New Issue of Screening the Past

Image from The Party (Blake Edwards, 1968). Read Charles Barr's article on this film, reprinted in issue 30 of Screening the Past

Film Studies For Free rushes you news, via Adrian Martin, that not only has Screening the Past, that wonderful, A* rated, online journal of screen history, theory and criticism, posted its latest issue, but it has changed URL, and is in the process of upgrading its website.

All the new contents are listed below. FSFF hasn't read everything yet, but is enjoying STP's tributes to Blake Edwards, as well as the Open Access reprint of Chris Berry's wonderful essay China’s New “Women’s Cinema”.

First Release

• “The China Film”: Madame Chiang Kai-shek in Hollywood
• Tokens of Exchange, or The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Lover: Marginal Asian Characters in 1920s Australian Cinema
• Working Within the System: An Interview with Gerry O’Hara
• Two Channels, Two Truths: Reporting the Iraq War in Control Room
• ‘Give It a Go You Apes’: Relations Between the Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, and the Early Australian Film Industry (1954–1970)

Tribute to Blake Edwards

• Introduction to Reprints of Two Essays on Blake Edwards
• Detecting, Defecting and Whistling in the Dark: The Films of Blake Edwards
• “Crazy World Full of Crazy Contradictions”, Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria
• On Blake Edwards
• The Bitter Essence of Blake Edwards
• Sophisticated Naturalism
• Ridicule and Panic: On Blake Edwards
• Blake Edwards, Switch, and the Price of a New Man
• Topping the Topper: Blake Edwards
• Strange Bodies: On The Great Race
• The Party
• You Can’t Keep A Good Auteur Down / Cruel To Be Kind
• The Party

Classics and Re-runs

• China’s New “Women’s Cinema”

Reviews

• Ford At Fox Part 3b
• Films by Gordon Ball (dvd review)
• Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh
• Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince, Mark A. Vieira
• Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier, Homay King
• Film Violence: History, Ideology, Genre, James Kendrick
• The Last Silent Picture Show: Silent Films on American Screens in the 1930s, William M. Drew
• New Korean Cinema: Breaking the Waves, Darcy Paquet
• Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, Tom Kemper
• British Culture and Society in the 1970s: The Lost Decade, Laurel Forster and Sue Harper (eds)
• Casablanca: Movies and Memory, Marc Augé (Translated and with an Afteword by Tom Conley)
• English Filming, English Writing, Jefferson Hunter
• Calling All Cars: Radio Dragnets and the Technology of Policing, Kathleen Battles
• The Francis Ford Coppola Encyclopedia, James M. Welsh, Gene D. Phillips, and Rodney F. Hill (eds)
• Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory – Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, (Edited by Erica Carter, Translated by Rodney Livingstone)
• Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s, Patrice Petro (ed.)
• Wake in Fright, Tina Kaufman
• Neo-Noir, Mark Bould, Kathrina Glitre, and Greg Tuck (eds.).
• Second Takes: Critical Approaches to the Film Sequel, Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis (eds.)
• On Michael Haneke, Brian Price and John David Rhodes (editors)

"The Greatest Disguise": On Cross-Dressing in Films, In Memory of Blake Edwards

James Garner and Julie Andrews in Victor Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982). Read Véronique Fernández's article on this film: '"People Believe What They See": Clothing and Genders in Victor/Victoria', Lectora, 7, 2001

Police Inspector: You idiot! That's a man! 
Labisse: It can't be! 
Police Inspector: The person in that room was naked from the waist down, and if that was a woman, then she is wearing the greatest disguise I have ever seen! 

Victor Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982)

It's the day after the news emerged of the death of American screenwriter and director Blake Edwards at the grand age of 88, surrounded by his loved ones in a California hospital. David Hudson's customary gathering of links to tributes is a very good place to begin to find out, if you don't already know, about the warm esteem in which Edwards was held by critics and other filmmakers.

