Movie-Struck Girls

Movie-Struck Girls PDF Author: Shelley Stamp
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691187754
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Movie-Struck Girls examines women's films and filmgoing in the 1910s, a period when female patronage was energetically courted by the industry for the first time. By looking closely at how women were invited to participate in movie culture, the films they were offered, and the visual pleasures they enjoyed, Shelley Stamp demonstrates that women significantly complicated cinemagoing throughout this formative, transitional era. Growing female patronage and increased emphasis on women's subject matter did not necessarily bolster cinema's cultural legitimacy, as many in the industry had hoped, for women were not always enticed to the cinema by dignified, uplifting material, and once there, they were not always seamlessly integrated in the social space of theaters, nor the new optical pleasures of film viewing. In fact, Stamp argues that much about women's films and filmgoing in the postnickelodeon years challenged, rather than served, the industry's drive for greater respectability. White slave films, action-adventure serial dramas, and women's suffrage photoplays all drew female audiences to the cinema with stories aimed directly at women's interests and with advertising campaigns that specifically targeted female moviegoers. Yet these examples suggest that women's patronage was built with stories focused on sexuality, sensational thrill-seeking, and feminist agitation, topics not normally associated with ladylike gentility. And in each case concerns were raised about women's conduct at cinemas and the viewing habits they enjoyed, demonstrating that women's integration into motion picture culture was not as smooth as many have thought.

Movie-Struck Girls

Movie-Struck Girls PDF Author: Shelley Stamp
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691187754
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Movie-Struck Girls examines women's films and filmgoing in the 1910s, a period when female patronage was energetically courted by the industry for the first time. By looking closely at how women were invited to participate in movie culture, the films they were offered, and the visual pleasures they enjoyed, Shelley Stamp demonstrates that women significantly complicated cinemagoing throughout this formative, transitional era. Growing female patronage and increased emphasis on women's subject matter did not necessarily bolster cinema's cultural legitimacy, as many in the industry had hoped, for women were not always enticed to the cinema by dignified, uplifting material, and once there, they were not always seamlessly integrated in the social space of theaters, nor the new optical pleasures of film viewing. In fact, Stamp argues that much about women's films and filmgoing in the postnickelodeon years challenged, rather than served, the industry's drive for greater respectability. White slave films, action-adventure serial dramas, and women's suffrage photoplays all drew female audiences to the cinema with stories aimed directly at women's interests and with advertising campaigns that specifically targeted female moviegoers. Yet these examples suggest that women's patronage was built with stories focused on sexuality, sensational thrill-seeking, and feminist agitation, topics not normally associated with ladylike gentility. And in each case concerns were raised about women's conduct at cinemas and the viewing habits they enjoyed, demonstrating that women's integration into motion picture culture was not as smooth as many have thought.

Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure

Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure PDF Author: Nan Enstad
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231111034
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
At the beginning of the twentieth century, labor leaders in women's unions routinely chastised their members for their ceaseless pursuit of fashion, avid reading of dime novels, and "affected" ways, including aristocratic airs and accents. Indeed, working women in America were eagerly participating in the burgeoning consumer culture available to them. While the leading activists, organizers, and radicals feared that consumerist tendencies made working women seem frivolous and dissuaded them from political action, these women, in fact, went on strike in very large numbers during the period, proving themselves to be politically active, astute, and effective. In Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, historian Nan Enstad explores the complex relationship between consumer culture and political activism for late nineteenth- and twentieth-century working women. While consumerism did not make women into radicals, it helped shape their culture and their identities as both workers and political actors. Examining material ranging from early dime novels about ordinary women who inherit wealth or marry millionaires, to inexpensive, ready-to-wear clothing that allowed them to both deny and resist mistreatment in the workplace, Enstad analyzes how working women wove popular narratives and fashions into their developing sense of themselves as "ladies." She then provides a detailed examination of how this notion of "ladyhood" affected the great New York shirtwaist strike of 1909-1910. From the women's grievances, to the walkout of over 20,000 workers, to their style of picketing, Enstad shows how consumer culture was a central theme in this key event of labor strife. Finally, Enstad turns to the motion picture genre of female adventure serials, popular after 1912, which imbued "ladyhood" with heroines' strength, independence, and daring.

The Truth about the Movies

The Truth about the Movies PDF Author: Laurence A. Hughes
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Motion picture acting
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description


A Queer Way of Feeling

A Queer Way of Feeling PDF Author: Diana W. Anselmo
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520971299
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
A Queer Way of Feeling gathers an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs to explore how girls coming of age in the United States in the 1910s used cinema to forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy, and kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos into personal scrapbooks and making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, girl fans from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense of feeling "queer" or "different from the norm." These material testimonies show how a forgotten audience engendered terminologies, communities, and creative practices that became cornerstones of media fan reception and queer belonging.

Powers of the Real

Powers of the Real PDF Author: Diane Wei Lewis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684176042
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Powers of the Real analyzes the cultural politics of cinema’s persuasive sensory realism in interwar Japan. Examining cultural criticism, art, news media, literature, and film, Diane Wei Lewis shows how representations of women and signifiers of femininity were used to characterize new forms of pleasure and fantasy enabled by consumer culture and technological media. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, she analyzes the role that images of women played in articulating the new expressions of identity, behavior, and affiliation produced by cinema and consumer capitalism. In the process, Lewis traces new discourses on the technological mediation of emotion to the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and postquake mass media boom. The earthquake transformed the Japanese film industry and lent urgency to debates surrounding cinema’s ability to reach a mass audience and shape public sentiment, while the rise of consumer culture contributed to alarm over rampant materialism and “feminization.” Demonstrating how ideas about emotion and sexual difference played a crucial role in popular discourse on cinema’s reach and its sensory-affective powers, Powers of the Real offers new perspectives on media history, the commodification of intimacy and emotion, film realism, and gender politics in the “age of the mass society” in Japan.

