Camera Obscura articles from May 2000

Camera Obscura archives from May 2000

Cinematic Exile: Performing the Foreign Body on Screen in Roman Polanski's The Tenant.
May 1, 2000... The flesh is intrinsic to the cinematic apparatus, at once its subject, its substance, and its limits. --Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body These women have the most beautiful music; the glitter of spotlights is theirs. Adoration and...

Quality versus Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television.
May 1, 2000... In a phrase as ubiquitous as it is facile, bumper stickers across America implore us to "kill our televisions." Though this statement would seem to issue from an alternative or progressive political consciousness, it is in fact linked to a...

"The Ineffaceable Curse of Cain": Racial Marking and Embodiment in Pinky.
May 1, 2000... Look at my fingers, are not the nails of a bluish tinge... that is the ineffaceable curse of Cain... Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana The 1949 film Pinky presents a central mulatto character as a method for focusing...

Missing Persons and Bodies of Evidence.
May 1, 2000... Common lore in film history has it that the first film star, Florence Lawrence, emerged, ironically enough, precisely at the same moment she was nowhere to be found.(1) The apocryphal tale that Carl Laemmle orchestrated Lawrence's disappearance...

Bahram Bayzai's Maybe ... Some Other Time: The un-Present-able Iran.
May 1, 2000... In a paper given in Paris and published in Iran-nameh's special issue on film, filmmaker Bahram Bayzai argues that the hundred-year success of cinema in Iran is proof that "the image" is now "the language of the people." In Iran, he writes,...

Books Received.
May 1, 2000... Allen, Richard, and Ishii Gonzales, eds. Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Bergstrom, Janet, ed. Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press,...