Camera Obscura articles from December 2001

Camera Obscura archives from December 2001

A taste for shrinking: movie miniatures and the unreal city.
December 1, 2001... Discrepancy of size is a form of distortion, and all forms of distortion shock us into attention. --Steven Millhauser, "The Fascination of the Miniature" Now she realized that this was the world of powerful, underworld men who spent...

Dolls in fragments: daisies as feminist allegory.
December 1, 2001... As director Vera Chytilova put it, "Each of my films has met a certain resistance on the part of authority." (1) Daisies [Sedmikrasky] (Czechoslovakia, 1966) was no exception. Denounced by state deputies in Czechoslovakia for "hav[ing] nothing...

Kitchen technologies: promises and alibis, 1944-1966.
December 1, 2001... Motorama and the Romance of Technology Everyone says the future is strange But I have a feeling some things won't change! --Woman, Design for Dreaming One of the classic advertising extravaganzas of the 1950s, General Motors'...

A Pygmalion tale retold: remaking La Femme Nikita.
December 1, 2001... I was falsely accused of a hideous crime and sentenced to life in prison. One night I was taken from my cell to a place called Section One, the most covert antiterrorist group on the planet. Their ends are just but their means are ruthless. If...

Jealous schoolgirls, single white females, and other bad examples: rethinking Gender and envy.
December 1, 2001... As in matters of the heart in general females are more susceptible to the passion than men. --G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence (1904) Jealousy is, on several counts, more inexcusable in a woman than in a man. --E. B. Duffy, What Every...

Books received.
December 1, 2001... Dale, Alan. Comedy Is a Man in Troubler Slapstick in American Movies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. New York: Routledge, 2000. ...