Magnifying Mirror: On Barbara Stanwyck and Film Performance Studies

 
"[F]ilm and criticism re-united"? MAGNIFYING MIRROR 
Video by Catherine Grant, based on text and narration by Andrew Klevan

Film Studies For Free proudly presents an entry on the wonderful work of American actress Barbara Stanwyck as well as on film performance studies more generally. Stanwyck's illustrious career began in the 1920s and spanned sixty years. During that period she starred in major films of many genres and worked with some of the most distinguished Hollywood directors. Writing on her work may provide, therefore, an excellent, indeed exemplary case for reflection on film critical methodologies in performance studies.

As well as the usual links to online scholarly work on these topics (scroll down for those), the entry presents, below, an interview with Andrew Klevan, Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford. Klevan discusses the rationale behind his recent book on Hollywood film star Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013). He also talks about some of the issues that arise when film performance is the object of study, around intention and attribution of agency and value.

During the interview, which took place in October this year, Klevan read aloud an excerpt from his book, a reading which inspired, and formed the narration of, the above FSFF video on Stanwyck, MAGNIFYING MIRROR. Klevan also wrote a short statement about the video and about his collaboration with FSFF more generally, which you can also find below.

FSFF Interview: Andrew Klevan on writing about Barbara Stanwyck and film performance 

A Note by Andrew Klevan
I am grateful to Film Studies For Free for highlighting my work, and I hope the expression of some nervousness will not be taken as ungracious. The problem of enlarging on rationale and method as I do in the interview is that, aside from risking accusations of self-importance and self-promotion, by simply stating matters which should, perhaps, remain implicit, one overstates the case, and raises expectations, especially with regard to, what we affectionately call, little books. My answers, drawing out many of the things I tried to do, may create the incorrect impression that the Barbara Stanwyck study is comprehensive and voluminous. (Even the use of expressions such as ‘moment-by-moment’ or ‘movement of meaning’ might suggest an exhaustive sequential tracking.) In fact, one of the compositional aims was to try, using the short form of the little book, to achieve a balance between elaboration and concentration, extraction and distillation. This partly reflects a similar balance achieved in the films and performances, and Catherine Grant’s fascinating video riff, ‘Magnifying Mirror’, which matches the film to my pre-existing text, captures some of this by looping a sequence and in doing so emphasises the moment’s compactness by way of repetition.

I am conscious that [fellow film scholar] E.A. Kaplan is a casualty, and it appears as if her comment on Stella Dallas is singled out where actually quite a few accounts are tested in the course of the study and the isolation is a consequence of uprooting. It is true that I take issue with her assessment, but this is a difference over an interpretation, not a charge against her work more generally, or the value of it. I feel that her account reduces, and overlooks an achievement of the film, but this is something that we are all prone to do. Indeed, much nervousness on my part again as the film returns, insistently, to probe my own description and interpretation – alas too late to make adjustments – but also some satisfaction as film and criticism are reunited. This image/speech track relationship struck me as quite different to a DVD commentary (which is limited by the real time of the film) and the narration of audio-visual criticism (which is conceived in relation to the handling of images). I got the sense of a new form of criticism, using audio-visual material, happily meeting an old form of criticism, using words, and not simply exemplifying the ‘close reading’, but enhancing and interrogating, and more generally revivifying (and magnifying). The iteration in Catherine’s video productively interacts with the distension of written representation. The collaboration with FSFF has illuminated for me the stimulating relationship between commentaries in different forms so that the book gets commented upon in an audio interview and in a video film which in turn gets commented upon in this web statement, allowing the different media to differently elucidate.

Andrew Klevan is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford, UK. He is author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film and Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. He is the co-editor of The Language and Style of Film Criticism, and is on the editorial boards of MOVIE - A Journal of Film Criticism and Film-Philosophy Journal]

On Barbara Stanwyck

• Linda Berkvens, No Crinoline-Covered Lady: Stardom, Agency, and the Career of Barbara Stanwyck, DPhil Thesis, University of Sussex, 2011
• 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) 
• Maria DiBattista, 'Fast-Talking Dames, New York Times: Books, 2001
• Gary Johnson, 'Barbara Stanwyck, With her Hands on her Hips', Images Journal, Issue 1 
• Glenn Kenny, 'A Woman's Equipment: Barbara Stanwyck's Anklet in DOUBLE INDEMNITY', Balder and Dash, October 14, 2013
• Andrew Klevan, sample chapters from Barbara Stanwyck (London: BFI/Palgrave, 2013) 
• Andrew Klevan, 'A Reply to Adrian Martin', Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
• Michelle Orange, 'Review of  A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907-1940 by Victoria Wilson. Simon & Schuster', Slate, November 8, 2013
• V.F. Perkins, 'Acting on Objects', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• Catherine Russell, 'Frank Capra: The Early Collection', Cineaste, 38.3, 2013
  
• Christopher Sharrett, 'Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow', Cineaste, 35.4, 2010
• Imogen Sara Smith, 'Passing the Test: On Repetition, Performance, and the Greatness of Howard Hawks', Moving Image Source, September 4, 2013
• Suzanna Danuta Walters, 'My Heart Belongs to Mama: Stella Dallas and the Politics of Class', in Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  1992
• Victoria Wilson, author of Barbara Stanwyck Steel-True 1907-1940 interviewed by Warner Archive Podcast, November 7th, 2013 
• 'An Interview with Victoria Wilson, Author of A LIFE OF BARBARA STANWYCK: STEEL-TRUE (1907-1940)', Backlots, October 24, 2013

On film performance

• Nicole Brenez, 'Incomparable Bodies', Screening the Past, 31, 2011
• Dan Callahan, 'Fatal Instincts: The Dangerous Pout of Gloria Grahame." Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 61, August 2008  
• Charles Chaplin Conference Proceedings, BFI, July 2005
• Anna Dzenis, 'On Film Performance', Screening the Past, 20, 2006
• Julie Grossman, Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009) Book info. 
• Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, 'Introduction', Film and Television Stardom, ed by K-P R Hart (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008)
• Susan Hayward, 'Stardom: Beyond Desire?' in History of Stardom Reconsidered, edited by Kari Kallioniemi, Kimi Kärki, Janne Mäkelä and Hannu Salmi. Turku: International Institute for Popular Culture, 2007 
• Tamar Jeffers, "Should I surrender?": performing and interrogating female virginity in Hollywood films 1957-64', PhD thesis, University of Warwick 
• 'Jerry Lewis Dossier' in La Furia Umana, Issue 12 - currently offline but will be back soon
• Christian Keathley, 'The Man in the Back Seat', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013 
• Andrew Klevan, 'A Reply to Adrian Martin', Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
• Andrew Klevan, 'Expressing the In-Between', LOLA, Issue 1, 2011
• Andrew Klevan, Disclosure of the everyday : the undramatic achievements in narrative film, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1996
• Victoria Lowe, 'Performing Hitchcock': Robert Donat, Film Acting and The 39 Steps (1935)', Scope, Issue 14, June 2009  
• Jean Ma, 'Close Reading: The Mise-en-scène of Song Performance', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• Adrian Martin, 'Secret Agents [Review of Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation], Undercurrent, Issue 4, 2008
• Adrian Martin, 'Hands Across the Table', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• Adrian Martin, 'At Table: The Social Mise en scène of How Green Was My Valley', Undercurrent, no. 5, 2009
• Steve Masters, 'Review of Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation by Andrew Klevan', Scope, Issue 9, October 2007
• Daniel Morgan, 'Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuosity: On the Aesthetics and Ethics of Camera Movement, Critical Inquiry, Autumn 2011 
• Warwick Mules, ''Mise-en-scène and the Figural: A Reading of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life'', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• Rebecca Claire Naughten, Spain Made Flesh: Reflections and projections of the national in contemporary Spanish stardom, 1992-2007, PhD Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2010 
• V.F. Perkins, 'Acting on Objects', The Cine-Files, Issue 4, 2013
• V.F. Perkins, 'Moments of Choice', Rouge, no. 9, 2006
• V.F. Perkins, 'Same Tune Again! Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman' (originally published in CineAction! no. 52), 16:9, September 2003
• VI Pudovkin, Film Technique And Film Acting, Grove Press Inc, 1958 
• Laura Sava, 'Théâtre du Soleil Meets the Cinema: Acting and Mask Work in Ariane Mnouchkine’s Molière', Screening the Past, Issue 31, 2011
• Imogen Sara Smith, 'Passing the Test: On Repetition, Performance, and the Greatness of Howard Hawks', Moving Image Source, September 4, 2013
• Joerg Sternagel, 'From Inside Us: Experiencing the Film Actor in Michael Haneke's Caché', Film International #39, vol. 7, no. 3
• Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular bodies: gender, genre and the action cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995
• Sarah Thomas, Face-maker : the negotiation between screen performance, extra-filmic persona and conditions of employment within the career of Peter Lorre, PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 2008
• Dolores Tierney, 'Latino Acting on Screen: Pedro Armendariz Performs Mexicanness in Three John Ford Movies', Revista Candiense de Estudios Hispanicos 37.1, 2012