 

Today, Film Studies For Free presents its own little "cross-dressing-in-international-film"-links homage to its favourite Blake Edwards film, the cross-dressing comedy Victor Victoria. It may not be the queerest of queer films, certainly; it may not even be the queerest of Blake Edwards' queerish films... But it is one of the funniest, with plenty of treats for fans of Julie Andrews and James Garner. It thus stands as a fine testimony to Blake Edwards' gently subversive powers as a screenwriter and a director.

FSFF's author first saw this film, memorably, on its French repertory release in 1984, as a year-abroad student. Alone in a packed cinema, she had the doubly funny but also unsettling experience of laughing at the numerous verbal gags as they were delivered in English, and then waiting for the French audience to laugh as the subtitles unerringly delivered a belated punch, a curious case of comic différance.

• James Allan, 'Sissies, Leeches and Sidekicks: Fags and Hags in the ‘60s and the ‘90', Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Sheraton New York, New York City, NY, 2009-05-25
• Kay Armatage, 'Fetish and Fashion in Canadian Film', TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2006
• Concepción Bados Ciria, Political and cultural cross-dressing, and the negotiation of Cuban-American identities, REDEN, Número 19-20, 2000
• Kathleen Barbara, 'Masquerade: The Female Body in Post-Modern Films', MP: An Online Feminist Journal, December 21, 2004
• Kathleen Barbara,The Post-Modern Body, MA Thesis, Wichita State University, May 2006
• Mark Bernstein, 'Victor/Victoria: It's "Mary Poppins in drag"', from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983
• David Boxwell, 'Wheeler and Woolsey Queered', Bright Lights Film Journal, 42, 2003
• Rong Cai, 'Gender Imaginations in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the Wuxia World', positions, 13:2, Fall 2005
• Terrell Carver, ‘Sex, Gender and Heteronormativity: Seeing “Some Like it Hot” as a Heterosexual Dystopia’, School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol, Working Paper No. 03-07, 2007
• Bert Cardullo, 'An Afghan Is a Woman', The Hudson Review, Summer 2005
• Gilbert Gerard Castillo, Gender, Identity and Influence: Hong Kong Martial Arts Films, MA Thesis, University of North Texas, December 2002
• Cynthia C. Degnan, 'Living on Girlboy Time: Queer Childhood Temporality and Kinship in Ma Vie en Rose', MP: A Feminist Journal Online, June, 2007
• Richard Dyer, 'Less and More than Women and Men: Lesbian and Gay Cinema in Weimar Germany', New German Critique, No. 51, Special Issue on Weimar Mass Culture (Autumn, 1990)
• Tanfer Emin-Tunc, 'Glen or Glenda: Psychiatry, Sexuality, and the Silver Screen', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 41, August 2003
• Richard Ekins, 'Cross-dressing, sex-changing and film. Fragments from an analysis of screening male femaling', Trans-Gender Archive, University of Ulster, Gendys Conference, 1994
• Heather Erin Emmens, Domestications and Disruptions: Lesibian Identities in Television Adaptations of Contemporary British Novels, PhD Thesis, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, May, 2009
• Brett Farmer, 'Interview with Stacy Wolf about her New Book, A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical', Gender OnLine Journal, Issue 28, 2002
• Véronique Fernández, '"People Believe What They See": Clothing and Genders in Victor/Victoria', Lectora, 7, 2001
• Elizabeth Fox-Kales, 'Cinematic Cross-Dressing: Sexual Disguise vs. Gender Transformations', IPSA Conference Proceedings, 2004
• Andrew Grossman, 'Better Beauty Through Technology: Chinese Transnational Feminism and the Cinema of Suffering', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 35, January 2002
• Robert Hanke, 'The "Mock-Macho" Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and its Reiteration', Western Journal of Communication, 62(1) (Winter 1998)
• Susan Hayward, 'Simone Signoret 1921-1985: the star as sign-the sign as scar', Modern Languages Publications Archive, 1995
• Mallory Jagodzinski, Of Bustles and Breeches; Cross-Dressing Romance Novel Heroines and the Performance of Gender Ideology, MA Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2010
• Nicholas R. Jones, 'Trevor Nunn's Twelfth Night: Contemporary Film and Classic British Theatre', Early Modern Literary Studies, 8.1, May 2002
• M. Alison Kibler, 'Rank Ladies, Ladies of Rank: The Elinore Sisters in Vaudeville', American Studies, 38:1, (Spring 1997)
• Kelly McWilliam, Girl Meets Girl: Lesbian Romantic Comedies and the Public Sphere,PhD Thesis,
  University of Queensland, May 2006
• Deborah Mellamphy, 'The Paradox of Transvestism in Tim Burton's Ed Wood',Wide Screen, Vol 1, No 1 (2009)
• Olga Osinovskaya, 'Cross-Dressing in Soviet CInema: The Case of Hello, I am your Aunt', MA Thesis, Central European Unversity, Budapest, 2007
• Iva Paneva, A study of female aggression as represented in Patty Jenkins' fiction film Monster, e--PhD Thesis, University of Witswatersrand, December 2008
• Sonali Pattnaik, 'Outside the Frame: The Representation of the Hijra in Bollywood Cinema', Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, Issue 22, October 2009
• Robert M. Payne, 'The Crying Game: Crossed lines', from Jump Cut, no. 39, June 1994 
• Jay Poole, 'Psycho: Queering Hitchcock's Classic', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 61, August 2008
• Candida Rifkind, 'Screening Modernity: Cinema and Sexuality in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall On Your Knees', Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, 2002
• Thibault Schilt, 'François Ozon', Senses of Cinema, Issue 31, 2004
  
