Camera Obscura articles from May 2002

Camera Obscura archives from May 2002

Introduction: female stardom and early film history.
May 1, 2002... Designed to explore specific cases of early female stars and the social, industrial, and ideological economies that underwrite the production of the star system, this issue of Camera Obscura takes a fresh look at early film history and the...

Technologies of early stardom and the extraordinary body.
May 1, 2002... If everyone can agree that "why and how stars came into prominence and what purposes they served for their audiences" is a question of critical import, then exactly which stars we recover and from when remains at issue. (1) It seems logical to...

Screening Musidora: inscribing indeterminacy in film history.
May 1, 2002... The opening title cards of La terre des taureaux (France, 1924), a film directed by the French silent film actress Musidora, pose a question directly to the audience: "Readers, Friends, and Spectators, why isn't life as good as a novel?" (1)...

Greta Garbo and silent cinema: the actress as Art Deco icon.
May 1, 2002... The stuff [shown at the 1925 Paris International Exhibition of Decorative and Modern Arts]... was not the normal output of commerce. It was extreme in its tendencies and not adaptable to the ordinary lives of our people. Actresses may...

History in miniature: Colleen Moore's Dollhouse and historical recollection.
May 1, 2002... For a collector--and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be--ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have with objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. --Walter Benjamin,...

Immigrant stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the problem of typology.
May 1, 2002... Arriving in America from Berlin in 1922, with a $3,000-per-week Paramount contract, and long famed for her coal-black hair, camellia-white complexion, and fiery temperament, she was Hollywood's first imported international star. -- "Pola...

Oh, "doll divine": Mary Pickford, masquerade, and the pedophilic gaze.
May 1, 2002... Mary Pickford, doll divine, Year by year, and every day At the moving picture play, You have been my valentine. -- Vachel Lindsay (1913), opening of "To Mary Pickford Moving Picture Actress (On Hearing She Was Leaving...

An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: the actress as vernacular embodiment in early Chinese film culture.
May 1, 2002... What does it mean to talk about "early cinema" in a Chinese context? How "early"--or how "late"--was early Chinese cinema? Where can we locate it in a broad cultural landscape of modernity, particularly with regard to women's place in it? In...

Books received.
May 1, 2002... Ashby, Justine, and Andrew Higson, eds. British Cinema: Past and Present. NewYork: Routledge, 2000. Bernardi,Joanne. Writing in Light: The Silent Scenario and the Japanese Pure Film Movement. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University, 2001. ...