Voluptuous Masochism: Gothic Melodrama Studies in Memory of Joan Fontaine

 

RITES OF PASSAGE by Catherine Grant

A video essay, completed in memory of Joan Fontaine, studying the liminal moments of her character in Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). This low resolution, educational compilation also samples and remixes music originally composed for the film by Franz Waxman.

Film Studies For Free presents its last entry of the year on the gothic film melodrama. Sadly, this entry appears just a short time after the death of one of the most notable stars of Hollywood's female Gothic tradition -- Joan Fontaine (22 October 1917 − 15 December 2013) -- and is dedicated to her memory. Other tributes have been comprehensively collected by David Hudson at his Keyframe/Fandor site, including a particularly fine one by Josephine Botting for the British Film Institute

FSFF's own collection of resources begins with an item that also doubles as a tribute: its own videographic study of Fontaine's masterly physical performance of "voluptuous masochism" (to borrow the brilliant words of Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape [p. 191]) in the context of Alfred Hitchcock's mise-en-scene for Rebecca (1940), together with Franz Waxman's lushly uncanny musical score for this film.

The resources continue at length below in a customary -- for FSFF -- list of links to online scholarly resources on the cinematic gothic more generally. You can also find further, closely related studies in FSFF's earlier entry on Final Girl Studies.

FSFF warmly wishes its readers very happy holidays if they're having them! It will be back with lots more open access film studies in the new year.

• Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies
• The Gothic Imagination website, University of Stirling 
• BFI Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film Resources
• BFI Gothic in the Classroom Resources 

 

• Elizabeth Abele, 'The Glory of Cary Grant and Other Girlish Delights. 3: Suspicious Looks', Images, Issue 5, 1997
• Glennis Byron, '©Branding and Gothic in Contemporary Popular Culture: the case of Twilight', The Gothic Imagination, December 31, 2010
• David Cairns, 'Felicitous Rooms: Fritz Lang’s House by the River', Senses of Cinema, October 2005
• Fergus Cook, 'Questions of Authorship and Audience: A Study of Artefacts Related to the Film Rebecca (1940)', Bill Douglas Centre Documents, date unknown
• Amanda Leigh Davis, 'Gothically Postmodern: Film Noir-Gothic Hybrids and the 1980s', Velox: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Film, Vol 2, No 1 (2008)
• R D’Mont, 'Changing form: Stage, film and TV adaptations of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca', In: Carroll, R., ed. (2009) Adaptation in Contemporary Culture: Textual Infidelities. London: Continuum, pp. 163-173
• 'Du Maurier + Selznick + Hitchcock = Rebecca', The ASC, July 1997 
• Coralline Dupuy, '"Why don't you remember? Are you crazy?": Korean Gothic and psychosis in A Tale of Two Sisters', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 3, 2007
• Winfried Fluck, 'Mass Culture Modernism: Guilt and Subjectivity in Film Noir', Romance with America (Heidelburg, 2009)
• Catherine Grant, 'Rites of Passage [on Joan Fontaine in Rebecca]', Vimeo, December 2013
• David Greven, 'Bringing out Baby Jane: camp, sympathy, and the horror-woman’s film of the 1960s', Jump Cut, 55, Fall 2013
• Eoghain Hamilton (ed), The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries (InterDisciplinary Press, 2012)
• Jenni Heeks, Teaching Resources on The Innocents for a BFI Workshop, Autumn, 2013
• Steven Jacobs, excerpt on Rebecca from The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (101 Publishers, 2007)
• Stuart M Joy, 'The Patriarchal Reception of Hysteria: Understanding thePossessed Woman in the Paranormal Activity franchise', Monstrous Spaces/Spaces of Monstrosity, 3.1, 2013 
• Frank Lafond, 'With them, I'm howling: Guillaume Radot's Le Loup des Malveneur (The Wolf of the Malveneurs, 1942)', Kinoeye, 1, 2005
• Mark Jancovich, 'Bluebeard’s Wives: Horror, Quality and the Paranoid Woman’s Film in the 1940s', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 12 (Summer 2013) 
• Mark Jancovich, 'Shadows and Bogeymen: Horror, Stylization and the Critical Reception of Orson Welles during the 1940s', Participations, 6.1, May 2009
• Mark Jancovich, 'Crack-Up: Psychological Realism, Generic Transformation and the Demise of the Paranoid Woman's Film', The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, Issue 3, 2007
• Bill Krohn et al, 'The Original Ending Shot for Suspicion', The MacGuffin, 2007
• Samatha Jane Lindop, 'The Homme Fatal and the Subversion of Suspicion in Mr Brooks and The Killer Inside Me', M/C Journal, 15.1, 2012
• Adrian Martin, 'Lady, Beware: Female Gothic Variations', Australian Centre for the Moving Image, March 2005 
• Gary McCarron, 'Moralizing Uncertainty: Suspicion and Faith in Hitchcock's Suspicion', Canadian Journal of Communication, 27.1, 2002
• Ken Mogg, 'The Day of the Claw: A Synoptic Account of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 
• Eithne O'Neill, 'Kazan's Streetcar: Film Noir, Woman's Film or Noir Woman's Film?', Cercles, 10 (2004) 
• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009
• Phillip Novak, 'Performing Politics (Review)', PMC, 19.2, 2009
• Esther Pereen, 'Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor', The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2014)
• Ana Salzberg, Beyond the looking glass: the narcissistic woman reflected and embodied in classic Hollywood film, PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2010
• Aaron Smuts, ' Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 6 No. 7, April 2002 
• Monica Cristina Soare, 'Chapter 5: The Final Girl as Female Quixote', The Female Gothic Connoisseur: Reading, Subjectivity, and the Feminist Uses of Gothic Fiction, PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 2013
• Jack Sullivan, excerpt on 'Franz Waxman and Suspicion', from Hitchcock's Music (Yale University Press, 2006)
• Elizabeth Tucker, '[Review] Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives, By Maria Tatar, 2006', Journal of Folklore Research Reviews, 2007
• Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs (Amsterdam University Press, 2005)
• Patricia White/Annamarie Jagose, 'Interview', Genders, 32, 2000
• Tony Williams, 'What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?', Senses of Cinema, Issue 41, 2006
  
• Dagmara Zając, 'Gothic Cinema: Horror on Screen and the Perils of (Over)Interpretation', The Gothic: Probing the Boundaries, ed. by Eoghain Hamilton (InterDisciplinary Press, 2012)

More about → Voluptuous Masochism: Gothic Melodrama Studies in Memory of Joan Fontaine

Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University

Website header and masthead at the incredible Women Film Pioneers Project website

This project began as a search for silent cinema “women film pioneers” who challenged the idea of established great male “pioneers of cinema.” Since researchers found more women than anyone expected to find, one principle came to organize the project: What we  assume never existed is what we invariably find. [About 'Women Film Pioneers Project']

Film Studies For Free is heading away from its computer for a few days but had to rush to publish the essential news of an incredible new website resource: the Women Film Pioneers Project.

