Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.1.102
Jenny L. Blaylock
When Ghana Television began in 1965, its first director, Shirley Graham Du Bois, explicitly devised it as an anticolonial and pan-African indigenous television system. Likely the first Black woman to head a national station, Graham Du Bois’ prominence, along with Genoveva Marais as head of programing, suggests that in its nascency Ghana Television was an exceptional place for women. Yet each woman’s relationship with Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, shadowed their professional lives and legacies. Rumors situated them along female archetypes with a powerful man firmly at the center: Graham Du Bois as Nkrumah’s mother and Marais as his mistress. In this article, I argue that while Graham Du Bois and Marais’ media practice rarely addressed gender inequality specifically, their work as female broadcast leaders set a precedent for decolonial feminist futures even as the coloniality of gender extended into Ghana broadcasting during the independence period.
加纳电视台于1965年开播时，其首任导演雪莉·格雷厄姆·杜波依斯明确将其设计为一个反殖民和泛非土著电视系统。Graham Du Bois很可能是第一位领导国家电视台的黑人女性，他的突出地位，加上Genoveva Marais担任节目负责人，表明加纳电视台在其淫秽的背景下是一个女性的特殊场所。然而，每一位女性与加纳首任总统夸梅·恩克鲁玛的关系都笼罩着她们的职业生涯和遗产。谣言将他们定位为女性原型，一个强大的男人牢牢地站在中心：Graham Du Bois饰演恩克鲁玛的母亲，Marais饰演他的情妇。在这篇文章中，我认为，虽然Graham Du Bois和Marais的媒体实践很少专门解决性别不平等问题，但她们作为女性广播领导者的工作为非殖民化女权主义的未来开创了先例，即使在独立期间，性别的殖民性延伸到加纳广播中。
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For decades, scholarly and popular literature have reproduced multiple stories about an alleged protest that the NAACP organized against the circulation and preservation of St. Louis Blues (1929), a Black-cast talkie that contains the only film image of Bessie Smith. This paper examines how these stories, as pervasive as they are unfounded, are versions of the same myth—one that I formulate as the NAACP protest myth and that, I speculatively argue, originates in the post-World War II years. From censorship boards’ repression of St. Louis Blues in Black movie theaters to Hollywood’s use of W.C. Handy’s 1914 song “St. Louis Blues,” the late 1940s produced a discursive field that promoted the emergence and persuasiveness of the NAACP protest myth. The location of this myth within its original historical context slowly uncovers new stances from which the social life of Smith’s film image can be retraced and examined.
{"title":"The Film Image of Bessie Smith","authors":"Cinta Pelejà","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.88","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.88","url":null,"abstract":"For decades, scholarly and popular literature have reproduced multiple stories about an alleged protest that the NAACP organized against the circulation and preservation of St. Louis Blues (1929), a Black-cast talkie that contains the only film image of Bessie Smith. This paper examines how these stories, as pervasive as they are unfounded, are versions of the same myth—one that I formulate as the NAACP protest myth and that, I speculatively argue, originates in the post-World War II years. From censorship boards’ repression of St. Louis Blues in Black movie theaters to Hollywood’s use of W.C. Handy’s 1914 song “St. Louis Blues,” the late 1940s produced a discursive field that promoted the emergence and persuasiveness of the NAACP protest myth. The location of this myth within its original historical context slowly uncovers new stances from which the social life of Smith’s film image can be retraced and examined.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.4.117
S. Khan
As a subset of food media meant to tantalize palates, food documentaries typically sensationalize the impoverished state of the entire food supply. This essay focuses on the food documentaries Hybrid (2000), King Corn (2007), Sunú (2015), and OMG OMG (2013), which variously treat “industrial food” as not an object of scorn but a useful category of resistance and engagement. When read through queer ecocritical and feminist materialist lenses, such films create an opening for ways of accounting for and living with the monstrosities of nature that typically arrest the gaze of sensationalism. These food films consider the family and the household not merely as units of passive consumption but as sites of considered provisioning that struggle to account for issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and ecological awareness in a world of ongoing environmental degradation.
