Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight, Doing Women's Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), pp. 278. IBSN: 978-0-252-08118-7 Jane M. Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Indu

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 820-832
Author(s):  
LIZ CLARKE
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Women's Film

Introduction: Special Effects and the Techno-Romantic Paradigm

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharina Loew
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Film History ◽  
Physical Reality ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Industrial Modernity

German silent cinema is famous for its unconventional aesthetics and film-technological innovations. These characteristics were the result of efforts to reconcile the new medium’s automatic reproductions of physical reality with idealist conceptions of art. Special effects played a crucial role in this endeavour. They afforded creative experiments with the cinematic apparatus and inspired filmmakers to convey ideas and emotions. Special effects embodied the “techno-romantic” project of construing technology as a means for transcending material reality. This common response to industrial modernity profoundly shaped German silent film culture. The techno-romantic paradigm formed the basis of one of the most creative periods in film history and proved instrumental in the evolution of cinematic expressivity and film art.

Doing women’s film history: reframing cinemas, past and future

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 746-748 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Women's Film

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Gledhill ◽  
Julia Knight
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Film History ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Women's Film ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Different Parts

This book examines film history with the goal of reframing it to accommodate new approaches to women's filmmaking. It brings together a wide range of case studies investigating women's work in cinema across its histories as they play out in different parts of the world from the pioneering days of silent cinema through recent developments in HD transmissions of live opera. It also tackles a range of conceptual and methodological questions about how to research women's film history—how, for example, to reconceptualize film history in order to locate the impact of women in that history. Furthermore, the book looks at the debates over relations among gender, aesthetics, and feminism. In this introduction, a number of interrelated themes and issues that can be grouped into four broad problematics are discussed: evidence and interpretation; feminist expectations of both contemporary and past women's filmmaking; the impact of women's film history on existing historical narratives and theories; and factors that determine the visibility of women's films and build audiences for them.

Women and the Shift from Theatre to Cinema in Spain: The Case of Helena Cortesina (1903–84)

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-120
Author(s):  
Elena Cordero-Hoyo ◽  
Begoña Soto-Vázquez
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
The Other ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
Spanish Film ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Marginal Status ◽  
The One

The purpose of this article is to identify the main causes behind women achieving, on the one hand, important positions as theatre managers in Spain but, on the other, being relegated a marginal status in the shift to cinema. We use the career of the artist Helena Cortesina to illustrate the only known example of a woman becoming a silent cinema entrepreneur in Spain. An actress, producer, and director of Flor de España o la leyenda de un torero ( Spanish flower or the bullfighter's story, 1921) Cortesina transitioned from the variety dances stage to silent film and became a theatrical manager. Her professional career exemplifies the inter-artistic relations between cinema and the scenic arts at the beginning of the twentieth century and the professional bridge between them. This article contributes to feminist film historiography. Following Monica Dall’Asta, it presents a ‘history that invites us to work using creative hypotheses and even imagination’. The article revisits Spanish Film History, reinterpreting the hegemonic production of knowledge that has been historically told from a (supposedly) un-gendered perspective. Our article seeks to disrupt this patriarchal narrative of firsts (including geniuses, technical discoveries, and masterpieces) that relegate women's experiences to the margins of History.

scholarly journals An Introduction to the Interviews

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
Victoria Duckett
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
History Books

This article explores the work that female archivists undertake today. It is based upon a series of six interviews—conducted largely in Europe in 2015—with noted female archivists, curators, and programmers. Through conversations with Bryony Dixon (British Film Institute), Giovanna Fossati (EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam), Karola Gramann (Kinothek Asta Nielsen, Frankfurt), Mariann Lewinsky (Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna), Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam), and Meg Labrum (National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra), it argues that women have a disproportionate impact upon the programming of silent film at festivals. It also suggests that there is a growing public that is attracted to festivals such as Il Cinema Ritrovato precisely because these festivals give us access to a vision of film history and feminism that we cannot find in traditional history books. Finally, it asks how these women work and, specifically, how the change to digital has impacted archival outreach and access today.

Feminism and Women’s Film History in 1980s Turkey

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eylem Atakav
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Film History ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Turkish Cinema ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women's Film ◽  
Film Texts ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between feminism and women's film history in the context of 1980s Turkey. In discussing women's film history, the chapter includes not only the history of women filmmakers and the films they have made but also the link between the history of Turkish film industry and feminism. It begins with a historical overview of the feminist movement in Turkey and then examines its visible traces in film texts produced during the 1980s in order to argue that those films can be most productively understood as explorations of gendered power relations. The chapter then considers how the enforced depoliticization introduced in Turkey after the 1980 coup opened up a space for feminist concerns to be expressed within commercial cinema. It also shows how this political context gave rise to the newly humanized, more independent heroine that characterized Turkish cinema during the period, but suggests that the films were nevertheless made largely within the structures of a patriarchal commercial cinema.

From Book to Film

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Christine M. E. Guth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Film History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Japanese Culture ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Art And Literature ◽  
Literary Art ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Mary McNeil Fenollosa’s 1906 novel The Dragon Painter and its 1919 filmic adaptation sit at the intersection of American literary, art, and film history. Simultaneously personal and political, each is a product of its time and place. Together, they tell a story about changing (and unchanging) attitudes that were constituents of the complex and often contradictory history of the reception of Japanese culture and people in the United States. The novel draws on stereotypes of Japan as a primitive country of innately artistic people that at the time of its publication had been made familiar through art and literature. The silent film, produced in Hollywood, by and co-starring Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki, expanded and complicated the modes of visualizing Japan by featuring a Japanese couple in starring roles. This article addresses the relationship between the novel, an allegory of Japanese cultural loss and renewal, and the film, a romance inflected with American concerns about race, drawing particular attention to gender and Japanism in their reception and interpretation.

Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, Jane M. Gaines (2018)

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Amelia Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
University Of Illinois

Review of: Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, Jane M. Gaines (2018)Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 203 pp.,ISBN 978-0-25208-343-3, p/bk, $29.95

scholarly journals Cultivating the Early Canons: The Pordenone Silent Film Festival

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-95
Author(s):  
Vito Adriaensens
Keyword(s):  
Film History ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Small City ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Film Festival ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
The North ◽  
Special Events ◽  
The World ◽  
Les Miserables

Festival Report: For passionate lovers of silent cinema, the first weekend of October is permanently highlighted in the calendar: it is then that a small city in the north of Italy serves up more than just excellent antipasti and chilled Aperol Spritz. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, or “the days of silent cinema,” commonly known as the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, has been the mecca for film historians and amateurs of “mute flickers” since its founding in 1982. The festival is the largest silent film festival in the world, offering a nine-day bombardment of rediscoveries, restorations, retrospectives, and special events from dusk until well past dawn, projected at the proper speeds and accompanied by such leading early cinema musicians as Neil Brand, John Sweeney, and Günter Buchwald. Film history comes alive. Films reviewed include: Douro, Faina Fluvial (1931), Chuji tabinikki (A Diary of Chuji's Travels, Daisuke Ito, 1927), and Henri Fescourt's 1925–26 rendition of Les Misérables.

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