New Women of the Silent Screen: China, Japan, Hollywood
Special Issue Editor. Camera Obscura
The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity
Given the complex historical and critical issues surrounding Naruse’s cinema, a comprehensive study of the director demands an innovative and interdisciplinary approach. Russell draws on the critical reception of Naruse in Japan in addition to the cultural theories of Harry Harootunian, Miriam Hansen, and Walter Benjamin. She shows that Naruse’s movies were key texts of Japanese modernity, both in the ways that they portrayed the changing roles of Japanese women in the public sphere and in their depiction of an urban, industrialized, mass-media-saturated society.
Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure and New Wave Cinemas
In these analyses, Russell reveals an uneasy relationship between death and closure, which she traces to anxieties about identity, gender, and national-cultural myths, as well as to the persistence of desire. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, she shows us death as a fundamentally allegorical structure in cinema–and as a potential sign of historical difference, with crucial implications for theories of film narrative and spectatorship.
Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video
Experimental film and ethnographic film have long been considered separate, autonomous practices on the margins of mainstream cinema. By exploring the interplay between the two forms, Catherine Russell throws new light on both the avant-garde and visual anthropology.
David Rimmer: Films & Tapes 1967-1993
This is a catalogue that was produced by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1993 to accompany an exhibition of David Rimmer’s work in the same year. My essay was commisioned as a critical overview of Rimmer’s career up until 1993.
Classical Japanese Cinema, Revisited
Respectful and thoroughly informed about the aesthetics and critical values of the Japanese canon, Russell is also critical of some of its ideological tendencies, and her analyses provide new insights on class and gender dynamics. Russell locates Japanese cinema within a global system of reception, and she highlights the importance of the industrial production context of these films.