Feminist Reader in Early Cinema

Jennifer M. Bean is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Washington.Diane Negra is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia.

• Acknowledgments viiIntroduction: Toward a Feminist Historiography of Early Cinema / Jennifer M. Bean 1I. Reflecting Film Authorship Circuits of Memory and History: The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blache / Amelie Hastie 29Nazimova's Veils: Salome at the Intersection of Film Histories / Patricia White 60Of Cabbages and Authors / Jane M. Gaines 88Reevaluating Footnotes: Women Directors of the Silent Era / Radha Vatsal 119II. Ways of Looking The Gender of Empire: American Modernity, Masculinity, and Edison's War Actualities / Kristen Whissel 141Making Ends Meet: "Welfare Films" and the Politics of Consumption during the Progressive Era / Constance Balides 166Irma Vep, Vamp in the City: Mapping the Criminal Feminine in Early French Serials / Kristine J. Butler 195The Flapper Film: Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age Kinaesthetics / Lori Landay 221III. Cultural Inversions The Queer Career of Jim Crow: Racial and Sexual Transformation in A Florida Enchantment / Siobhan B. Somerville 251Taking Precautions, or Regulating Early Birth-Control Films / Shelley Stamp 270The New Woman and Consumer Culture: Cecil B. DeMille's Sex Comedies / Sumiko Higashi 298"So Real as to Seem Like Life Itself": The Photoplay Fiction of Adela Rogers St. Johns / Anne Morey 333IV. Performing Bodies Oh, "Doll Divine": Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophilic Gaze / Gaylyn Studlar 349Immigrant Stardom in Imperial America: Pola Negri and the Problem of Typology / Diane Negra 374Technologies of early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body / Jennifer M. Bean 404Femininity in Flight: Androgyny and Gynandry in Early Silent Italian Cinema / Angela Dalle Vacche 444Greta Garbo and Silent Cinema: The Actress as Art Deco Icon / Lucy Fischer 476V. The Problem with Periodization An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: The Actress as Vernacular Embodiment in Early Chinese Film Culture / Zhang Zhen 501Technology's Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity / Mary Ann Doane 530Parallax Historiography: The Flaneuse as Cyberfeminist / Catherine Russell 552Contributors 571Index 575

”Despite the enormous amount of work that has been done in the last two decades on women and early cinema, this anthology is the first of its kind. It is outstanding.”-Judith Mayne, author of Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture ”This collection is a persuasive reminder that the hottest current topics in film theory-cultural intersections, questions of authorship, fantasy and technology, representation and the body-demand and are illuminated by feminist inquiry.”- Linda Mizejewski, author of Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema