Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Studies)

Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History brings together a diverse group of international feminist scholars to examine the intersections of feminism, history, and feminist theory in film. Editor Vicki Callahan has assembled essays that reflect a range of methodological approaches--including archival work, visual culture, reception studies, biography, ethno-historical studies, historiography, and textual analysis--by a diverse group of film and media studies scholars to prove that feminist theory, film history, and social practice are inevitably and productively intertwined. Essays in Reclaiming the Archive investigate the different models available in feminist film history and how those feminist strategies might serve as paradigmatic for other sites of feminist intervention. Chapters have an international focus and range chronologically from early cinema to post-feminist texts, organized around the key areas of reception, stars, and authorship. A final section examines the very definitions of feminism (post-feminism), cinema (transmedia), and archives (virtual and online) in place today. The essays in Reclaiming the Archive prove that a significant heritage of film studies lies in the study of feminism in film and feminist film theory. Scholars of film history and feminist studies will appreciate the breadth of work in this volume.--Publisher website Gazing outward: the spectrum of feminist reception history. Unmasking the gaze: feminist film theory, history, and film studies / Laura Mulvey Les Belles Dames sans merci, femmes fatales, vampires, vamps, and gold diggers: The Transformation and narrative value of aggressive fallen women / Janet Staiger "I wanted life to be romantic, and I wanted to be thin" : Girls Growing Up with cinema in the 1930s / Annette Kuhn The "true love" of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton / Suzanne Leonard "She will never look": film spectatorship, black feminism, and scary subjectivities / Terri Simone Francis Rewriting authorship. Lois Weber, Star Maker / Shelley Stamp Reading as a woman: the collaboration of Ayako Wakao and Yasuzo Masumura / Ayako Saito Women in the nouvelle vague: The lost continent? / Genevieve Sellier Investigating an interval: Sarah Bernhardt, Hamlet, and the Paris Exposition of 1900 / Victoria Duckett Vision and visibility: women filmmakers, contemporary authorship, and feminist film studies / Yvonne Tasker Black and white: Mercedes de Acosta's glorious enthusiasms / Patricia White Excavating early cinema. Vitagraph stardom: constructing personalities for "new" middle-class consumption / Sumiko Higashi Clara, Ouida, Beulah, et. al.: women screenwriters in American silent cinema / Giuliana Muscio Making more than a spectacle of themselves: creating the militant suffragette in Votes for women / Amy Shore Visualizing the modern Mexican woman: santa and cinematic nation-suilding / Joanne Hershfield Sisters in rebellion : the unexpected kinship of Germaine Dulac and Virginia Woolf / Sandy Flitterman-Lewis Constructing a (post)feminist future. "Misty water-colored memories of The way we were- " postfeminist nostalgia in contemporary romance narratives / Michele Schreiber On cyberfeminism and cyberwomanism: high-tech mediations of feminism's discontents / Anna Everett The birth of the local feminist sphere in the global era : Yeoseongjang and "trans-cinema" / Soyoung Kim The future of the archive : an interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson / Vicki Callahan. Illustrates the relationship between film history and feminist theory. This work examines the intersections of feminism, history, and feminist theory in film. It assembles the essays that investigate the different models in feminist film history and how those feminist strategies might serve as paradigmatic for other sites of feminist intervention.