WFPP is a new free online database published by Columbia University Libraries’ Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. The database includes more than 150 career profiles of women who worked during the silent film era as directors, co-directors, scenario writers, camera operators, title writers, editors, costume designers, exhibitors, animal trainers, studio accountants, film company owners, and theatre managers.

A monumental, open access piece of important film historical research and publishing, this first phase of the project places together the Americas, the U.S. in the North and Latin America in the South. The next phases will open up the study of women in other national silent era cinemas: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic and Slovakia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary,  India, Ireland, Italy, Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey,  The United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and Yugoslavia.

Clearly this is an archival resource that will also grow as more people know about it and can contribute missing information to it, but the editors have done a truly fantastic job in establishing this resource and populating it with such high quality and significant material already.

Congratulations and many thanks go to the WFPP team led by the brilliant film historian Jane Gaines, whose related book on early cinema, Fictioning Histories: Women Film Pioneers was published by University of Illinois Press in 2009. The project launch will take place at MoMA this Saturday, part of the film exhibition To Save and Project: The 11th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation.

More about → Women Film Pioneers Project at Columbia University

Celebrating Laura Mulvey: Or, Film Studies with Poetic License

 
A fascinating and informative excerpt from the audio commentary track on the British Film Institute's brand new Dual Format Edition of RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, 1977). You can find more information about this new video version of the film here and read a new interview with Mulvey about its making here.

Riddles of the Sphinx was made in 1976-7. The film used the Sphinx as an emblem with which to hang a question mark over the Oedipus complex, to illustrate the extent to which it represents a riddle for women committed to Freudian theory but still determined to think about psychoanalysis radically or, as I have said before, with poetic license. Riddles of the Sphinx and Penthesilea, our previous film, used ancient Greece to invoke a mythic point of origin for Western civilization, that had been critically re-affirmed by high culture throughout our history. [... S]ome primitive attraction to the fantasy of origins, a Gordian knot that would suddenly unravel, persisted for me in the Oedipus story, and its special status: belonging to very ancient mythology and to the literature of high Greek civilization, chosen by Freud to name his perception of the founding moment of the human psyche. My interest then concentrated on breaking down the binarism of the before/after opposition, by considering the story as a passage through time, a journey that could metaphorically open out or stretch the Oedipal trajectory through significant details and through its formal, narrational, properties. [Laura Mulvey, 'The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx', PUBLIC, 2, 1989, FSFF's emphasis]

Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry in honour of one the most important, most brilliant, most influential and hardest-working film and moving image scholars of all time: Laura Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and recently, co-founder of the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. Mulvey is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan, 1989; second edition, 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute, 1996; 2nd ed. 2013), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series, 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books, 2006). And she has made six films in collaboration with fellow film theorist and practitioner Peter Wollen including Riddles of the Sphinx (BFI, 1978) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council, 1980) and with artist/film-maker Mark Lewis Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4, 1994)

FSFF's author has a pretty good record in celebrating Mulvey's influence on film studies already, having been lucky enough to take part, earlier this year, in a day devoted to this activity at Birkbeck's Institute of Humanities - an event recorded by Backdoor Broadcasting. The happy occasion for today's eFestschrift, however, is the British Film Institute's release of a new DVD/BluRay disk of Riddles of the Sphinx, the hugely significant and original feminist film Mulvey co-directed and produced in 1976/77 with her partner Wollen (the disk also contains their first film together: Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons [1974]).

To accompany this entry FSFF was honoured to be able to produce a short, exclusive extract of a sequence of its choice from the DVD audio commentary accompanied version (as embedded above). FSFF warmly thanks Laura Mulvey herself, as well as Hannah Maloco and the BFI, whose Production Board thankfully funded Riddles of the Sphinx, for kindly allowing this blog to create such a memorable and instrumental item of openly accessible film studies.

Beneath the BFI's own Riddles of the Sphinx clip (embedded below) -- a commentary free version of substantially the same sequence -- you can find a wonderful listing of links to openly accessible online scholarly work by and about Laura Mulvey. It provides ample testimony, were it needed, as to why she has been, is, and always will be, one of the true greats of our subject - as Michel Foucault probably would have put, a veritable 'founder of discursivity' for our discipline... 

Online written work by Laura Mulvey: 

• 'Between Melodrama and Realism: Under the Skin of the City (2001)', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• 'The Death Drive', Afterall Journal, 10, Autumn/Winter 2004  
• 'The Earrings of Madame de ...' Film Quarterly Summer 2009, Vol. 62, No. 4 
• '[On Fetishism and Curiosity] Reply to MacKinnon and Sorfa', Film-Philosophy, 5.6, February 2001
• 'The Oedipus Myth: Beyond the Riddles of the Sphinx', PUBLIC, 2, 1989  
• 'Unmasking the Gaze: Some Thoughts on New Feminist Film Theory and History', Lectora, 2, 2001
• 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16.3, Autumn, 1975 pp. 6-18
• 'Plaisir visuel et cinéma narratif', Laura Mulvey (première partie); and 'Plaisir visuel et cinéma narratif', Laura Mulvey (seconde partie), Débordments, 2012 

Online written work by Peter Wollen about Mulvey/Wollen's joint work: 

• 'Knight's Moves', PUBLIC, 25, 2002
• 'The Field of Language on Film', October, 17, Summer 1981 [Lux Online version] 

Online video/audio work by or featuring Laura Mulvey:

• Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities Celebrates Laura Mulvey, Birkbeck, University of London, February 7, 2013
• British Film Institute Researchers' Tale: Laura Mulvey on the Blonde, March 8, 2010 
• Cinemaphilia: Laura Mulvey at the 'Moving Image As Art' Symposium, TATE Modern, June 1, 2001 
• Added 'Death 24x a Second', PodAcademy, December 2012
• Jeff Wall: Six Works, TATE Modern,  December 2, 2005
• Jerwood Visual Arts lecture by Professor Laura Mulvey, 2013
• In Conversation: Film theorist Laura Mulvey talks to Director Mark Lewis (6 Parts), CineCity 2009 - Brighton Film festival 
• Iranian Women Filmmakers (2002) (Produced, directed by: Hamid Khairoldin, Majid Khabazan)  
• Itinerancy, Dislocation, Nomadic Subjects: Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami,1997),
  Birkbeck, University of London, June 25, 2013 [with Amber Jacobs and Rosalind Galt] 
• 'Laura Mulvey in conversation with Griselda Pollock', Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1) 2010
• Laura Mulvey – Love and Death in Three Films by Max Ophuls: Liebelei (Germany 1932), Letter from an Unknown Woman (US 1948) and Madame de… (France 1953), Royal Holloway University of London, June 2012
• London Critical Theory Summer School 2013 – Friday Debate II [with Stephen Frosh, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey and Costas Douzinas]
• Talking Film Laura Mulvey - Part 1, Stedelijk Museum, 2011
• Talking Film Laura Mulvey - Part 2, Stedelijk Museum, 2011 
• The Many Faces of Frida Symposium, TATE Modern, October 1, 2005
• Underwire Interview with Laura Mulvey, 2013 