 
Framing Incandescence: Elizabeth Taylor in JANE EYRE by Catherine Grant

 
Refashioning the Femme Fatale? Gilda in Motion by Catherine Grant

More about → Magnifying Mirror: On Barbara Stanwyck and Film Performance Studies

Studying Movie Magazines and Fan Culture! Online Research and Methodology Resources. And LANTERN!

 A Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine by Tamar Jeffers McDonald with Catherine Grant (on shaky cam!).
With her customary wit and aplomb, Jeffers McDonald shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. See below for further information about the video, as well as for a discussion about how Jeffers McDonald used resources, like the one showcased in the video, in research for her new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom.

Today, Film Studies For Free presents a bumper entry on movie magazines and fan culture research! The entry boasts three main content clusters: 

1. A guide to using Lantern, the new search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched.
2. A nine minute video Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine (also embedded above), presented by film scholar Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, and an audio interview in which she expands on the fan magazine research she carried out for her new book on Doris Day's stardom.
3. Links to written studies and other essential online resources on, or using, movie magazine and fan culture research methodologies.

 1. LANTERN

Pages from Radio and Television Mirror, Jan-June 1949 (archived by the Internet Archive), as discussed by Tamar Jeffers McDonald, Reader in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK, in her report, below, on using Lantern, Media History Digital Library's search and visualisation platform.

Many readers at Film Studies For Free will already know of, and indeed be using, Lantern, the new, essential, search and visualization platform for the Media History Digital Library, a wonderful project that FSFF wrote about back in 2011 when it launched. The MHDL has digitized over 800,000 pages of out-of-copyright media publications for open access. Many of the rare magazines in the collection came from the Library of Congress Packard Campus (you can see the full list of contributing individuals and sponsors on the credits webpage). The MHDL's searchable collections now include:

Business Screen (1938-1973); Educational Screen (1922-1962); The Film Daily (1918-1948); International Photographer (1929-1941); International Projectionist  (1933-1965); Transactions of SMPE and Journal of SMPE (1915-1954); Motion Picture Magazine (1914-1941); Motography (1909-1918); Movie Classic (1931-1937); Movie Makers (1926-1953); Moving Picture World (1907-1919); The New Movie Magazine (1929-1935); Photoplay (1914-1943); Radio Annual and Television Yearbook (1938-1964); Radio Digest (1923-1933); Radio Mirror (1934-1963); Radio Broadcast (1922-1930); Sponsor (1946-1964); Talking Machine World (1906-1928); Variety (1905-1926 - production on the next twenty years is underway)

The great news is that we can search and access items from the collection platform at MHDL's brilliant Lantern site http://lantern.mediahist.org, or simply type your query into the searchbox of the existing MHDL site: http://mediahistoryproject.org. The site was developed designed and produced by Eric Hoyt, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts, UW-Madison and Co-Director (with David Pierce), Media History Digital Library.

FSFF asked film scholar Tamar Jeffers McDonald, whose fabulous work in this area is expanded on in the next section of this entry, to test Lantern as a highly seasoned user of offline archives. Here is her glowing account:

For me Lantern's utility lies not only in its stock of periodicals, freely accessible, fully searchable, available for my own research purposes but also the possibilities it offers as a teaching tool, bringing film history alive.