• Sarah Schulman,' Yidl Mitn Fidl: Yiddish fictional cinema from Jump Cut, no. 31, March 1986
• Jérôme Segal and Monika Kaczek, 'Molly Picon and the Cinematic Archetype of a Jewish Woman', Cinemascope, Issue 14, 2010
• Rose T Sengenberger, 'Ma vie en rose', Writing Portfolio,2009 (scroll down to p. 23-41 in PDF)
• Karen Serwer, 'Mariposas en el andamio: Imagining Utopia through Repetition and Excess', Sexuality and the Public Sphere, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (date unknown)
• Jamie Stuart, The Business and Pleasure of Filmic Lesbians Performing Onstage, PhD Thesis, Bowling Green State University, August 2006
• Isabelle Stauffer, 'Heroines of Gaze. Gender and Self-Reflexivity in Current Espionage Films', Imagendering II, Genders Online Forum, Issue 13, 2006Georgette Wang and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, 'Globalization and Hybridization in Cultural Production: A Tale of Two Films', LEWI Working Paper Series, Paper Number: 36, April 2005
• K.E.Sullivan, 'Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer', from Jump Cut, no. 43, July 2000
• Chao-Jung Wu, Performing Postmoderm Taiwan: Gender, Cultural Hybridity, and the MaleCross-Dressing Show, PhD Thesis, Wesleyan University, 2007
  
• Simon Chia-rong Wu, 'Gender Pastiche: Thai Queerness in Beautiful Boxer', Cultural Studies Monthly, 78, 2008
• Niamh Thornton, 'Valentinas, Adelitas, Soldaderas: Explosive Women on Film', LASA, 2009
• Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms, 'Introduction: Why Act Like A Man?', Sex, Drag, and Male Roles (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010)
• Chun-Chi Wang, Lesbianscape of Taiwan: Media History of Taiwan's Lesbians, PhD Thesis, University of Southern California, August 2007
• Stacy Wolf, 'Preface', A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002)
• Barry Wurst II, 'Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood's Golden Age', Bright Lights Film Journal, 66, 2009

New Brights Lights Film Journal

Delphine Seyrig (as A) in L'Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, France 1961)

A quick post to begin the blogging week: Film Studies For Free is delighted to flag up that Issue 66 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online. Below are all the relevant links. There are some very good articles, written as always in BLFJ's entertaining, but still scholarly-critical, house style, including ones on Polanski, Chaplin, Delphine Seyrig, Kubrick, Tarantino, and a great interview with Jonas Mekas. Keep up with Bright Lights between issues by visiting its companion blog, Bright Lights After Dark. Those of you on Twitter might also like to follow the BLF Journal  @blfj

From the editor

• Keep watching the lights...