作为美食媒体的一个子集，美食纪录片通常会耸人听闻地报道整个食物供应的贫困状况。本文关注的是食品纪录片Hybrid (2000)， King Corn (2007)， Sunú(2015)和OMG OMG(2013)，它们不同地将“工业食品”视为抵抗和参与的有用类别，而不是蔑视的对象。当通过酷儿生态批评和女权主义唯物主义的镜头阅读时，这样的电影为解释和与自然的怪物共处创造了一种方式，这种方式通常会阻止耸人听闻的目光。这些食物电影不仅将家庭和家庭视为被动消费的单位，而且将其视为在环境持续恶化的世界中努力解决食物正义、食物主权和生态意识问题的考虑供应场所。
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Paula Strasberg demands a Method reading. Wife of Lee Strasberg, coach to Marilyn Monroe, and victim of the Hollywood Blacklist, Paula Strasberg's life is only detectable through the stories of other (more famous) people, epitomizing the historical record’s indifference to women’s work. Those extant, conflicting traces of Strasberg—as crone, as radical, as overbearing Jewish mother—reveal how conceptions of art, femininity, and ethnicity circulated in the shadow of the postwar culture industries. In response, this speculative account, rooted in theatricality and play, reinstates Paula Strasberg into the history through critical-creative means.
Paula Strasberg要求进行方法阅读。李·斯特拉斯伯格的妻子，玛丽莲·梦露的教练，好莱坞黑名单的受害者，宝拉·斯特拉斯伯格的生活只有通过其他(更著名的)人的故事才能发现，这是历史记录对女性工作漠不关心的缩影。斯特拉斯伯格现存的、相互矛盾的痕迹——老妪、激进分子、专横的犹太母亲——揭示了艺术、女性气质和种族观念是如何在战后文化工业的阴影下传播的。作为回应，这种根植于戏剧性和戏剧的推测性叙述，通过批判性-创造性的手段将宝拉·斯特拉斯伯格恢复到历史中。
{"title":"Paula Strasberg’s Private Moment","authors":"Annie Berke","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.35","url":null,"abstract":"Paula Strasberg demands a Method reading. Wife of Lee Strasberg, coach to Marilyn Monroe, and victim of the Hollywood Blacklist, Paula Strasberg's life is only detectable through the stories of other (more famous) people, epitomizing the historical record’s indifference to women’s work. Those extant, conflicting traces of Strasberg—as crone, as radical, as overbearing Jewish mother—reveal how conceptions of art, femininity, and ethnicity circulated in the shadow of the postwar culture industries. In response, this speculative account, rooted in theatricality and play, reinstates Paula Strasberg into the history through critical-creative means.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Documentarian and writer Atteyat al-Abnoudy was a fierce proponent of Egypt’s working class and marginalized communities. She carved indelible, haunting images onto the national psyche through her work, which is more prescient than ever. This essay explores the ways in which it is possible to understand and interpret Al Abnoudy’s work processes and filmic legacy within the context of Egypt’s lack of archival practices. The larger context of Egyptian documentary filmmaking and the impact of post-colonial practices on the arts and culture sphere also inform the article.
{"title":"The Vanishing Archive","authors":"Yasmin Desouki","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.70","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.70","url":null,"abstract":"Documentarian and writer Atteyat al-Abnoudy was a fierce proponent of Egypt’s working class and marginalized communities. She carved indelible, haunting images onto the national psyche through her work, which is more prescient than ever. This essay explores the ways in which it is possible to understand and interpret Al Abnoudy’s work processes and filmic legacy within the context of Egypt’s lack of archival practices. The larger context of Egyptian documentary filmmaking and the impact of post-colonial practices on the arts and culture sphere also inform the article.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.127
Hayley O’Malley
In 1976, a remarkable group of Black feminist artists organized the first ever Black women’s film festival, the Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, at the Women’s Interart Center in New York. Screening films by at least sixteen Black women directors, the festival was simultaneously a celebration of the emerging world of Black women’s filmmaking and a radical call for the kinds of socio-political and institutional changes necessary for a Black women’s film culture to thrive. This essay uses archival materials and personal interviews to reconstruct the festival, arguing that although it has long been overlooked, it represents a foundational moment for Black feminist film culture and epitomizes the cross-arts networks of influence that shaped Black feminist artmaking in the period. At the same time, engaging with a fragmentary archive, the essay reflects on the forms of speculation needed to reconstruct the events, lived experiences, and long-term legacies of the festival.