     My recent research has been on Doris Day. Trips to the British Library, the Library of Congress and the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles netted me over 1500 articles to peruse, but not the first article turned up by Lantern when I put in "Doris Day" as the search term, "That Day Girl/That Hope Fellow" from Radio and Television Mirror, May 1949. This is an early piece in which the new star herself purports to write about Bob Hope, the veteran entertainer on whose radio show Day appeared as songstress and sidekick. The article attempts to preserve the double-act nature of the pair's relationship by getting each to write about the other. The columns notionally penned by 'Day' - and there is no way at this distance that we can either prove or disprove her actual authorship - testify to what a great guy Hope is; his sections do the same, maintaining his comic persona as a narcissist. This confirms the piece's early date - 1949 - Day was already beginning to be spoken of as a major star and fan magazines would not allow space dedicated to her to boost another performer for much longer. By 1952 coverage of Day was saturating the movie magazines: she appeared on or in all twelve monthly issues of Movie Stars Parade and was featured in seventy-five other periodicals that year too. Finding this piece through Lantern is a valuable corrective, then, to the belief that Day became a star effortlessly, consistently receiving lead billing and attention in the magazines. While Motion Picture did hail her as the next big thing in August 1948 [see images below**], other publications obviously took longer to be convinced.

     In addition to its value for researching for individual stars or films, Lantern is also useful for more general searches for social history. Since the whole text of the issues is scanned and searchable, the advertising sections of the magazines can be viewed also, and provide fascinating social history data about the presentation of a variety of products. Typing in "pink toothbrush" recovers the history of Ipana, a toothpaste which boasted it could do away with gum disease; "Zonite" claimed it was the "solution to a woman's most intimate problem". Enter any product name to see the variety of methods used to sell it in the different periodicals, and different periods, covered: a search for "Lustre Creme shampoo" will bring up gorgeous full colour portraits of Hollywood stars as well as more utilitarian black and white ads featuring a more anonymous 'the Lustre-Creme Girl'.

     Lantern truly illuminates both the importance of fan and trade periodicals as cinema paratexts, and itself as an invaluable source for finding and searching them.

     (Note: For the first search, I simply put in Doris Day as the term, without inverted commas, with no specified date range and without altering the default Sort mode for results, By Relevance. Changing this to 'Sort by date' is the best option to capture the changing methods of presentation for product advertising).

Further great accounts of Lantern may be found at the links below:

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

• Eric Hoyt, 'Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern', Antenna, August 14, 2013
• David Bordwell, 'Magic, this lantern', Observations on Film Art, August 12, 2013

Let’s talk about search – lessons from building Lantern: Eric Hoyt on the new search engine for the now-even-more-valuable Media History Digital Library; for background, see David Bordwell’s post Magic, this lantern. - See more at: http://www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk/2013/09/links-for-the-weekend-31/#sthash.4WU77rAD.dpuf

2. A Guide to Studying a Movie Magazine 

In the video embedded at the top of the entry, Tamar Jeffers McDonald presents a guide to studying a movie magazine. With her customary wit and aplomb, she shows us how media historians and theorists might make use of a copy of the November 1965 issue of the American fan magazine Modern Screen. The above, somewhat impromptu (shaky cam!) resource came out of an interview with Jeffers McDonald carried out at the National Theatre, London, in October 2013 by Film Studies For Free. An audio recording of the interview is embedded below and online here at FSFF's new podcast site.

The  main topic of conversation was about Jeffers McDonald's new book Doris Day Confidential: Hollywood Sex and Stardom (London: I B Tauris, 2013). This book poses as a central question, amongst others, “Why do we assume Doris Day always plays a virgin?” In previous work (her PhD thesis, the edited collection Virgin Territory: Representing Sexual Inexperience in Film, (Wayne State University Press, 2010), and an article on Rock Hudson from 2007 - see details here) Jeffers McDonald has examined what ‘playing a virgin’ might mean and consist of; now she turns her attention to how this dominant idea has been circulated, through studying the film fan periodicals which advanced and then froze Day’s stardom, a methodology she explores in detail in this video, and in the (12 minutes long) audio interview embedded below. [** See the foot of FSFF's entry for images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, to which Jeffers McDonald refers in the interview].

3. Online Resources on Movie Magazines and Fan Culture Research Methodologies

• Participations: A Journal of Audience and Reception Studies
• Transformative Works and Cultures
• Fan Studies Network
• Fan Sites Network website
• Henry Jenkins' website
• Anne Helen Petersen's blog Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style | Proto-Scholastic Musings on Star Studies. Also see:
  Scandals of Classic Hollywood, The Hairpin; “The Rules of the Game: A Century of Hollywood Publicity,” Virginia Quarterly Review; “There Are Things Of Which I May Not Speak,” The Toast; “The Hollywood Canteen,” Laptham’s Quarterly; “Decoding the Beyonce Tumblr,” Gawker; “Me, You, and Star Trek: The Next Generation,” The Awl; Various fan magazine finds at Slate’s The Vault; The “Remembering Lilith Fair” series at The Hairpin.

• Nancy Baym's Online Fandom website
• Karen Hellekson's website
• On classic era Chinese movie magazines at The Chinese Mirror: A Journal of Chinese Film History

• Daniël Biltereyst, Kathleen Lotze, Philippe Meers, 'Triangulation in historical audience research: Reflections and experiences from a multi-methodological research project on cinema audiences in Flanders', Participations, 9.2, 2012
• Liam Burke, '‘Superman in Green’: An audience study of comic book film adaptations Thorand Green Lantern', Participations, 9.2, 2012
• Brigid S. G. Cherry., The female horror film audience : viewing pleasures and fan practices, PhD Thesis, University of Stirling, 1999 
• Pam Cook, 'Labours of Love: In Praise of Fan Websites', Frames, 1.1, 2012   
• Catherine Driscoll and Matt Hills, 'Gender and Fan Culture (Round Twelve, Part One):', Confessions of an Aca Fan, August 23, 2007
• Mark Duffett, 'Boosting Elvis: A Content Analysis of Editorial Stories from one Fan Club Magazine', Participations, 9.2, 2012
• 'Fan Labor', Wikipedia entry
• Ellen Hijmans, 'Reading YES. Interpretive Repertoires and Identity Construction in Dutch Teenage Magazines', Participations,1.2, 2004
• Matt Hills, 'Fiske's 'textual productivity' and digital fandom: Web 2.0 democratization versus fan distinction?', Participations, 10.1, 2010
• Laura Hubner, 'Introduction: Valuing Films', in Hubner (ed.), Valuing Films: Shifting Perceptions of Worth (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
• Pietari Kääpä and Guan Wenbo, 'Santa Claus in China and Wu xia in Finland: Translocal reception of transnational cinema in Finnish and Chinese film cultures', Participations, 8.2, 2011 
•  Paul Thébergé, 'Everyday Fandom: Fan Clubs, Blogging, and the Quotidian Rhythms of theInternet', Canadian Journal of Communication, 30.4, 2005
• Ed Wiltse, 'Fans, Geeks and Nerds, and the Politics of Online Communities', Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association Fifth Annual Convention 5 (2004)

**Below are images from Motion Picture Magazine, August 1948, reproduced by kind permission of Tamar Jeffers McDonald, to which she refers in her audio interview embedded above.

More about → Studying Movie Magazines and Fan Culture! Online Research and Methodology Resources. And LANTERN!

Comic Book INTENSITIES

Screenshot of the new issue header for INTENSITIES

Way back in the dim mists of online time (on January 23, 2013, to be precise), Film Studies For Free publicised its discovery of the new online incarnation of Intensities, the wonderful journal of cult media studies.

Not only are four existing issues of the journal freely available at its website, but a new issue has recently been published there, with lots of items of film studies related interest. The table of contents is pasted in below with links to these excellent items.

Of related interest: FSFF's entry on Studies of the Remediation of Films, Comics and Video Games.



