New Women of the Silent Screen: China, Japan, Hollywood
Special Issue Editor. Camera Obscura
Special Issue Editor. Camera Obscura
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.
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.
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.