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]...

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....

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...

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. ...