Online writing about Laura Mulvey's work:

• Rakhee Balaram, Entry on 'Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen', Lux Online
• Katalin Bálint, 'Are Women Really Focalised? Overlap Between the Concepts of Male Gaze and Focalization in Film Theory', PsyArt, March 15, 2011
• Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013)
• Michael Brooke, BFI Screenonline entry on 'The BFI Production Board: The Features'
• Eleanor Burke, BFI Screenonline entry on 'Laura Mulvey'
• Eleanor Burke, BFI Screenonline entry on 'Peter Wollen'
• Francesco Casetti, 'The City and its Moving Images: Hypertopia' (video), Afterall Journal, June 2013
• Franceso Casetti, 'The Relocation of Cinema', NECSUS,  
• Daniel Chandler, 'Notes on The Gaze', 2000; especially the section on Laura Mulvey on film spectatorship
• Ian Christie (ed.), Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)]  
• Matthew Croombs, 'Pasts and Futures of 1970s Film Theory', Scope, 20,  June 2011
  
• Charles Esche,'What does it mean to say that feminism is back? A reaction to Riddles of the Sphinx', Afterall Journal, 15, Spring/Summer 2007
• Chris Fennell, 'Laura Mulvey on Riddles of the Sphinx', BFI, October 1, 2013
  
• William Fowler, BFI Screenonline entry on 'Penthesilea: Queen of the Amazons (1974)'
• Monika Gagnon, 'Beyond Post-Feminism: The Work of Laura Mulvey and Griselda Pollock', Canadian Women's Studies, 11.1, 1990
• John Haber, 'Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', HaberArts, [date unknown]
• Daniel Herbert, 'Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image by Laura Mulvey ', Scope, Issue 10, Feburary 2008
• Stefan Jovanovic, 'The Ending(s) of Cinema: Notes on the Recurrent Demise of the Seventh Art, Part 2', Offscreen Journal, April 30, 2003
  
• Alexandra Kokoli, Entry on ‘Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)' in Diana Newall and G. F. Pooke (eds.), Fifty Key Texts in Art History (London: Routledge, 2012)
• Carolyn Korsmeyer, 'Feminist Aesthetics', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) 
• Kendra Preston Leonard, 'Silencing Ophelia: Male Aurality as a Controlling Element in Olivier's Hamlet', Scope, 14, June 2009
• Katharina Lindner, 'Spectacular (Dis-) Embodiments: The Female Dancer on Film', Scope, 20, February 2011
• Lux Online  Entry on 'Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen'
• Kenneth MacKinnon, 'Curiously, Fetishism Can Be Fun', Film-Philosophy, 5.4, February 2001 
• Jennifer Proctor, '[Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema assignment:] Popcorn Maker for Film Studies', Nanoramas, February 25, 2013 
• Paula Quigley, 'Undoing the Image: Film Theory and Psychoanalysis', Film-Philosophy, 15.1, 2011
  
• Lucy Reynolds, BFI Screenonline entry on 'Riddles of the Sphinx (1977)'
• Eivind Røssaak (ed.), Between Stillness and Motion Film, Photography, Algorithms (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011) 
• Alison Rowley, 'Between Les Rendez-vous d’Anna and Demain on Déménage: m(o)ther inscriptions in two films by Chantal Akerman', Studies in the Maternal 2(1) 2010 
• Richard Rushton, 'Deleuzian Spectatorship', Screen, 50.1, 2009 
• Ellen Seiter, 'Re-vision: the limits of psychoanalysis', Jump Cut, no. 33, Feb. 1988, pp. 59-61 
• David Sorfa, 'Hieroglyphs and Carapaces: The Enigmatic Real in Laura Mulvey's Fetishism and Curiosity', Film-Philosophy, 5.5, 2001 
• Wanda Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
• Marijke de Valck, Malte Hagener (eds), Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam University Press, 2006)
• Griet Vandermassen, 'Woman as Erotic Object: A Darwinian Inquiry into the Male Gaze', The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture, eds. Alice Andrews and Joseph Caroll. New York: SUNY Press, 2010, pp. 69-75
• Belén Vidal, Figuring the Past: Period Film and the Mannerist Aesthetic (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012) 
• Maria Walsh, 'Against Fetishism: The Moving Quiescence of Life 24 Frames a Second', Film-Philosophy, 10.2, September 2006 
• Matt Wiley, 'Avoiding the Masculine “Gaze”: Frustrated Homosexual Desire and the Eroticized Role of the Camera In Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Antonioni’s Blow Up', Cinetext, 2003

More about → Celebrating Laura Mulvey: Or, Film Studies with Poetic License

Study of a Single Film: Todd Haynes' [SAFE] (1995)

Video Essay on Todd Haynes's [SAFE] (1995) by Amber Jacobs and Catherine Grant. You can read more about this work in 'Un[Contained]? On Todd Haynes's [SAFE]', Filmanalytical, June 17, 2013

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you one of its regular 'studies of a single film' entries. This one is dedicated to gathering direct links to freely accessible, high-quality studies of Todd Haynes's remarkable film [SAFE] (1995).

The resources are headed (above) by a new video by FSFF's author which was completely inspired by Amber Jacobs's magnificent commentary. This audiovisual essay foregrounds the film's treatment of mothering.

FSFF is also truly delighted and grateful to offer free access (below) to a wonderful, related excerpt from Rob White's recently published book on the cinema of Todd Haynes.

Below the embedded excerpt, readers can find FSFF's customary listing of open access resources on the featured film, and, below that, further offline, bibliographies related to this film.

Rob White on Todd Haynes' SAFE

Embedded excerpts from Rob White, ' The Misery the World Is Made Of: The Cinema of Todd Haynes', TODD HAYNES (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Reproduced here at Film Studies For Free by kind permission of the author and University of Illinois Press. FSFF's thanks go to the author and publisher, and also to Steven Fast.

