Freelance film curator Pamela Hutchinson interviews Scandinavian studies scholar Julie K. Allen about the life and work of silent film star Asta Nielsen, who made her debut in 1910 and was among the most acclaimed performers of her generation. Allen discusses her work on Nielsen, including the translation of the actor’s memoir into English for the first time: The Silent Muse (Rochester, NY: Camden House 2022). The conversation covers Nielsen’s most famous roles, her global reception, and her enduring importance to queer audiences.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66947410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"What Women Want","authors":"Sarah Keller","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.3.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.3.15","url":null,"abstract":"The feeling of being caught between immersion in cinematic fictions and having one’s attention pulled away from them by a range of distractions has shaped the experience of cinema for many decades. In the 1910s, several developments emerged in tandem with each other: the promotion of films and their stars/directors, narrative becoming the dominant form of cinema production, and the materialization of tension between immersion and distraction for audiences. The environment in which 1910s promotional and narrational strategies thrived set the stage for how we have thought about the bodies of women on screen, behind the camera, and in the seats of the theater. This essay focuses on the example of Cleo Madison as a filmmaker, actress, and a site of discursive energy to explore these issues.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66947668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Research without Films","authors":"C. Gledhill","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.8","url":null,"abstract":"Dinah Shurey was the only woman to found her own film company in 1920s Britain, producing six films and directing one, all of which, despite their apparent popularity, are lost. Absence of films and (auto)biography, along with the “oddness” of Shurey’s choice of military and naval melodramas, means film history has discounted her. This article explores alternative historical sources—genealogical sites, popular magazines from her family’s publishing house, autobiographies of women she worked with, source novels and short stories, industry meeting and law-court reports, trade papers and reviews, shipping manifests, and hospital records. Drawing on Debashree Mukherjee’s concept of “cine-ecology,” it pursues Shurey’s career at the intersections of shifting social and professional networks and a diversity of sociocultural intertexts. It aims less to restore a forgotten woman filmmaker than garner insight into the lived experience of a career struggle, filtered through cultural changes, social and media events, conflicting industrial interests, and political calculations.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66947230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"My Name Is Alice Guy","authors":"Aurore Spiers","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.155","url":null,"abstract":"Founded in Paris in October 1973, the feminist collective “Musidora,” which was named for the actress, director, screenwriter, and film critic Jeanne Roques, also known as Musidora, was instrumental in generating new interest in women’s film history. This essay examines the collective Musidora’s speculative approaches to the first woman filmmaker, Alice Guy Blaché, by way of Nicole-Lise Bernheim’s short film Qui est Alice Guy? (Who Is Alice Guy?, 1976). Its focus lies in particular in how the members of the Musidora collective, which often represented Guy Blaché in their image, as a strong independent woman struggling to be recognized as a filmmaker in France, transformed Guy Blaché into a feminist figure of French film history through speculative means. In doing so, the collective Musidora reveals not our limited knowledge of the past, but rather the possibilities of changing the present through both historiographical and fictional means.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lesbian Bars, Archival Media Bricolage and Research-Creation","authors":"Julianne Pidduck","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.132","url":null,"abstract":"This article reflects on the author’s research-creation project entitled After Hours Chez Madame Arthur as a speculative practice of archival media bricolage. After Hours was a multimedia installation returning to the 1970s lesbian bar Chez Madame Arthur mounted at the Centre Never Apart in summer 2019. Made possible by the support of co-researchers, community groups, technicians, research assistants and artists who share my fascination with local queer women’s history, After Hours restaged this storied bar deploying diverse archival media traces and period objects. This essay discusses some of the possibilities of research-creation and non-representational theory for lesbian, feminist, and queer historical projects. I explore the affordances of archival media traces for forging affective and erotic relationships between past and present, with a particular emphasis on presence, metonymy, storytelling, and space.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"63 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards a Methodology of Unwatched Digital Media","authors":"Lauren Berliner","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.219","url":null,"abstract":"Cinema and Media Studies scholarship has historically been grounded in examining media that has been deemed significant. Whether that significance has been determined to be social, aesthetic, political, or even economic, our focus has been trained on understanding and explaining its import. In the age of digital media networks, we now have the added metrics of shares and likes to support our methods of media consumption and engagement, or at the least confirm that there is indeed an active audience. Building from established approaches in the field, this article seeks to bring attention to the digital media landscape to ask, what do digital audiovisual media that have been posted online but do not circulate have to offer? A close textual analysis of several such videos is used to advocate for a methodology to elucidate the themes, identities, and production practices that are escaping (algorithmically informed) representation.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decolonization, Disenchantment, and Arab Feminist Genealogies of Worldmaking","authors":"Viviane Saglier","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.72","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.72","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyzes the intersection of Third Worldist materialism and decolonial epistemologies in the Arab world by focusing on Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour’s decolonial feminist cinema in the transitional period of the 1970s to 1990s. It proposes to read Srour’s disenchanted critique of masculine Third World nationalisms and Western feminism as a practice of worldmaking that is grounded within colonial-patriarchal modernity. Using Srour’s own trajectory as an entry point into larger debates, the article reflects on what affiliation to third cinema means for crafting a cinema of liberation that reconfigures gender relations. Srour’s Leila and the Wolves (1984) exemplifies such an expansive praxis of third cinema by combining a feminist historiography that centers oral tales, myth, and genealogies with a commitment to the armed struggle. The article concludes that Srour’s decolonial feminist cinema functions as a pedagogical tool to build cross-gender coalitions necessary for the persistence of the anticolonial struggle.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46057922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Pioneer Paradigm","authors":"Kiki Loveday","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.165","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.165","url":null,"abstract":"This essay considers the deployment of a nineteenth-century white-supremacist imaginary within popular culture and, more curiously, within feminist media historiography. Tracing the paradoxical figure of the “female film pioneer” to groundbreaking work by Ally Acker and Jane Gaines in the 1990s, I historicize how the “pioneers” initially functioned as strategic interventions in a white masculinist landscape, but argue that they have since become naturalized in post-millennial digital culture and are (mis)shaping the discourse of the field. Leaning on foundational texts by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam and Emma Pérez, this paper intervenes in the pioneer paradigm so prevalent in the study of the silent film era—and in discourse on female film and video makers more generally—calling for a proliferation of metaphors to provoke new insights into the very real challenges facing feminists in the present.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47178880","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Is a Non-Capitalist World Imaginable? Embodied Practices and Slipstream Potentials in Amanda Strong’s Biidaaban","authors":"Matthew Harrison Tedford","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.46","url":null,"abstract":"This essay analyzes Michif filmmaker Amanda Strong’s 2018 stop-motion film about urban syrup making, Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) within the context of some scholars’ claim that it is nearly impossible to imagine a world outside of capitalism. Drawing on decolonial Indigenous political theory and feminist thought, the essay argues that Biidaaban illustrates the political possibilities of Indigenous slipstream, a subgenre of Indigenous science fiction characterized by nonlinear time, to bring about liberatory worlds in the face of forces that make the capitalist order appear natural. Theories of Indigenous aesthetics also highlight how embodied practices—including both syrup making and stop-motion animation—are part of an ongoing process of creation and remaking of the world. These perspectives point to the generative function of visual art, breaking down the boundary between representation and action. Following from these ideas, the essays shows how Biidaaban is an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty and a generative step in the process of world making.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46720979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}