INTENSITIES, Issue 5: Comic Book Intensities (Spring/Summer 2013) 

Articles

• Producing Transnational Cult Media- Neon Genesis Evangelion and Ghost in the Shell in Circulation – Brian Ruh
• Girls’ Fantasies, Freedom, and Brotherly Love- Incest Narratives in Shōjo Anime – Elizabeth Birmingham
• Depicting ordinary and nonstandard intimacies in public- Sex, romance and humour in women’s porn comics – Jackie Ruddock
• Architecture, Violence and Sensation- A Visitor’s Guide to Mega City One – Dan Smith
• The Joke’s On Him- Shamanism, Literary Magic, and the Textualization of Grant Morrison, Heath Ledger, and The Joker – Tim Bavlnka
• From Stories to Worlds- The Continuity of Marvel Superheroes from Comics to Film – David Sweeney
• Captain America, Watergate, and the Falcon- Rediscovering the American Dream? – Michael Ahmed

Intensive: Cult Media Review

• A Fatal Attraction- the fine line between eroticism and horror in Baba Yaga (Corrado Farina, 1973) – Adrian Smith
• Expressions of Fandom- Findings from a Psychological Survey of Cosplay and Costume Wear – Robin S. Rosenberg and Andrea M. Letamendi
• Karen Oughton interviews Fabrizio Federico, director of Black Biscuit (2011) – Karen Oughton

More about → Comic Book INTENSITIES

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!

Media History Digital Library

It has been brilliantly publicised already, but Film Studies For Free wanted to make sure all its readers were alerted to the launch of an amazing new website for the Media History Digital Library, an excellent non-profit organisation that, for a good while now, in conjunction with the Internet Archive, has been working to digitize and open up full public access to collections of classic film and media periodicals that belong in the public domain.

On the site, you will find access to over 200,000 digitized pages of public domain media industry trade papers and fan magazines, including Moving Picture World (1912-1918), Film Daily (1918-1936), Photoplay (1917-1940), Radio Broadcast (1922-1930), and much more.

As well as its collections, the new website sports a great blog by MHDL Founder and Director David Pierce, and it also has its own Facebook page.

You are also encouraged to support this brilliant project with sponsorship. As such brilliance doesn't just come about by accident, nor can it possibly come about for free, FSFF strongly urges you to think about supporting this work financially, especially if you know that you, or your institution, are likely to benefit to any great degree from access to these wonderful resources.

More about → Media History Digital Library

Great new Essays on Film and Video from Mediascape

The above video is a very short, but effective, introduction to issues affecting small nations as they produce cinema, using the example of the Nordic countries, by film scholar Mette Hjort. It is also a fascinating digital promotional tool for a University of Washington Press book series co-edited by her. See Hjort's excellent essay on 'small nation cinema studies' in the new issue of Mediascape. And also see Tom Zaniello's excellent article there on emerging, new-media forms of documentary including the digital advert.

Film Studies For Free was really delighted to see that there's a new issue out of online journal Mediascape. The Winter 2011 issue explores

the complex notions of the local and global as they intersect with media: industries and studies; cultures of production, distribution, exhibition and reception; as well as the text itself. Some of the questions this issue engages with include: In what ways does the global marketplace facilitate local products and productions? How do actors negotiate the politics of globalization in how they represent themselves in either the digitally enhanced or real worlds? How can digital media balance both the autonomy of local communities and the ongoing impact of corporate globalization? What role do academic scholars and students play in the globalization of media studies? [read more of this introduction here].

As with earlier issues of this high quality and strikingly original journal, there are a good number of items in audiovisual formats (including video essays, video exemplars, etc). Alongside Mette Hjort's and Tom Zaniello's articles, FSFF particularly appreciated Brian Hu's excellent video essay on the use of popular music in Wong Kar-wai’s films: truly wonderful, analytical viewing and listening! But there are many others pieces of great interest and these are all directly linked to below.

Thanks for a really great issue, Mediascape.

