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.
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.
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.
Director for the McGill Institute
n Archiveology Catherine Russell uses the work of Walter Benjamin to explore how the practice of archiveology—the reuse, recycling, appropriation, and borrowing of archival sounds and images by filmmakers—provides ways to imagine the past and the future.