51.2
CONTENTS
Drake Stutesman
Editorial
Linda C. Ehrlich and Celia Martinez Garcia
Erice’s Songs: Nature as Music/Music as Nature
Miguel Lomillos
Artistic Testament or Final Exorcism? Passion and Tragedy in Bergman’s Saraband
Constantine Verevis
Screen Theory Goes to Australia
DOSSIER
Transnationalizing Women's Film History
Christine Gledhill
Introduction
Jane M. Gaines
World Women: Still Circulating Silent Era Film Prints
Bryony Dixon
Women’s Film History Project: Issues of Transnationalism
Monica Dall’Asta
On Frieda Klug, Pearl White, and Other Traveling Women Film Pioneers
Emma Sandon
Women, Empire, and British Cinema History
Mark Garrett Cooper
Tackling Universal Women as a Research Problem: What Historiographic Sources Do and Don’t Tell Us about “Gender” in the Silent Motion Picture Studio
Elaine Burrows
A Historical Overview of NFTVA/BFI Collection Development Policies with Regard to Gender and Nation Questions
Rosanna Maule
Women Filmmakers and Postfeminism in the Age of Multimedia Reproduction: A Virtual Archive for Women’s Cinema
Women’s Film History: Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art, March 2010
Shelley Stamp
“Exit Flapper, Enter Woman,” Or Lois Weber in Jazz Age Hollywood
Anne Morey
A New Eroticism or Merely a New Woman? Cecil B. DeMille’s Adaptation of Alice Duer Miller’s Manslaughter
Tami Williams
Toward the Development of a Modern “Impressionist” Cinema: Germaine Dulac’s La Belle Dame sans merci (1921) and the Deconstruction of the Femme Fatale Archetype
EDITORIAL
This issue focuses on how small details can expose the wider picture. In “Erice’s Songs: Nature as Music/Music as Nature,” Linda C. Ehrlich and Celia Martínez García poetically reveal how the elegiac Spanish director Víctor Erice weaves songs into his films to form a hidden configuration. Through a generous feel for the temperament of the films and how Erice places them within Spain’s difficult politics, Ehrlich and García show the songs’ deep cultural meaning that is so often lost on the outsider. Miguel Lomillos, in “Artistic Testament or Final Exorcism? Passion and Tragedy in Bergman’s Saraband,” examines the last great film of the brilliant Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, Saraband (SE/IT/DE/FI/DK/AT, 2003). Lomillos focuses on how Bergman uses the device of the vivacious, sexualized, sixteenth-century musical form the Sarabande, which during the Baroque era developed into a modified but complex suite movement. The Sarabande’s contrapuntal structure is more than a metaphor, Lomillos argues: it is a method to reveal Bergman’s disintegrating characters.
Details are explored in the dossier “Transnationalizing Women’s Film History,” on transnationalism, feminism, and women in film history—specifically those details found from the willingness to look at what an odd dovetailing yields (such as travel, subjectivity, archiving, colonialism, or distribution, to name a few). These seven essays are taken from a two-day workshop with more than thirty participants at Columbia University and the Museum of Modern Art in March 2010. The question of transnationality’s relevance for research into women in the industry was the primary focus, but the workshop was also a starting place for discussing the participants’ experience of how to research women in the industry. Issues of inventive study, new networking, viral libraries, funding, film preservation, and film access (such as copyright, archival legitimacy, theatrical screenings, DVD creation, and internet streaming) were addressed among archivists, librarians, curators, programmers, scholars, preservationists, and researchers from Europe, Asia, and the United States (see dossier for full list), in order to cross-fertilize current work on the subject.
Group effort was the secondary theme of the conference, and its organizer, Christine Gledhill, sets the case for her ambitious project designed (under the aegis of Women’s Film History International [WFHI]) to connect many such “women in film” enterprises and to open the dialogue. As such, the formality, informality, academic argument, and conversational tone of the dossier’s short essays—by Jane M. Gaines, Bryony Dixon, Monica Dall’Asta, Emma Sandon, Mark Garrett Cooper, Elaine Burrows, and Rosanna Maule—impart a flavor of a work in progress that definitely reflects the spirit of the conference.
These colloquies are important not only for the discussion but so that women and men, from different generations, can agree that these researches are vital. Generations must persuade each other that what they bring to the table matters—be it first-hand knowledge, different kinds of experience, opinions, loves, hates, discoveries, ideas, or contradictions. Through this dialogue, new strategies about databases, websites, research methods, and, as is obvious in this dossier, new points of view are mingled with forgotten names or seemingly trivial information. These tiny, tirelessly searched for, open-mindedly honored details become huge mountains of material, which, as Jane M. Gaines vigorously promotes, can (and does) change the canon at any moment.
Another cooperative dialogue should be underscored—found in the preservation of film itself. Library of Congress curator and preservationist Kim Tomadjoglou, whose talk is not included here (as it was extemporized from a PowerPoint presentation), has spoken convincingly on film preservation’s unique alliances. This process, she states, involves not only a lab technician, whose expertise is grounded in tiny detail (that a dot on celluloid can indicate the climate and season in which an old print was struck), but also a film scholar, whose knowledge is crucial to place these tiny details into context (determining the year, the studio, and related issues), and an expert who knows both these subjects and takes a curatorial role (are there other prints? is there a negative? do other international archives have variant elements? and on and on). These talks often take place in the lab while laboriously examining the film, and it is these collaborators who will create the film’s final output.
Three essays focus on myths about women in film (onscreen or off) and how, by breaking down the generally accepted story into specific details, an entirely new version, closer to reality, emerges. History has distorted the careers of powerful women of the silent period, such as the inventive director Lois Weber; in “‘Exit Flapper, Enter Woman,’ or Lois Weber in Jazz Age Hollywood,” Shelley Stamp, who is writing a comprehensive Weber biography (long overdue, since Anthony Slide’s very important but short book on Weber is nearly fifteen years old), looks at the director’s breakdown in the 1930s. This breakdown, which followed a divorce, has always been viewed as hastening the end of her career. After in-depth research, never before published, Stamp argues that the case was quite the opposite: Weber continued to work and to agitate against the growing domination of corporate control. Anne Morey, in “A New Eroticism or Merely a New Woman? Cecil B. DeMille’s Adaptation of Alice Duer Miller’s Manslaughter,” looks at how the studio distorted the work of the engaging popular novelist and screenwriter Alice Duer Miller by ensuring that the heroine’s sexual confidence in Miller’s novel shift to alienation in the screenplay. But, Morey argues, the film also can be read as showing that this split reveals some of the complex, contradictory subtleties in the New Woman’s sexual identity. In “Toward the Development of a Modern ‘Impressionist’ Cinema: Germaine Dulac’s La Belle Dame sans merci (1921) and the Deconstruction of the Femme Fatale Archetype,” Tami Williams explores how Germaine Dulac used distortion radically when she distorted the classic character of the femme fatale in her film La Belle Dame sans merci (FR, 1921), a film that delicately straddled the real and the symbolic in post–World War I France.
Finally, Constantine Verevis renders a provocative and detailed history of film theory as it evolved, creatively, intellectually, predictably, and unpredictably, in Australian film studies.
—Drake Stutesman
