Tuesday 10 July 2012

Update to Classical Hollywood Cinema directors list...

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I've added a couple of names to my ongoing list of directors whose films go unmentioned in Bordwell/Staiger/Thompson's The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985): Robert Rossen, Jacques Tourneur, and Robert Wise. See here.
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Wednesday 29 February 2012

What does feminism look like?

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This day, marking (in the UK) that absurd leap-year-female-proposal tradition, seems as good an excuse as any to share an excellent line I came across during my recent recapping on feminist history. Made into a cheery, meme-able image.



(The image, by the way, shows a clash between suffragettes and British police in Parliament Square, November 1910; it can be read about here.)

Incidentally, while preparing the lecture on romantic comedy that occasioned my re-trawling through past articles and books, I was reminded again of quite the extent of the anti-feminist backlash in the U.S. that Faludi wrote so well about in the early '90s, and again for the post-9/11 climate. Looking absent-mindedly, as I often do, for easy anecdotal evidence with which to catch students' imaginations, I ventured onto Youtube and actually began seeing the site's like/dislike bar as some kind of depressing barometer of just where we're currently at on this subject.

Entirely unscientific as the evidence is, it's difficult not to feel disheartened when an almost embarrassingly friendly and non-confrontational video promoting feminism like this one gets this rating:



...while one that carries this title gets rewarded with a bar that looks like this:


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Monday 2 January 2012

Directors whose films go unmentioned in 'The Classical Hollywood Cinema' (1985)...

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That is: directors who (while they may be named in passing) do not have their films mentioned or taken into account in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristen Thompson's long-canonical survey The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985). I've gathered the information through re-reading the book, as well as by performing word searches for all the titles in the directors' bodies of work, via Google Books.

To be periodically updated...

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Dorothy Arzner
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E.g.: Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

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Leo McCarey


E.g.: The Awful Truth (1937)

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Oscar Micheaux
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E.g.: Body and Soul (1925)

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Max Ophüls
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E.g.: Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

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Nicholas Ray
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E.g.: Johnny Guitar (1954)

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Robert Rossen
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E.g.: All the King's Men (1949)

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Frank Tashlin
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E.g.: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957)

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Jacques Tourneur
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E.g.: Out of the Past (1947)

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Robert Wise
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E.g.: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
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