Features: 

• 'From Synthespian to Avatar: Re-framing the Digital Human in Final Fantasy and The Polar Express' by Jessica Aldred
• 'Tsuruko Aoki: Wife, Lover, Transcultural Star (visual essay)' by Bryan Hikari Hartzheim
• 'Pop Music and Wong Kar-wai (visual essay)' by Brian Hu
• 'Impact on Soft Power of Cultural Mobility: Japan to East Asia' by Seiko Yasumoto

Reviews:

• 'Suturing the Wound of Globalization: Immigration and Organs in Dirty Pretty Things' by Abby Hinsman
• 'Coming of Age in Media/Cultural Studies: Critical Approaches' by Dennis Lo

Meta:

• 'Small Cinemas: How They Thrive and Why They Matter' by Mette Hjort
• 'Roundtable Discussion on the Local and Global in Media Studies' Respondents: Amelie Hastie, Roshanak Khesti and Laura U. Marks (link not yet working)

Columns:

• 'Introduction' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Robert Greenwald Interview' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Ina Inaba Interview' by Ross Lenihan
• 'Amie Williams Interview' by Ben Sampson
• 'Globalization, Digital Films, and New Directions in Documentary' by Tom Zaniello
• 'Speculations on the Virtual and the Viral Witness to Human Rights Crises' by Sam Gregory and Patricia Zimmermann

Columns Video:

• 'Local/Global in Documentary Films: Traditional Media and New Media (video interview)' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Local/Global in Documentary Films: Short Format vs Long Format (video interview)' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Local/Global in Documentary Films: New Media and Social Change (video interview)' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson
• 'Local/Global in Documentary Films: Effectiveness of Advocacy Media (video interview)' by Ross Lenihan and Ben Sampson

More about → Great new Essays on Film and Video from Mediascape

On Spectatorship, Reception Studies, Fandom and Fan Studies: In Media Res and Flow

Picture from Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla via Flickr, used and altered under Creative Commons License permission.

Film Studies For Free wanted you to know you have to go with the new issue of Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture on Fandom and Fan Studies.  Oh, and then you can join the party already started at In Media Res on issues of spectatorship. The great contents of these worthy e-journals are directly linked to below:


In Media Res December 13-17, 2010 (Theme week organized by Ian Peters [Georgia State University])

• Sarah Sinwell (Northeastern University) presents: The Art of Seduction: Film Spectatorship in the Age of the Cell Phone

• Ross Melnick (Emory University) presents: BIG News from India: BIG Cinemas and Diasporic Indian Moviegoing in the United States

• Sarah Hamblin (Michigan State University) presents: Puzzling Spectatorship

• Daniel C. Faltesek (University of Iowa) presents: The 3D Machine: An Experiment With Aura, Television, and Installation

• Jesse Schlotterbeck (University of Iowa) presents: DVDs Like LPs: The Official Websites of Musical Biopics and the Contemporary Film Collector

Flow: A Critical Forumon Television and Media Culture

• "Fandom In/As the Academy" by Paul Booth A look at the specific pedagogical value of fandom as an activity and how it can be appropriated in a variety of educational contexts.

• "We Have Met the Fans, and They Are Us: In Defense of Aca-Fans and Scholars" by Catherine Coker and Candace Benefiel  Fans hold their objects of study to a higher standard. How can the critical study of any text succeed without the passionate and knowledgeable participation of the scholar?

• "The Gathering of the Juggalos and the Peculiar Sanctity of Fandom" by Michael Dwyer The Gathering of the Juggalos is the scene of questionable fan practices contrary to the noble portrait of fandom elaborated by several scholars.

• "'We are all together:' Fan Studies and Performance" by Jen Gunnels and M. Flourish Klink Gunnels and Klink argue that fan studies parallels performance studies in discerning tensions between researcher and subject.

• "Stop Being an Elitist, and Start Being an Elitist" by David Jenemann Given how Aca-fandom has created its own canon and looks down its nose at certain cultural forms like sports broadcasting, we could use a little of Adorno's elitism in the discipline today.

• "Telling Tastes: (Re)producing Distinction in Popular Media Studies" by Eve Ng What we study and how we learn to talk about it is productive of our identities along mostly covert dimensions of power. How do scholars distinguish themselves from the mainstream critics?

• "Embracing the 'Overly Confessional:' Scholar-Fandom and Approaches to Personal Research" by Tom Phillips A scholar argues that embracing an "overly confessional" approach to his academic writing is integral to the fidelity of his research.

• "Revisiting Fandom in Africa" by Olivier J. Tchouaffe The application of fandom and its resources is not the same in all cultures, and African fans might not be recognized as legitimate fans. The point of this piece is to demonstrate that there is a unifying figure of American domination of mass culture.

