Although the term and the theory entered into Film Studies scholarship as a genre grounded in European culture and American cinema, melodrama is clearly evident in many international film traditions. In this course we will look at the ways that the term has traveled and how melodrama has manifested in different cultures as an expression of social injustice, gender inequity, and an affective bridge between private and public desires and repressions.
Acting and Performing are notoriously difficult to talk about because they are elusive and always enmeshed in storytelling, technologies, collaboration, and of course costume and miseen-scene. This course aims to help students talk and write about film acting, which is often a matter of finding the right vocabulary and identifying the performative aesthetics in any given media.
A classic of Japanese cinema described as a ‘masterpiece’ by Yasujiro Ozu, Floating Clouds is a melancholy meditation on the hopeless side of love. Through the lens of Yukiko and Tomioka’s tempestuous relationship, Mikio Naruse’s most acclaimed film quietly captures the devastation of a country in economic post-war ruin.
Russell situates the film within the trajectory of Naruse’s career and analyses how his social critique is balanced with an aestheticization of a harsh and brutally gendered world, creating an affective tension that is symptomatic of Naruse’s own position as an industrial worker.
I have a contract with Routledge for a new book on Non Professional Acting that will include essays by 13 contributors on the topic.
I have a contract for a book on the 1987 Canadian film with McGill Queen’s University Press. I am currently conducting research on A Winter Tan made by a directorial collective of Jacqueline Burroughs, Louise Clark, John Frizzell, Aerlyn Weisman, and John Walker.
The 1963 film adaptation of William Golding’s 1954 novel of Lord of the Flies has become a classic of US Independent Cinema. By comparing the situation of the film shoot on the Caribbean island of Vieques (part of Puerto Rico) with Golding’s parable about human violence, this article explores the ironic failure of the filmmakers to recognise the historical violence that continued to plague this particular island as a contested site. Peter Brook’s approach to the novel demanded an attitude of innocence on the part of his novice actors and crew members to capture the authenticity that he sought. His so-called documentary approach to an island narrative was only achieved through the fiction of obfuscating the real violence taking place on and around Vieques.
The fifth title in the Docalogue series, this book examines Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s 2021 documentary, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).
This book will be of interest to students and scholars in multiple areas including but not limited to archival studies, Black studies, cultural studies, documentary studies, historiography, and music studies.
Cinema’s First Nasty Women presents a rambunctious roster of talented ladies from the silent era challenging gender norms from every direction. They turn households inside out; they invert class and racial hierarchies; they do everything that men do, and they do it all in high spirits. These women actors and characters, who are white, Indigenous, Asian, and African American, are brought together in a groundbreaking Kino Lorber box set of ninetynine films made between 1899 and 1926, constituting more than fourteen hours of running time. Based in equally significant scholarship by Maggie Hennefeld, author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Laura Horak, author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers University Press, 2016), this collection remakes and expands the living history of the silent period. Hennefeld and Horak are the Project Directors, with archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakcp from Amsterdam’s Eye Film Museum as cocurator.
From The Lady Eve, to The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck played parts that showcased her multidimensional talents but also illustrated the limits imposed on women in film and television. Catherine Russell’s A to Z consideration of the iconic actress analyzes twenty-six facets of Stanwyck and the America of her times. Russell examines Stanwyck’s work onscreen against the backdrop of costuming and other aspects of filmmaking. But she also views the actress’s off-screen performance within the Hollywood networks that made her an industry favorite and longtime cornerstone of the entertainment community. Russell’s montage approach coalesces into an engrossing portrait of a singular artist whose intelligence and savvy placed her center-stage in the production of her films and in the debates around women, femininity, and motherhood that roiled mid-century America.
