THE HOUR OF THE CUCKOO (Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams)
This article talks about the woman’s film — first, historically; then, in relation to British cinema. At first women’s films are compared with weepies and melodramas. Bell and Williams say that women’s films focus on a female character, forward women’s concerns, and often replace intense action with the intense drama of a woman making a choice. Later, the article poses the question: is there a place for women’s films in British cinema? They ask this question because British culture is stereotypically uptight and unwilling to show emotion; stiff upper lip and all that jazz. However, they suggest that not only is there a place for women’s films in British cinema, but that British cinema has a long tradition of women’s films. They support this by discussing heritage films. They also identify common trends of British women’s films as connecting women and landscape and films with ensemble casts. As someone who often dismisses chick-flicks or melodramas as boring fluff, I was shocked to read that some of these British women’s films rank higher in popularity than Harry Potter and James Bond (7). The article stresses that women’s films are not only that; women’s films exist within multiple co-existing genres.
CHANGING MEDIA HISTORY THROUGH WOMEN’S HISTORY (Susan Henry)
At first the article made me quite angry. I wondered how such statements could be made by a woman. The beginning of the article made it sound like — yes, there has been much research on women in mass media and it is solely due to the fact that men have supported and encouraged it. Luckily, that infuriating tone changes on page 40, when she starts talking about new approaches to women’s history in media studies. The problem, Henry suggests, is that women’s media history has been done within the same framework as male media history. This lens rewards autonomy. However, in the following sections, she emphasizes the community and collaboration that is important not only in women’s communities and relationships but in journalistic enterprise itself. She lists five methods that could be explored to expand the knowledge of women’s media history: women’s culture (43), women as community builders (45), women’s formal and informal connections (46), women’s work (48), and women media audiences (49). In her conclusion, she says that perhaps these pathways won’t lead to significant paradigm shifting breakthroughs, however it will offer more complete knowledge, and that is important when thinking about history.
INTRODUCTION TO A FEMINIST READER IN EARLY CINEMA (Jennifer M. Bean)
This article discusses feminist methodologies and lenses for the analysis of early cinema. However, what I find most interesting about the article is the debate of early cinema. First, Bean suggests that the 1917 cut-off line for early/classical cinema as establishes by Bordwell, Thompson, and Staiger in The Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985) as arbitrary. Then, she introduces the chapter written by Zhang Zhen which describes early cinema in different terms: “‘the term ‘early cinema’ (zaoqi dianying) serves loosely as a common reference to the cinema before 1949, when the Communists drove the Nationalists to the island of Taiwan and founded the People’s Republic of China on the mainland.’ Zhang joins recent Chinese scholars in making ‘finer periodizations within that long ‘early’ period,’ and does so by placing the Shanghai industry between the 1910s and 1930s in conversation with issues of gender and modernity that Western scholars have brought to bear on early Euro-American products” (11). Although I understand that dominant film criticism/theory/history is very Westernized (read: Americanized), I rather naively accepted Early Cinema/Classical Cinema separations to be universal. This alternate (international) viewpoint was a much needed wake up call for my view of film history. Bean’s introduction suggests five methodologies for analyzing pre-sound cinema: “authorship, spectatorship, historical topicality, stardom, and periodicity” (14).
COMIC BOOK MASCULINITY AND THE NEW BLACK SUPERHERO (Jeffrey A. Brown)
Brown’s article is about representation of masculinity, specifically black masculinity in comic books. The article does a good job of problemizing binaries: black/white, masculine/feminine, body/intelligence, etc. He criticizes the common image of masculinity in comic books: white and hypermasculine. He points out that the dominant narrative of superhero comics is to give the hero a duality: he is wimp and hero in the same person. When he is in his “regular life” like Clark Kent, he is a wimp. However, Superman is hyper masculine with unrealistic physical proportions. He also discusses how this taps into stereotypes of black men being physical and aggressive. Thus, black superheroes could convey too much masculinity. The comics he highlights in the article, published by Milestone Comics, offer superheroes within realistic measurements as well as intellectual capacity. The article very much shows why representations beyond the dominant culture (white men) are important.
THE HOUSES OF HISTORY (various readings)
The theme of this packet of readings is best summed up in a statement made on page 253: “Knowledge of history is knowledge that thing have changed and do change.” This plays out in this first chapter (chapter 1o) by explaining that over time it was understood that considering gender alone was not enough. Although not calling it by name, the chapter calls for considerations of intersectionality, in that suggesting gender, race, and class be considered in addition to other characteristics such as religion, disability, and sexual orientation (256). Change is evoked in the following chapter about colonialism, when post-colonial studies are discussed — talking about subalterns (here, colonized countries) telling their own stories instead of allowing their histories to be told by the colonizers. However, change is most strongly emphasized in chapter 12, talking about post-structuralism, post-modernism, and deconstruction. In this case, histories change as new information and new interpretations are collected. This chapter offers a great analogy that helped me more fully understand the idea behind structuralism and post-structuralism. In the chapter, they are described in terms of making a house: “Each historian, while not able alone to see the full picture, both due to lack of evidence and an inevitably subjective interpretation, contributes her brick. Eventually the house will be finished, and the person lucky enough to add the paint to the front door knob can stand back and see the completed whole” (298) [an analogy for structuralism]. Then says, “[a] poststructuralist might argue that the house is still only visible from one side; for all the observer can tell, the far wall may be unfinished; as the observer walks to the back door, the front porch may collapse” (298). I found this house analogy to be very helpful.