More about → On Spectatorship, Reception Studies, Fandom and Fan Studies: In Media Res and Flow

New Senses of Cinema: Assayas, Ava Gardner, Haneke, Morin, Rouch, Epstein, African Francophone cinema, Citizen Kane, digital cinema

One Touch of Venus (William A. Seiter, 1948), starring Robert Walker and Ava Gardner. See Edgar Morin's essay on Gardner here.

As ever, Film Studies For Free rushes you the latest e-journal news. Today, the latest Senses of Cinema hit the e-newsstands. Without further bloggish ado, read the below links to contents and weep with film-scholarly joy!

Issue 57 Contents

• Editorial

Feature Articles

• An Interview with Olivier Assayas on Carlos by Genevieve Yue

• Introduction to Edgar Morin by Lorraine Mortimer

• Ava Gardner by Edgar Morin

• The America Endangered in The American by Joseph Natoli

• African Francophone Cinema in the French New Wave by Wes Felton

• Citizen Kane: Biography and the Unfinished Sentence by Pedro Blas Gonzalez

• The Older Grows the Body, the Faster Run the Machines by John Downie

• Making Space by Sean Cubitt

• The Cinemas of Interactions by Leon Gurevitch

• disney.go.com/fairies and Pixie Hollow MMOG by Allison Maplesden

• Feminism and Cinema in the Digital Age by Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon

Great Directors

• Mattias Frey on Michael Haneke

• Matt Losada on Jean Rouch

• Robert Farmer on Jean Epstein

Festival Reports

• Martha P. Nochimson on New York

• Gianluca Pulsoni on Lucca Film Festival

• Celluloid Liberation Front on Venice

• Vera Brunner-Sung on Pusan International Film Festival

• Libertad Gills on Festival de Cine Cero Latitud

• Huw Walmsley-Evans on Brisbane

• Bérénice Reynaud on Vancouver

Book Reviews

• Film, Theory and Philosophy

• John Fidler on The Tactile Eye and Moving Viewers

• Dean Brandum on Michael Winterbottom

• Chris Carter on >Re-Imagining Animation

• Adrian Danks on Humphrey Jennings

• David Melville on Beyond Paradise

Cteq Annotations

• Michael Walsh on Camouflage

• Marcin Wisniewski on Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease

• Pedro Blas Gonzalez on The Structure of Crystals

• Adrian Danks on Family Life

More about → New Senses of Cinema: Assayas, Ava Gardner, Haneke, Morin, Rouch, Epstein, African Francophone cinema, Citizen Kane, digital cinema

"European film-makers construct the United States"

Image from Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang, 1952). Read Hilaria Loyo's
Star and National Myths in Cold War Allegories: Marlene Dietrich’s Star Persona and the Western in Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952)

Thanks to the ever brilliant David Hudson, Film Studies For Free heard about a must-read item on American cinema, a special issue of the European Journal of American Studies entitled European film-makers construct the United States. Links to all the brilliant and openly accessible articles are given below.

European Journal of American Studies (1, 2010) Special issue on Film: European film-makers construct the United States

• Melvyn Stokes and Dominique Sipière
  Out of Many, One: European film-makers construct the United States 
  
  
• David Roche
  (De)constructing “America”: the Case of Emir Kusturica’s Arizona Dream (1993) 
  
  
• Frank Mehring
  From Independence Day to Land of Plenty: Screening American Patriotism from German Émigré Perspectives before and after 9/11 
  
  
• Hilaria Loyo
  Star and National Myths in Cold War Allegories: Marlene Dietrich’s Star Persona and the Western in Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952) 
  
  
• Ian Scott
  “Don’t Be Frightened Dear … This Is Hollywood”: British Filmmakers in Early American Cinema 
  
  
• Yves Carlet
  Frank Capra and Elia Kazan, American outsiders 
  
  
• Vicente J. Benet
  Eldorado Revisited: Spanish Film-makers in Reagan’s America 
  
  
• Jeffrey L. Meikle
  Transatlantic Refractions: Ambivalence and Cultural Hybridity in the Euro-American Road Movie 
  
  

More about → "European film-makers construct the United States"