2023

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Review of Nasty Women DVD set

By Catherine Russell

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.

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The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star

By Catherine Russell

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.

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Fire of Love

By Catherine Russell

The relation between volcanoes and love has a long history in Japan, as hundreds of lovers and spurned lovers have leapt to their deaths in the fiery depths of Mount Mihara for centuries, but most famously during the Twenties and Thirties. Later in the century, in 1991, another pair of lovers—volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft—perished at the foot of Japan’s Mount Unzen. Having rushed there to observe an imminent eruption to film and photograph it in action, they, along with forty-one journalists and firefighters, were swallowed by Unzen’s powerful excretion of moving earth. Sara Dosa’s remarkable documentary, created largely from the Kraffts’ visual archive, includes a shot of their final volcano erupting, as captured by a camera abandoned by a fleeing journalist. Although Japanese TV has only recently discovered the beauty and attraction of volcano imagery, the Kraffts had known and pursued these aspects throughout their working lives.

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