A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema

This book organizes its contents in the five parts mentioned below for opening a long-overlooked discussion about early cinema. The historical evidences (i.e., advertising, films, critical reviews, fan magazines) used in these essays help to address the flux of the cinematic construction of woman's identity, the fears regarding technology in film, as well as how gender is perceived and conveyed. The essays featured are: Introduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema by Jennifer M. Bean PART 1 Reflecting Film Authorship -Circuits of Memory and History: THe Memoirs of Alice-Guy Blaché by Amelie Hastie -Nazimova's Veils: Salome at the Intersection of Film Histories by Patricia White -Of Cabbages and Authors by Jane M. Gaines -Reevaluating Footnotes: Women Directors of the Silent Era PART 2 Ways of Looking -The Gender of Empire: American Modernity, Masculinity, and Edison's War Actualities by Kristen Whissel -Making Ends Meet: "Welfare Films" and the Politics of Consumption during the Progressive Era by Constance Balides -Irma Vep, Vamp in the City: Mapping the Criminal Feminine in Early French Serials by Kristine J. Butler -The Flapper Film: Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics by Lori Landay PART 3 Cultural Interventions -The Queer Career of Jim Crow: Racial and Sexual Transformation in A Florida Enchantment by Siobhan B. Somerville -Taking the Precautions, or Regulating Early Birth-Control Films by Shirley Stamp -The New Woman and Consumer Culture: Cecil B. DeMille's Sex Comedies by Sumiko Higashi -"So Real as to Seem Like Life Itself": The Photoplay Fiction of Adela Rogers St. Johns by Anne Morey PART IV Performing Bodies -Oh, "Doll Divine": Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze by Gaytlin Studlar -Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology by Diane Negra -Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body by Jennifer M. BEan -Femininity in Flight: Androgyny and Gynadry in Early Silent Italian Cinema by Angela Dalle Vacche -Greta Garbo and Silent Cinema: The Actress as Art Deco Icon by Lucy Fisher PART V The Problem with Periodization -An Amorous History of the Silver Screen : The Actress as Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture by Zhang Zhen -Technology's Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity by Mary Ann Doane -Parallax Historiography: The Flâneuse as Cyberfeminist by Catherine Russell