A Different Kind of Ballet

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Simonson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Women's Relationships ◽  
The Future ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Classical Hollywood

Dorothy Arzner’s 1940 filmDance, Girl, Dancehas been embraced within feminist film criticism as a stunning demonstration and critique of the “male gaze” so typical in classical Hollywood cinema. Tracing the lives and careers of two dancers, scholars argue, the film privileges strong female characters and women’s relationships with one another over heterosexual romance. Yet this essay argues thatDance, Girl, Danceis as much a film about the evolution of American dance in the twentieth century as it is about looking at women’s friendships. Juxtaposing Bubbles’s risqué burlesque routines and Judy’s sentimental divertissements with extended sequences of “modern” ballet,Dance, Girl, Dancegrafts contemporary debates about the future of American dance and the meaning of American modernism onto the bodies of Bubbles, Judy, and their fellow dancers.

scholarly journals Greta Gerwig's Gestures: Agamben in the Land of Stardom

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janet Harbord
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Gender Identity ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
The Common ◽  
Contemporary Film ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Classical Hollywood ◽  
Binary Gender

In a brief essay, “For an Ethics of the Cinema”, Giorgio Agamben names the film star as the twentieth century figure representing an elision of what is individual and what is collective. It is impossible, he argues, to separate the actor from the character in the thorough commodification of the star, drawing examples from classical Hollywood cinema. Yet consideration of contemporary film provides for a different account of stardom in which the common language of performance is seen to be an inheritance to be inhabited critically and citationally by the star. This article brings Agamben's cinema essays on ethics and gesture respectively into dialogue with Greta Gerwig's emphatically gestural style of performance, a style that belongs to what Erin Manning has named the minor gesture. Incomplete and imperfect performances of heterosexual femininity, Gerwig's gestures are incisive in their revelation precisely of binary gender identity as the major, the defining and delimiting paradigm of adulthood that her characters consistently resist.

Rewriting Ibsen for the big screen

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audun Engelstad
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Adaptations ◽  
Henrik Ibsen ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Classical Hollywood

Henrik Ibsen is regarded as the champion of realist theatre. In the early days of cinema, there were several silent film adaptations of Ibsen’s plays. One would think, given his standing as a playwright, that there would be a continuous interest in Ibsen’s work after the conversion to sound. This article examines how the realist theatre – heralded by Ibsen – relates to classical (Hollywood) cinema and how Ibsen in various ways has been rewritten and has recently re-emerged within contemporary cinema.

Classicism and Deviation in His Girl Friday and Double Indemnity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Todd Berliner
Keyword(s):  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Cognitive Challenge ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Double Indemnity ◽  
Classical Hollywood

Chapter 2 illustrates an aesthetically productive balance between easy understanding and cognitive challenge in classical Hollywood cinema with extended analyses of His Girl Friday and Double Indemnity. These films combine classical narrative, stylistic, ideological, and genre properties with artistic devices that complicate formal patterning and thwart audience expectations.

Frozen in the Glassy, Bluestreaked Air

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alix Beeston
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Modern City ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Female Bodies

This chapter interprets the serialized narration and characterization of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) in line with the figuring of female bodies through the photographic apparatus of advertisement and celebrity that was ancillary to popular Broadway entertainments in the early twentieth century. Unpacking the image of Ellen Thatcher, Dos Passos’s central character, as a photograph at the end of the multilinear novel, it accounts for Dos Passos’s critique of the patriarchal, white-centric specular economy of the modern city. The photographic freezing of the wealthy, white Ellen registers her imprisonment to the male gaze and her resistance to those who are ethnically and socially other to her. Yet by the additive construction of its female characters, Manhattan Transfer undercuts Ellen’s sense of her essentialized difference from the novel’s other women.

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