1976年，一群杰出的黑人女权主义艺术家在纽约的女性艺术中心(women’s Interart Center)组织了有史以来第一届黑人女性电影节——旅居者真相艺术节(Sojourner Truth festival of the Arts)。该电影节放映了至少16位黑人女性导演的电影，同时也是对黑人女性电影制作新兴世界的庆祝，同时也是对黑人女性电影文化蓬勃发展所必需的社会政治和制度变革的激进呼吁。本文使用档案材料和个人访谈来重建电影节，认为尽管它长期以来被忽视，但它代表了黑人女权主义电影文化的基础时刻，并集中体现了跨艺术影响网络，塑造了这一时期的黑人女权主义艺术创作。与此同时，这篇文章结合了一个零碎的档案，反思了重建事件、生活经历和节日长期遗产所需的猜测形式。
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Pub Date : 2022-01-01DOI: 10.1525/fmh.2022.8.2.180
J. Scheible
VALIE EXPORT and Agnès Varda both made moving-image installations about ping pong (EXPORT’s 1968 Ping Pong and Varda’s 2006 “Ping Pong, Tong, et Camping”), a subject each returned to on multiple occasions in subsequent works across different media forms. Apprehending ping pong as a cinematic thing and gesture, this essay considers how EXPORT and Varda, each in her own way, unsettle and expand the rules of the game in ways shaped by their distinct, and distinctly feminist, politics. This essay explores these works and the artists’ repeated returns to ping pong by staging a “volley,” alternating between different scenes and iterations across Europe and the US, from the 1960s to the 2010s. Additional works discussed include EXPORT’s 1980s television documentary on avant-garde film, The Armed Eye, and Varda’s final two documentaries, Faces Places (2017) and Varda by Agnès (2019).
VALIE EXPORT和agn·瓦尔达(agn Varda)都创作了关于乒乓球的动态影像装置作品(EXPORT 1968年的《乒乓》和瓦尔达2006年的《乒乓，Tong, et Camping》)，这一主题在随后的作品中以不同的媒介形式多次出现。本文将乒乓球理解为一种电影的事物和姿态，思考EXPORT和瓦尔达是如何以自己的方式，以她们独特的、明显的女权主义政治塑造的方式，扰乱和扩展游戏规则的。这篇文章探讨了这些作品，以及艺术家们在20世纪60年代至2010年代在欧洲和美国的不同场景和迭代之间交替进行的“截击”，反复回归乒乓球。讨论的其他作品包括EXPORT在20世纪80年代关于前卫电影的电视纪录片《武装之眼》，以及瓦尔达的最后两部纪录片《Faces Places》(2017)和《agn的瓦尔达》(2019)。
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After the Palestine Liberation Organization withdrew from Beirut as a result of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the most significant Palestinian film archive, comprising more than 100 documentaries, was nowhere to be found. This article examines Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image (dir. Azza El-Hassan, 2004), a documentary that ostensibly chronicles the director’s search for the archive, but ultimately explores Palestinians’ recurrent efforts to narrate and visualize their historical reality in the face of archival appropriation and destruction. As El-Hassan travels between Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and occupied Palestine, her journey becomes a quest for Palestinian freedom dreams, generating its own, living archive, uniquely Palestinian in its unauthorized, stateless, and itinerant form. Engaging Palestinian archival imaginaries alongside decolonial feminist critiques of positivist historiography, I propose “reparative fabulation” as an act of the radical narrative imagination that animates unrealized political potentialities glimpsed in the gaps endemic to violated archives.
