51.1

CONTENTS

Drake Stutesman 
Editorial

Margaret Schwartz 
Proper Corruption: Index and Metaphor in Photographs of the Embalmed Corpse of Eva Perón

Ara Osterweil 
Queer Coupling, or the Stain of the Bearded Woman

Drake Stutesman 
Connectivity: An Interview with Susan Meiselas

Christopher Robé 
The Good Fight: The Spanish Civil War and U.S. Left Film Criticism

Gerard Dapena 
Goyescas: Picturing Defiance and Consent in Early Francoist Cinema

Marilia Martins 
The Garbage Man: An Interview with Eduardo Coutinho

Cecilia Sayad 
Flesh for the Author: Filmic Presence in the Documentaries of Eduardo Coutinho

J. Ronald Green
Sophistication under Construction: Oscar Micheaux’s Infamous Sound Films

John Baxter 
Berlin Year Zero: The Making of The Blue Angel

EDITORIAL

The body appears as a major theme in this issue, as something that is delicate, targeted, enduring, hated, loved, present, iconic, vulnerable, and peculiarly susceptible to public and private desire. The body in war, the body in metaphor, the body in love, the body as the lived life: how these realities are brought forth in art and in politics and what happens in their mixture are questions asked throughout this issue.

Margaret Schwartz, in her essay “Proper Corruption,” examines, with meticulous creativity, the manner in which the photographs of the corpse of Eva Perón (with its odd history of burial, theft, and reburial) have become politically iconic, yet for opposing groups. In searching that contradiction, Schwartz poses a new way of contemplating the concept of ‘iconic,’ not as a status but rather as a way of perceiving. In “Queer Coupling,” Ara Osterweil, deftly and with immense sympathy for all involved, uncovers the complex life of filmmaker Barbara Rubin, especially her explicit films, her unlikely drive into Hasidism, and her unlikely sexual relationships with Allen Ginsberg and others. She places Rubin’s otherwise marginalized artistry centrally within New York’s avant-garde movement. By studying her life in that scene, Osterweil shows that the freedoms fought for in the 1960s were muddied by the era’s blend of old European heritages and young American male confusion, which neglected many difficulties that women faced and from which many women suffered a hard price.

The Brazilian Globe journalist Marilia Martins interviewed Eduardo Coutinho during the 2009 retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. One of the geniuses of filmmaking, Coutinho has created what can only be described as his own category of fiction and nonfiction cinema in his fluid, earth-bound, yet uniquely contrived documentaries. Cecilia Sayad follows with a look at Coutinho’s work and his select way of framing the face, drawing the audience into his films with both artifice and blunt honesty.

Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas talks in an interview about the interlinks between her films and her photographs and her sense of how she attempts to capture the vulnerable body, especially in the midst of untranslatable brutality—in, among other subjects, war, domestic violence, sex work, cultural genocide, or sado-masochism—and how she deals with the dichotomies of a still camera shot that stops a moving world, a moving history.

Finally, four authors study how a moving, ineluctable history is framed within certain key films. Christopher Robé examines how New Left Criticism swept into Hollywood in the 1930s through new approaches to documentaries broached by Joris Ivens’s supportive Spanish Civil War films. Gerard Dapena digs deeply into Spanish director Benito Perojo’s seemingly escapist period musical Goyescas (ES, 1942), a Francoist film, with an homage to Goya, which, Dapena argues, exposes many of the class shifts in Franco’s uncertain, fascist world. J. Ronald Green analyzes the oddities of Oscar Micheaux’s 1930s sound films, rereading what seem to be harsh lighting and poorly imposed camera setups as inventive, almost surreal, groundbreaking methods of narrative. These techniques can also be interpreted as a demonstrative cinematic language revealing the African American worldview. And with elegant, amusing, and telling detail, John Baxter jaunts through the ins and outs of the production history of Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (DE, 1930), showing how the film’s moment summarizes the final gasps of Weimar Berlin.

In the last editorial, for the double issue commemorating Framework’s fiftieth anniversary, I posited the question: What can a journal do? Issue 51.1 marks a move toward a more sustained focus on the topics of prejudice, feminism, and politics. Focus on their intricacies and a creation of an open forum for different perspectives adds, one hopes, to the giant social dialogue. The website carries more details.

—Drake Stutesman