Notes on Contributors:

• Amber Jacobs works on feminist  theories and philosophies, film and visual culture, ancient Greek myth, tragedy and philosophy and post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theories. Her Book On Matricide: Myth, Psychoanalysis and the Law of the Mother came out in 2008 with Columbia University Press. She currently works as a lecturer in the department of psychosocial studies, Birkbeck, University of London.
• Rob White spent ten years as commissioning editor of BFI Publishing (and series editor of the Classics volumes) before becoming, in 2006, editor of Film Quarterly (until 2013). He has been a columnist for Sight and Sound and is author of The Third Man (BFI Film Classics, 2003) and Freud’s Memory: Psychoanalysis, Mourning and the Foreign Body (Palgrave, 2008). His book on Todd Haynes has been published in the University of Illinois Press series, Contemporary Film Directors.

Open Access Resources on [SAFE]

• Andrew Burke, '"Do You Smell Fumes?": Health, Hygiene, and Suburban Life', ESC: English Studies in Canada, 32.4, December 2006
• Rachel Carroll, 'Toxic shock: Gendered environments and embodied knowledge in Don DeLillo’s White Noise and Todd Haynes’s [Safe]', Transformations, Issue 14, March 2007 
• Çakirlar, Cüneyt, 'Cinephilic Bodies: Todd Haynes’ Cinema of Queer Pastiche', Kult 1.1 (2011): 162–200
• Anthony Enns], '"A Name in Search of a Disease": Illness and Identity in Todd Haynes' Safe', Reconstruction, 7.3, 2007
• John Gill, excerpt from Far From Heaven (London: Palgrave/BFI Film Classics: 2011)
• Ruth Goldberg, 'Every Breath You Take: Re-Evaluating Time, Place and Cultural Metaphor in Safe', Screen Memories of the Mad Monstrous '80s: Trauma and Political Allegory in Horror Films that Look Back at the Reagan Years, PhD Thesis, Union Institute and University Cincinatti, Ohio, October 2010 
• Catherine Grant, 'Un[Contained]? On Todd Haynes's [SAFE]', Filmanalytical, June 17, 2013
• Julie Grossman, 'The Trouble with Carol: The Costs of Feeling', Other Voices 2.3 January 2005
• Amber Jacobs and Rob White, 'Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce: A Discussion', Film Quarterly, Feburary 2012
• Alexandra Juhasz, 'From the Scenes of Queens: Genre, AIDS and Queer Love,' originally published in The Cinema of Todd Haynes, ed. James Morrison (London:Wallflower Press, 2007) 
• Jeremy Justus, "What you are seeing outside is a reflection of what you are feeling within" space, ideology and biopolitics in Safe', AmericanPopularCulture.com, October 2007
• Rose Ellen Lessy, 'Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes’s Safe', Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 7(4):291–308, 2006 
• Jed Mayer, 'Raised in Fear: The Self-Help Horror of Todd Haynes’ SAFE', PressPlay, Indiewire, April 16, 2013 
• Joan Faber McAlister, 'Unsafe Houses: The Narrative Inversion of Suburban Morality in Popular Film', Liminalities, 4.1, 2008
• Alison McLean, 'Todd Haynes', BOMB 52/Summer 1995
• Martha Elisabeth Polk, 'What is Wrong With Carol? Narrative, Genre, Feminism, and Language in Todd Haynes’ Safe', MA dissertation, Emory University, 2013
• Susan Potter, 'Dangerous Spaces: SAFE', Camera Obscura, 57 (Volume 19, Number 3), 2004, pp. 124-154
• Anat Pick, '"No Callous Shell": The Fate of Selfhood from Walt Whitman to Todd Haynes', in James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes (London: Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Jason Qualls, 'Genuine Artifice, Serious Camp: The Women's Films of Todd Haynes', The McNair Scholarly Review, 2008 (scroll to p. 119)
• Steven Shaviro, 'Stranded in the Jungle [on SAFE], Interzones, October 1995
• Chuck Stephens, 'Gentlemen Prefer Haynes', Film Comment, Vol. 31, No. 4, July/August 1995 
• Nick Stevenson, 'What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk', Sociological Research Online, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2005
• Amy Taubin, 'Nowhere to Hide', Sight and Sound 6:5 (May 1996) p. 32-34
• Keith Uhlich, 'Todd Haynes', Senses of Cinema, July 2002 
• Rob White, 'Todd Haynes’s Poison Reconsidered', Film Quarterly Fall 2011, Vol. 65, No. 1

Film Studies For Free entries on Todd Haynes

• On Todd Haynes: Happy Independence Day! July 4, 2010
• New Todd Haynes' Masterclass November 27, 2011
• Longtime Companion? HIV/AIDS in thirty years of cinema, media and culture December 1, 2011
• All That Film Pastiche Allows: Fifty+ Online Studies April 15, 2012

Other Resources Mentioned in the Video Essay Bibliography

• Danielle Bouchard and Jigna Desai, '"There's Nothing More Debilitating than Travel“: Locating US Empire in Todd Haynes' Safe', Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22(4), 2005: 359–370
• Laura Christian, 'Of Housewives and Saints: Abjection, Transgression, and Impossible Mourning in Poison and Safe', Camera Obscura (2004) 19(3 57): 93-123
• Glyn Davis], 'Health and Safety in the Home: Todd Haynes's clinical white world', in David Alderson and Linda R. Anderson (eds), Territories of Desire: Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000)
• Mary Ann Doane, 'Pathos and Pathology: The Cinema of Todd Haynes', Camera Obscura (2004) 19(3 57): 1-21
• Roy Grundmann, 'How Clean Was My Valley? Todd Haynes' Safe', Cineaste 21:4, 1995: 22-5
• Lisa Lynch, 'The Epidemiology of "Regrettable Kinship": Gender, Epidemic, and Community in Todd Haynes' [Safe] and Richard Powers' Gain', Journal of Medical Humanities vol. 23, nos. 3-4 (Winter, 2002): 203-19
• José Esteban Muñoz, 'Notes on the Whiteness of New Queer Cinema: Safe', GLQ (1998) 4:1: 126-37
• Gaye Naismith, 'Tales from the Crypt: Contamination and Quarantine in Todd Haynes's [Safe],' In P. Treichler, L. Cartwright, & C. Penley (eds), The Visible Woman: Imagine Technologies, Gender and Science (New York: New York University Press, 1998)
• Roddey Reid, 'Un[Safe] at Any Distance: Todd Haynes's Visual Culture of Health and Risk', Film Quarterly (Spring, 1998): 32-44
• John David Rhodes, 'Allegory, mise-en-scène, AIDS: interpreting Safe', in James Morrison (ed.), The Cinema of Todd Haynes (London: Wallflower Press, 2007)
• Rob White, Todd Haynes (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013) online excerpt

Further Offline Resources

• Andrew Burke, '"Do you smell fumes?": Health, Hygiene, and Suburban Life', English Studies in Canada, Winter 2006, Vol. 32 Issue 4, pp. 147-168
• Matthew Gandy, 'Allergy and Allegory in Todd Haynes' [Safe]', In: Screening the city edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice (London and New York: Verso, 2003)
• Todd Haynes, Julianne Moore and Christine Vachon, '"...and all is well in our world" - making Safe', In: Film-makers on film-making edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue (London: Faber and Faber, 1996)
• Susan Kollin, 'Toxic Subjectivity: Gender and the Ecologies of Whiteness in Todd Haynes's Safe', Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 121-39, Winter 2002
• Christopher McQuain, 'Safe Man: Are Todd Haynes' Films Gay Enough?', Film Journal, vol. 1, no. 3, 2002
• Arij Ouweneel, 'Carol's Predicament" The Body in [Safe] (1995) and Jennifer's Body (2009)', Freudian Fadeout: The Failings of Psychoanalysis in Film Criticism (London: McFarland, 2012)
• Dorian Stuber, 'Patient Zero? Illness and Vulnerability in Todd Haynes's [Safe]." Parallax Volume 11, Number 2 / April-June 2005  

  

Front cover of Rob White, Todd Haynes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

 

More about → Study of a Single Film: Todd Haynes' [SAFE] (1995)

Performing/Representing Male Bonds: Issue 2 of INMEDIA

Screencap from The Matrix (Larry and Andy Wachowski, 1999). Read Marianne Kac-Vergne 's article Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fall of Hypermasculinity in Science Fiction Films on the images of masculinity offered up by this and other scifi films.

Film Studies for Free let its readers know, early last year, of InMedia, a great online French Journal, in English, of Media and Media Representations in the English-Speaking World. Its first issue treated  Global Film and Television Industries Today.

Issue 2 on Performing/Representing Male Bonds has also been published recently and its contents, many of which are film related, are linked to below.

InMedia, Issue 2, 2012: Performing/Representing Male Bonds
Edited by Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin

• Performing/Representing Male Bonds Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski, Claire Hélie and Pierre-Antoine Pellerin
• Losing Visibility? The Rise and Fall of Hypermasculinity in Science Fiction Films Marianne Kac-Vergne
• The Reluctant Patriarch: The Emergence of Lads and Lad Mags in the 1990s Nick Growse
• Seducing Women to Assess Each Other: Male Hierarchies within the Seduction Community Mélanie Gourarier
• Midlife Pop Masculinities in the Here and Now Chris Tinker

Varia

• British Party Election Broadcasts (2001, 2005 and 2010): Ideological Framing, Storytelling, Individualisation David Haigron

Bibliographical Essay

• ‘Locus of Control’: A Selective Review of Disney Theme Parks Thibaut Clément

Interview

• At the Crossroads of Media, Media Critique, and the Critique of Media critics – An Interview with Serge Halimi, Editor-in-Chief of Le Monde Diplomatique Serge Halimi and Christine Larrazet

Critical Perspective

• Social Cognition Divina Frau-Meigs

Conference and Seminar Reviews

• Offshore Processes: International Perspectives on Australian Film and Television Oliver Haag
• The Translation and Reception of Multilingual Films Samuel Bréan and Jean-François Cornu
• Contemporary Screen Narratives Fabrice Lyczba
• Internet Studies in Europe Mathieu O'Neil
• Cinema and the Crossing of Frontiers, 16th SERCIA Conference Julie Assouly and Marianne Kac-Vergne

Book Reviews

• Delphine Letort Violaine Roussel, Art vs War : les Artistes américains contre la guerre en Irak Paris : Presses de Sciences Po, 2011, 314 p.
• Elsa Grassy Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan (eds), Major Problems in American Popular Culture
• Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011, 496 p.
• Estelle Epinoux Carol MacKeogh, Díóg O’Connell, Documentary in a Changing State: Ireland since the 1990s Cork: Cork University Press, 2012, 176 p.
• Delphine Letort Brian A. Monahan, The Shock of the News: Media Coverage and the Making of 9/11 New York & London: New York University Press, 2010, 221 p.

Index by author
Index by keyword

More about → Performing/Representing Male Bonds: Issue 2 of INMEDIA

Corrected entry (February 12): FRAMEWORK: The Journal of Cinema and Media

'Snakes&Funerals' by Emily Jeremiah, James S. Williams and Gillian Wylde. Taking Jean-Luc Godard’s canonic film Le Mépris / Contempt (1963) as a starting-point, Snakes&Funerals set out to explore the queer possibilities of image and sound, especially of colour and of ‘straight’ repetition. First published in Frames, Issue 1, July 2012.

Film Studies For Free [thought it had] had a lovely surprise today. It found, through Google Scholar, that NINE full issues of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media (including the most recent five issues) were freely accessible through the Digital Commons of its publisher Wayne State University Press. It jumped to the pleasing conclusion (encouraged by the use of the word Commons + free access), that this great journal had turned to open access publishing.

Then, on February 11, FSFF received a very courteously worded email with the following message from a very nice representative of Wayne State University Press:

Unfortunately, this journal is not open access, and we have no plans to make it so at this time. I'm writing to you so that you have the correct information about Framework. 

When you visited the site, BePress (administrator of Digital Commons) had not yet activated the toll-access barrier to the journal content. That was an error on our part, one that we have since rectified. Those who click on the links you have posted on your blog will not be able to download the article for free. Instead, a $5 fee is charged before access is granted. I apologize for the confusion [...].

$5 is much, much cheaper than most traditional "gated" online academic publication access, for sure. But FSFF must apologise to its readers -- who, up until a short while ago, will have been able to access contents for free -- for drawing a premature conclusion.

More about → Corrected entry (February 12): FRAMEWORK: The Journal of Cinema and Media

New issue of SCOPE: Nicole Holofcener, Realism, Self-Transformation Narratives, Károly Makk, the Feature Film as "Short Story" and More

Framegrab from Lovely and Amazing (Nicole Holofcener, 2001). You can read Rachel Lister's article about Holofcener's films here

Life is good, thinks Film Studies For Free: a new issue of Scope: An Online Journal of Film and Television Studies has just been published. There's a small but well-edited selection of great articles, and an enormous number of hugely useful book reviews and conference reports. FSFF particularly liked Rachel Lister on Nicole Holofcener's "short story" films and Miklós Kiss on Károly Makk's Szerelem/Love.