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Informed by three interlocking texts—Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, Agnès Varda’s 1985 Vagabond, and Lesley Stern’s Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing—this essay attends to a series of scenes from US films of the 1970s. Visually oriented and guided by movement, these analytic descriptions develop together a context of feminist associations that in turn runs counter to the mastery of textual analysis that is so often implicitly aligned with the “masterful” auteurs and works of the era. By moving between a series of cinematic images that home in on women’s experiences, the essay at once recognizes their shared resonances and imagines a counter narrative to dominant histories of the era and an alternative or extension to dominant theoretical fields that emerged from the era. This form of speculative criticism allows for readers to engage in acts of speculation themselves.
通过三个相互关联的文本——nathalie Sarraute的《Tropisms》，agn Varda 1985年的《Vagabond》，以及Lesley Stern的《Dead and Alive: The Body as The cinema东西》——本文关注了20世纪70年代美国电影中的一系列场景。以视觉为导向，以运动为指导，这些分析性描述共同发展了女权主义协会的背景，反过来又与文本分析的掌握背道而驰，而文本分析往往隐含地与那个时代的“大师”导演和作品相一致。通过在一系列聚焦于女性经历的电影图像之间移动，本文立即认识到它们之间的共同共鸣，并想象出一种与时代主流历史相反的叙事，以及对时代中出现的主流理论领域的替代或延伸。这种形式的思辨批评允许读者自己从事思辨行为。
{"title":"Wandering around the ’70s","authors":"A. Hastie","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.61","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.61","url":null,"abstract":"Informed by three interlocking texts—Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, Agnès Varda’s 1985 Vagabond, and Lesley Stern’s Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing—this essay attends to a series of scenes from US films of the 1970s. Visually oriented and guided by movement, these analytic descriptions develop together a context of feminist associations that in turn runs counter to the mastery of textual analysis that is so often implicitly aligned with the “masterful” auteurs and works of the era. By moving between a series of cinematic images that home in on women’s experiences, the essay at once recognizes their shared resonances and imagines a counter narrative to dominant histories of the era and an alternative or extension to dominant theoretical fields that emerged from the era. This form of speculative criticism allows for readers to engage in acts of speculation themselves.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66946820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The file on Black actor Theresa Harris includes 103 Hollywood films and TV shows for which she has screen credit, along with many that she does not, from 1929 to 1958. She was cast as an extra, a bit player, or a character actor with lines, most of the time as a maid. In this speculative history of her career, I examine a selection of her roles in films such as Baby Face (1933), Jezebel (1938), I Married a Zombie (1943), Out of the Past (1947), and Lady from Shanghai (1947) as if they were racial events. The act of critical viewing, of actually noticing Harris’s contribution to these and other films, can arguably alter the reading of the films in important ways. My reparative readings are inspired by the theoretical work of Eve Sedgwick and Christine Goding-Doty, and the historiographical work of Saidiya Hartman and Daphne Brooks.
{"title":"The File on Theresa Harris, Black Star of the Archive","authors":"Catherine Russell","doi":"10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.86","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2022.8.3.86","url":null,"abstract":"The file on Black actor Theresa Harris includes 103 Hollywood films and TV shows for which she has screen credit, along with many that she does not, from 1929 to 1958. She was cast as an extra, a bit player, or a character actor with lines, most of the time as a maid. In this speculative history of her career, I examine a selection of her roles in films such as Baby Face (1933), Jezebel (1938), I Married a Zombie (1943), Out of the Past (1947), and Lady from Shanghai (1947) as if they were racial events. The act of critical viewing, of actually noticing Harris’s contribution to these and other films, can arguably alter the reading of the films in important ways. My reparative readings are inspired by the theoretical work of Eve Sedgwick and Christine Goding-Doty, and the historiographical work of Saidiya Hartman and Daphne Brooks.","PeriodicalId":36892,"journal":{"name":"Feminist Media Histories","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66947012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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