Go West, Young Women!

Go West, Young Women! PDF Author: Hilary Hallett
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520274083
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
In the early part of the twentieth century, migrants made their way from rural homes to cities in record numbers and many traveled west. Los Angeles became a destination. Women flocked to the growing town to join the film industry as workers and spectators, creating a “New Woman.” Their efforts transformed filmmaking from a marginal business to a cosmopolitan, glamorous, and bohemian one. By 1920, Los Angeles had become the only western city where women outnumbered men. In Go West, Young Women, Hilary A. Hallett explores these relatively unknown new western women and their role in the development of Los Angeles and the nascent film industry. From Mary Pickford’s rise to become perhaps the most powerful woman of her age, to the racist moral panics of the post–World War I years that culminated in Hollywood’s first sex scandal, Hallett describes how the path through early Hollywood presaged the struggles over modern gender roles that animated the century to come.

The Spectacular Modern Woman

The Spectacular Modern Woman PDF Author: Liz Conor
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253216700
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Liz Conor explores the role of media technology in the emergence of the 'modern woman' in the 1920s. At once liberating & confining, the media images of women set standards of appearance that were closely tied to ideas about the roles a woman could fulfill, from city girl to mannekin to flapper.

Hollywood Unknowns

Hollywood Unknowns PDF Author: Anthony Slide
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1617034754
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Extras, bit players, and stand-ins have been a part of the film industry almost from its conception. On a personal and a professional level, their stories are told in Hollywood Unknowns, the first history devoted to extras from the silent era through the present. Hollywood Unknowns discusses the relationship of the extra to the star, the lowly position in which extras were held, the poor working conditions and wages, and the sexual exploitation of many of the hardworking women striving for a place in Hollywood society. Though mainly anonymous, many are identified by name and, for perhaps the first time, receive equal billing with the stars. And Hollywood Unknowns does not forget the bit players, stand-ins, and doubles, who work alongside the extras facing many of the same privations. Celebrity extras, silent stars who ended their days as extras, or members of various ethnic groups—all gain a deserved luster in acclaimed film writer Anthony Slide's prose. Chapters document the lives and work of extras from the 1890s to the present. Slide also treats such subjects as the Hollywood Studio Club, Central Casting, the extras in popular literature, and the efforts at unionization through the Screen Actors Guild from the 1930s onwards. Slide chronicles events such as John Barrymore's walking off set in the middle of the day so the extras could earn another day's wages, and Cecil B. DeMille's masterful organizing of casts of thousands in films such as Cleopatra. Through personal interviews, oral histories, and the use of newly available archival material, Slide reveals in Hollywood Unknowns the story of the men, women, and even animals that completed the scenes on the silver screen.

Beyond the Movie Theater

Beyond the Movie Theater PDF Author: Gregory A. Waller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520391500
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Beyond the Movie Theater excavates the history of non-theatrical cinema before 1920, exploring where and how moving pictures of the 1910s were used in ways distinct from and often alternative to typical theatrical cinema. Unlike commercial cinema, non-theatrical cinema was multi-purpose in its uses and multi-sited in where it could be shown, targeted at particular audiences and, in some manner, sponsored. Relying on contemporary print sources and ephemera of the era to articulate how non-theatrical cinema was practiced and understood in the US during the 1910s, historian Gregory A. Waller charts a heterogeneous, fragmentary, and rich field that cannot be explained in terms of a master narrative concerning origin or institutionalization, progress or decline. Uncovering how and where films were put to use beyond the movie theater, this book complicates and expands our understanding of the history of American cinema, underscoring the myriad roles and everyday presence of moving pictures during the early twentieth century.

Bombay Hustle

Bombay Hustle PDF Author: Debashree Mukherjee
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551673
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
From starry-eyed fans with dreams of fame to cotton entrepreneurs turned movie moguls, the Bombay film industry has historically energized a range of practices and practitioners, playing a crucial and compelling role in the life of modern India. Bombay Hustle presents an ambitious history of Indian cinema as a history of material practice, bringing new insights to studies of media, modernity, and the late colonial city. Drawing on original archival research and an innovative transdisciplinary approach, Debashree Mukherjee offers a panoramic portrait of the consolidation of the Bombay film industry during the talkie transition of the 1920s–1940s. In the decades leading up to independence in 1947, Bombay became synonymous with marketplace thrills, industrial strikes, and modernist experimentation. Its burgeoning film industry embodied Bombay’s spirit of “hustle,” gathering together and spewing out the many different energies and emotions that characterized the city. Bombay Hustle examines diverse sites of film production—finance, pre-production paperwork, casting, screenwriting, acting, stunts—to show how speculative excitement jostled against desires for scientific management in an industry premised on the struggle between contingency and control. Mukherjee develops the concept of a “cine-ecology” in order to examine the bodies, technologies, and environments that collectively shaped the production and circulation of cinematic meaning in this time. The book thus brings into view a range of marginalized film workers, their labor and experiences; forgotten film studios, their technical practices and aesthetic visions; and overlooked connections among media practices, geographical particularities, and historical exigencies.