Articles

• Roman Polanski: What's on Trial? By Karin Luisa Badt

• Looking at Charlie: Modern Times An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin "Buck up! Never say die! We’ll get along!" By Alan Vanneman

• Past Sunset: Noir in the West "I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me." By Imogen Sara Smith

• On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong Especially when the lovers aren't, By D. J. M. Saunders

• Porno to the People: The Danish Revolution That Liberated America "Tease was out, honesty was in." By Jack Stevenson

• The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual "We keep returning to this story about pod people because we're terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era." By Jesse Stommel

• The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover: Larry Cohen's The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover How a movie exposé of "abuse of power" defends those in power and their institutions, By Jay Rothermel

• Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah "In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality — and its alternate currents — is caught with a glance." By Rob Faunce

• Can't Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can't — and Shouldn't Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century, By Suzanne del Gizzo

• Blake Edwards vs. Hollywood: Sunset and the Myth of Hollywood's Golden Age A tour of Edwards' curious 1988 film, with side trips to variations by James Ivory, John Schlesinger, and others, By Barry Wurst II

Actors

• Delphine Seyrig: The Eternal Return "Seyrig is capable of stopping an entire film with one decisive physical gesture, one smile, one glare, one sound from her smoky, murmuring voice." By Dan Callahan

• Sean Connery: A "Natural Thrust" "Connery, never a martyr to false modesty, remains as voluble and combative as ever." By Christopher Sandford

Directors

• Just Say Oui: An Interview with the Yes Men "I'm shitting bricks, thinking he's onto me." By Damon Smith

• Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas "One who knows how to, as they say, 'read' the images, can tell everything about me." By Jon Lanthier

Columns

• Bright Sights: Play Time, Gaumont Treasures, Diary for My Children, Winstanley, Marlene, Bill Douglas Trilogy An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases, By Gordon Thomas

• Letter from New York (c. 1980) "The problem is other people — crazy people." By Howard Mandelbaum

Movies

• Film Kills: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 1 "Tarantino thus concedes some of his omnipotence to the medium he so deftly manipulates." By Vlad Dima

• "Do You Find Me Sadistic?" Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds 2 "This is the World War II film confronting its Jungian shadow, acknowledging its darkest impulses and finally purging them." By Lee Weston Sabo

• Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing "His plan mirrors Johnny's, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place."" By Robert Castle

• Critical Distance: What Knowing Knows About 9/11 "Where Cloverfield provocatively blurs the line between being 'about' 9/11 and being (mere) entertainment, Knowing lands squarely in the latter camp." By Devan Goldstein

• Playing It Safe with John Dillinger: Michael Mann's Public Enemies "Dillinger had recently undergone plastic surgery to alter his face and to try to remove his fingerprints. But Public Enemies does not dare to depict that kind of desperation and that determination to survive under any circumstances." By Joan McGettigan

• "They Come in Peace": Andy Fickman's Race to Witch Mountain "Only saviors can save polluted planets, yellow cab drivers are losers . . .", By Jay Rothermel

• Far from Elementary: Debra Chasnoff's Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up"I told him, 'I'm not gay. My neck was cold.'"By Gary Morris

Festivals

• After the Surge: The 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival "An alternative agenda for the festival might be: what can we make of modernism?", By Lesley Chow

• Bucking the Tide: The 2009 New York Film Festival This year's strong, idiosyncratic line-up reminds us that moviegoing can still be more than "a museum experience", By Megan Ratner

• Lucky 13: The 2009 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Getting out of the ghetto, By Gary Morris

• From Air Dolls to the Anchorage: The 2009 Vancouver International Film Festival "VIFF remains the unspoiled oasis for cinephiles looking to get away from it all." By Ben Cho

Books

• In My Father's Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles, by Chris Welles Feder, By Joseph McBride

• Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, edited by Robert Politot, By Jon Lanthier

• America’s Film Vault: A Reference Guide to the Motion Pictures Held by the U.S. National Archives, by Phillip W. Stewart, By Matthew Kennedy

• Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor, by Dan North, By Deborah Allison