All contents are listed and linked to below.

Scope: Issue 24 October 2012

Articles

• Self-Making as Public Spectacle: Bodies, Bodily Training and Reality TV Bree Hadley
• Rationalising the Irrational: Artistic Realism as Cognitive Reality in Károly Makk's Szerelem/Love  Miklós Kiss
• The Feature Film as Short Story: The "Little Disturbances" of Nicole Holofcener Rachel Lister
• Cinderella vs Barbie: The Battle for Postfeminist Performance in Teen Transformation Narratives Kendra Marston

Book Reviews

• All Book Reviews
• Jacques Rivette by Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith ; Alain Robbe-Grillet by John Phillips A Review by Jonathan L. Owen
• Music and Politics by John Street ; Wagner and Cinema edited by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman  A Review by Nathan Waddell
• Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films by M. Keith Booker
• Demystifying Disney: A History of Disney Feature Animation by Chris Pallant
• A Review by Noel Brown
• Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel edited by Jeffrey Ruoff; Cinematic Journeys: Film and Movement By Dimitris Eleftheriotis A Review by Sofia Sampaio
• Jerry Lewis by Chris Fujiwara ; Atom Egoyan by Emma Wilson ; Andrei Tarkovsky by Sean Martin A review by Adam Jones
• The Comedy of Chaplin: Artistry in Motion by Dan Kamin ; Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century by Matthew Solomon  A review by Bruce Bennett
• Von Sternberg by John Baxter ; Willing Seduction: The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich and Mass Culture by Barbara Kosta  A Review by Elaine Lennon
• Soldiers' Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television Since World War I by Yvonne Tasker ; A ‘Toxic Genre': The Iraq War Films by Martin Barker A Review by Jay Reid
• Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier by Homay King ; Theorizing Bruce Lee: Film-Fantasy-Fighting-Philosophy by Paul Bowman  A Review by Lin Feng

Film and Television Reviews

• All Film and Television Reviews
• Dust (Polvo) A review by Miharu M. Miyasaka

Conference Reports

• All Conference Reports
• The Distribution and Exhibition of Chinese and Asian Cinema in the UK  A report by Jonathan Wroot
• Deleuze, Guattari and China Symposium A report by Yun-hua Chen
• The Cinema of Sensations: Fourteenth International Film and Media Studies Conference A report by Francesca Hardy
• NECS Conference 2012 - Time Networks: Screen Media and Memory A report by Nessa Johnston

More about → New issue of SCOPE: Nicole Holofcener, Realism, Self-Transformation Narratives, Károly Makk, the Feature Film as "Short Story" and More

New SCREENING THE PAST on 'Untimely Cinema'

Framegrab from Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998). Please read Adrian Martin's new essay A Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma

The question of whether cinema has run out of time, and the related question of whether it is also, therefore, out of ‘its’ time (cinema as ‘heritage’ media, a relic from another era) are questions that are often posed by, and to, those working in cinema studies today. For well over a decade, film theorists and film historians have evocatively, rigorously and at times relentlessly theorised and debated the question of whether cinema is dead, dying, living on borrowed time, or doing what it has so often done – refigure itself. In titling this essay, and this issue, “Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time” we consider this idea in two seemingly very different ways. [Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis, 'Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time', Screening the Past, ISsue 43, 2012 ]

A really wonderful new issue of Screening the Past, one of the best online and openly accessible film studies journals, has just been published, so Film Studies For Free rushes you the news. It's a timely special issue on Untimely Cinema guest edited by Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis.

The contents are incredibly rich and wide-ranging and are listed, and linked to, below.


Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time

• Untimely Cinema: Cinema Out of Time by Jodi Brooks & Therese Davis
• Syrian Cinema: Out of Time? by Kay Dickinson
• The Restoration of The Exiles: The Untimeliness of Archival Cinema by Catherine Russell
• A Skeleton Key to Histoire(s) du cinéma by Adrian Martin
• Suspended Reading: Man on Wire, 9/11, and the Logic of the High-Wire by Adam Ross Rosenthal
• Kim Ki-duk’s Aporia: The Face and Hospitality (on 3-Iron) by Steve Choe
• Re-staging the Cinema: Psycho, Film Spectatorship and the Redundant New Remake by Megan Carrigy
• Parentheses in Time: L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) as Amorous Event by Alex Ling
• Missed Beats: Unseen Cinema and a Cinema of the Unseen (or Stella Dallas, Again) by Jodi Brooks
• Cinema Against the Age: Feminism and Contemporary Documentary by Belinda Smaill
• Untimely Animations: Waltz with Bashir and the Incorporation of Historical Difference by Paul Atkinson and Simon Cooper

First Release

• Ten Fingers and Nine Toes: Embodied Representations of Pregnancy in Avant-Garde Cinema by Lauren Bliss
• Mapping the Cinematic Journey of Alexander Pearce, Cannibal Convict by Jane Stadler
• I racconti di Canterbury (Pier Paolo Pasolini)/The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer) by Sam Rohdie
• The Great Uncredited: Sir Walter Scott and Cinema by Tim Dolin
• The Jazz Singer: Accounting for Female Agency and Reconsidering Scholarship by Karen Vered
• Encountering Elusive Cinema: Tati, Straub-Huillet and Antonioni by Edgar Jorge

Classics and Re-runs

• Directing the Avant-Garde: Raymond Durgnat interviews Stephen Dwoskin (1984) by Raymond Durgnat

Reviews

• Ford At Fox by Bill Routt
• To Wax Zizekian: On Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible by Adrian Martin
• Humphrey Jennings and British Documentary Film: A Re-Assessment by Patricia Aufderheide
• The Shadowcatchers: a history of cinematography in Australia by Ina Bertrand
• Post – 9/11 Cinema: Through a Lens Darkly by Rod Bishop
• Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs by Dirk de Bruyn
• Deleuze and World Cinemas by Daniel Fairfax
• Celluloid Immigrant: Italian Australian Filmmaker Giorgio Mangiamele by Geoff Gardner
• Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts
• by Gabrielle Lowe
• World Film Locations: Paris by Sarinah Masukor
• The Oriental Obscene: Violence and Racial Fantasies in the Vietnam Era by Josh Nelson
• China on Video: Smaller-screen realities by Tom Salek
• Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film
• by Robert Sinnerbrink
• World Film Locations: Los Angeles & World Film Locations: London by Lynn Smailes
• Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era by Mike Walsh
• The Anatomy of Harpo Marx by Wheeler Winston Dixon
  

More about → New SCREENING THE PAST on 'Untimely Cinema'

A Star Was Born... : Links in Barbra Streisand's Honour on her 70th Birthday!

Frame grab from A Star Is Born ( Frank Pierson, 1976)

Each version of A Star Is Born may detail the rise of an unknown, but does so through extremely well-known performers, albeit ones at different stages of their careers. [...] Barbra Streisand [...] was at the height of her career in 1976. Her domination of A Star Is Born (she contributed to the writing and even, as Kris Kristofferson, her co-star, saw it, the directing [(Burke, Tom. "Kris Kristofferson Sings the Good-Life Blues." Esquire 86 (December 1976): 126–28ff), 208-9]) was another manifestation of a desire to play out aspects of her own life. The credited director has recounted at length how, during preproduction, Streisand debated the degree to which her autobiography should be reflected in Esther Hoffman ([Pierson, Frank. "My Battles with Barbra and Jon." New York 9 (November 15, 1976): 49–60], 50). If James Mason's character in the 1954 film becomes through role reversal the "fictional counterpart of the neurotic, self-destructive person that Garland [had] become" ([Jennings, Wade. "Nova: Garland in 'A Star Is Born.'" Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 3 (summer 1979): 321–37], 333), then Streisand's Esther Hoffman directly fulfills everything that Streisand herself has become by 1976. Richard Dyer even suggests that among the "number of cases on which the totality of a film can be laid at the door of the star" the case can be made "most persuasively" for Streisand's A Star Is Born (Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1979], 175) [Jerome Delamater, '"Once More, from the Top": Musicals the Second Time Around', in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 84]

Film Studies For Free wishes a very happy 70th birthday to Barbra Streisand, actor, singer, songwriter, film director, producer, and queer feminist icon extraordinaire.

Below, you can find a tiny little celebration in related scholarly links - the only gift that (rather besotted Barbra fan) FSFF knows how to give.

If anyone knows of any other good items (and it is far too short and unworthy a list so far...), please leave a comment and FSFF will add them to the list.

• Zohar Altman Ravid, 'The star as a Creation and the Star as a creator: The Case of Barbra Streisand' in History of Stardom Reconsidered, edited by Kari Kallioniemi, Kimi Kärki, Janne Mäkelä and Hannu Salmi. Turku: International Institute for Popular Culture, 2007
• Henry Bial, 'How Jews Became Sexy, 1968–1983', Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (University of Michigan, 2005)
• Jerome Delamater, '"Once More, from the Top": Musicals the Second Time Around', in Horton, Andrew, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, c 1998 1998
• Brett Farmer, 'Stage Door Jennies: Interview with Stacy Wolf about her New Book, A Problem Like Maria Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical', Genders.org, Issue 38, 2003
• Rachel Garfield, 'Towards a Re-Articulation of Cultural Identity: Problematising the Jewish Subject in Art', originally in Third Text, Vol. 20, Issue 1, January, 2006, 99–108
• Stephen Godfry, 'The Way We Were', Pro Tem, November 29, 1973 (scroll down in PDF to p. 8)
• Elisa Klapheck, Toby Axelrod, 'My Journey Toward Regina Jonas', Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas: The Story of the First Woman Rabbi (Wiley, 2004)
• Evyatar Marienberg, 'Jews Have the Best Sex: The Hollywood Adventures of a Peculiar Medieval Jewish Text on Sexuality', Journal of Religion and Film, 14.2, 2010
• Arthur Laurents, 'Emotional Reality: Interview by Pat McGilligan', in McGilligan, Patrick. Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)
• Joel Rosenberg, 'Jewish Experience on Film: An American Overview', American Jewish Yearbook, 1996
• Jérôme Segal and Monika Kaczek, 'Molly Picon and the Cinematic Archetype of a Jewish Woman', CinemaScope, 14, Jan-Jul. 2010
  
• Greg M. Smith, 'Streisand Shops the Museum Store: Consuming Art on Television', Journal of Popular Film and Television, 30.1 (Spring 2002) 63-68
• Jon Stratton, 'Introduction', Jews, Race and Popular Music (Ashgate, 2009)
• Stacy Wolf, 'Barbra’s “Funny Girl” Body', SandF Online, Double Issue: 3.3 & 4.1
• Stacy Ellen Wolf, 'Introduction', A Problem Like Maria:Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (University of Michigan Press, 2002)

Sequence from Funny Girl (William Wyler, 1968)

More about → A Star Was Born... : Links in Barbra Streisand's Honour on her 70th Birthday!

"Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies

The above is a short video primer by Catherine Grant. It offers an audiovisual introduction to issues of gender, sexuality and movement in relation to Rita Hayworth's performance as Gilda in Charles Vidor's 1946 film.

The femme fatale is a product of the male imaginary, which emerges in literature and the visual arts under contingent socio-political conditions as a challenge to coherent and stable identities. [...]
     The emergence of the femme fatale motif in literature, art and cinema generally coincides with periods of social or political instability and is not specific to a culture, society or era, but exhibits countless masks as she may manifest herself in diverse historical or geo-political contexts, and through a variety of artistic and literary forms. She embodies traces of a myriad of powerful, as well as menacing, historical, biblical and mythical female figures, such as Cleopatra, Salome, or the Sirens; yet this wicked and barren creature is always imbued with an alluring beauty and rapacious sexuality that is potentially deadly to man. The femme fatale figure is a recurrent patriarchal construct, a projection of all that exists beyond that which is normal, familiar, or safe. As Rebecca Stott observes, she is a multiple sign, or ‘the Other around whom the qualities of all Other collect in the male imagination’ (1992: 39). As such, her appearances are always symptomatic of a society in crisis. [Eva Bru-Domínguez, 'The Body as a Conflation of Discourses: The femme fatale in Mercè Rodoreda’s Mirall trencat' (1974)', Journal of Catalan Studies 2009]

[I]s it possible that the tangled webs of violence, sexuality, pathology, and intrigue at the core of certain film noir offer moments of reversal and exception which challenge women's role as eternal victim? How is an anti-feminist backlash or male anxiety around women's power projected into these paranoid film scenarios? To what extent can such disruptions be contained through conventional "happy family" closure - or through the violent death of the (anti-)heroine whose glittering image lingers as the credits rolls? Working against the inescapable grain of the "repressive rule" of female victimhood, I choose here to seize on the exceptional figure of the "fatale femme." While the exception may help define the rule, she also keeps alive the possibility, the inevitability, of transformation in gendered relations of power. [Julianne Pidduck, The "fatal femme" in contemporary Hollywood film noir: reframing gender, violence, and power, Masters Thesis, Concordia University, 1993: 6-7]

Rather than promoting images of women that emphasize their spirit and unknowable power, and rather than promoting images of women that rely on their bodies, finally, we need to illustrate the contexts that inform women’s experience. I want to suggest some of the reasons why we’ve grown accustomed to identifying film noir’s “femme fatale” without examining these contexts that inform her presence in film noir, by doing just that: examining the settings—social, psychological, political, physical, and geographical—that define her experience, which is, I want strongly to suggest, a far better thing to define than “woman” herself.
     This study seeks to modify the tone of feminist discussions about film noir’s women by reorienting our attention to the narrative, social contexts, and mise-en-scene that show the relationship between women’s powers and the limits placed on them by social rules. Both the view of the “femme fatale” as misogynist projection and the view of the “femme fatale” as opaque yet transgressive female force emphasize her status as object or symbol (as object of scorn or as the mysterious and opaque “other” that threatens to destroy the male subject). My aim is to adjust our focus on film noir and gender so that we illuminate these women’s narratives rather than mystifying women as objects or images. [Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009): 5. Book info.]

Film Studies For Free wishes its reader a very happy International Women's Day with a varied curatorial selection of online scholarly work touching on possibly the most studied 'object' in all of feminist film theory: the 'dangerous' woman, sometimes fatal, sometimes a fatality...

If you are a film goer you know her kind. She is attractive, alluring, enigmatic, enticing, teasing, siren-like. Totally tautological. You might come across her dancing in a cinematic cabaret or show, smoking in a private detective's office, gracing a film noir alleyway, or haunting a difficult to decipher flashback. Or turning up like a beautiful but bad penny, provoking your scopophilia (and/or your epistemophilia), just about anywhere in almost every period of international film history.

Just what is it about these cinematic women? There certainly isn't one answer to that question, but the studies linked to below might very well help you to begin to tackle it.

If there are any important online resources that FSFF has missed, please do list them in the comments thread.

• Rihab Kassatly Bagnole, Imaging the Almeh: Transformation and Multiculturalization of the Eastern Dancer in Painting, Theatre, and Film, 1850-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005
• Linda Berkvens, 'From Below to Above the Title: The Construction of the Star Image of Barbara Stanwyck, 1930-1935', Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, Vol 2, No 1 (2009) 
• Rebecca H. Bias, From golden age to silver screen: French Music-Hall Cinema from 1930-1950, PhD, Ohio State University, 2005
• John J. Blaser and Stephanie L.M. Blaser, Film Noir Studies (dozens of essays and clips), 2008 
• Dan Callahan, 'Fatal Instincts: The Dangerous Pout of Gloria Grahame." Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 61, August 2008 
• Derek Dubois, 'Silent Subversions : Exploring the Enigma of Female Spectatorship in Silent Cinema', Master's Theses, Dissertations and Graduate Research Overview. Paper 32, 2009
• Richard Dyer, 'Homosexuality in Film Noir', from Jump Cut, No. 16, 1977, pp. 18-21
• Maura Edmond, 'Fashionable Attractions: Fashion Parades in Popular Entertainment from Lady Duff-Gordon to Lady Gaga', SCAN, 7.2, November 2010 
• Catherine Gomes, “‘The Era Of Lustrous Screen Sirens Lives On, Thousands Of Miles From Hollywood’: The Cross-Cultural Reception Of Chinese Martial Arts Cinema’s Sword-welding Actresses,” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History, Vol 1, The Reception Study Society, 2008
• Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009) Book info.
• Melissa Jane Hardie, 'Loose Slots: Figuring the Strip in Showgirls', Xtext 1 (1996): 24-35
• Lee Horsley, 'Fatal Women in the Hard-Boiled Fifties' An extract from The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001; 2009) 
• Thomas Kiely, 'Erendira: A not-so-innocent film', from Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986 
• Naomi King, ‘Male Identity and the Threat of the Feminine’, Crimeculture, 2002
• Aspasia Kotsopoulos and Josephine Mills, 'The Crying Game: Gender, genre and "postfeminism"', from Jump Cut, no. 39, June 1994
• Elizabeth Lee, 'The Femme Fatale as Object', Victorian Web, 1997
• Scott Loren, 'Self-fashioning, Freedom, and the Problem of His-story: the return of noir', European Journal of American Studies, 1, 2008
• Maree Macmillan, 'Beyond the femme fatale: The mythical Pandora as cathartic, transformative force', in Illuminating the Dark Side: Evil, Women and the Feminine, edited by Andrea Ruthven and Gabriela Mádlo (InterDisciplinary.net, 2010)
• Maasilta Mari, African Carmen. Transnational Cinema as an Arena for Cultural Contradictions, PhD Thesis, University of Tampere, 2007
• Michael Mills,  'High Heels on a Wet Pavement: Film Noir and the Femme Fatale', Modern Times (date unknown)
• Daniel Morgan, 'Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuosity: On the Aesthetics and Ethics of Camera Movement, Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2011 
• Laura Mulvey, 'Visual pleasure and narrative cinema', Screen, 1975
• Fred Nadis, 'Mechanical Dolls and Rank Ladies', Left History,Vol 7, No 1 (2000)
• Rebecca Claire Naughten, Spain Made Flesh: Reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992-2007, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2010 
• Sheila O'Malley, 'Five Things About Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy', The Sheila Variations, February 19, 2011
  
• Anne Helen Petersen, The Gossip Industry: Producing and Distributing Star Images, Celebrity Gossip, and Entertainment News, 1910 - 2010, PhD Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2011
• Julianne Pidduck, The "fatal femme" in contemporary Hollywood film noir: reframing gender, violence, and power, Masters Thesis, Concordia University, 1993
• Patricia Pisters, 'Lili and Rachel: Hollywood, History and Women in Fassbinder and Verhoeven' in Kooijman, Jaap, Patricia Pisters, Wanda Strauven (eds), Mind the Screen: Media Concepts According to Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam University Press, 2008)
• Barbara L. Romanczuk, Screening Zola’s women, PhD, Ohio State University, 2002 
• Sarah Sik, '[Review of] Evil by Design: The Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale by Elizabeth K. Menon (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, 2012
• Cheryl Inez Simon, Gender, genre and globalization : discourses of "Femininity" in the popular culture of the 1990's. PhD thesis, Concordia University, PhD Thesis, Concordia University, 1998
• Scott Snyder, 'Personality Disorder and the Film Noir Femme Fatale', Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 8(3) (2001)
• Jamie L. Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage, PhD, Bowling Green State University, 2006
• Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular bodies: gender, genre and the action cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995 
• Deborah Walker, 'Re-reading the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: an evolutionary perspective', The Journal of Moving Image Studies, Vol. 5, No. 6
• Emma Whiting, 'Dangerous Women and the Abject in the Noir Thriller', Crimeculture, 2005

More about → "Dangerous" Cinematic Women Studies