In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Recent Books in Film History
Emily Carman, Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016).
Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer, eds., Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014).
Allyson Nadia Field, Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
Trevor Griffiths, The Cinema and Cinema-Going in Scotland, 1896–1950 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
Brian R. Jacobson, Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
Colin Williamson, Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015).

Reflecting the broad range of new scholarship in the history of cinema, the books included in this section have been selected by the editorial staff of Film History. The summaries have been provided by the authors.

Emily Carman, Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016).

Independent Stardom examines how 1930s female film stars, including Carole Lombard, Constance Bennett, Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, and Miriam Hopkins, challenged the patriarchal and oligopolistic business structure of the Hollywood film industry by taking a proactive role in shaping their careers as freelance artists rather than as long-term studio contract employees. The book blends together an industrial and cultural framework comprised of rigorous archival research that consults primary texts (contracts, studio memos, legal documents, production records, publicity material, and fan magazines) to illuminate the varying ways in which these women achieved their trendsetting independence in the star system. By tracing the freelance phenomenon among American motion-picture talent in the 1930s, Independent Stardom compels film historians to rethink standard histories of Hollywood and recognize female stars as creative artists, sophisticated businesswomen, and active players in the then (as now) male-dominated American film industry.

Scott Curtis, The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

This book examines popular and specialized published sources in Germany before World War I to discover the criteria for the acceptance and use of motion-picture technology in four disciplines: science (especially human motion studies, physics, and biology), medicine, education, and aesthetics. It claims that successful appropriations or arguments for the use of film depended on establishing a correspondence between formal feature(s) of the image (still or projected)—such as its frame, its detail, its duration—and the logic of the [End Page 182] specific discipline, particularly its mode of viewing. In its description of the collisions between moving images and expert vision, the book outlines a theory and historiography of media use (especially nontheatrical) that acknowledges the importance of both media form and viewing strategies. It claims that expert observation and lay spectatorship functioned as each other’s negative space; we can understand the “shape of spectatorship” only by understanding the contours of expert vision.

Zoë Druick and Gerda Cammaer, eds., Cinephemera: Archives, Ephemeral Cinema, and New Screen Histories in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014).

This anthology of eighteen chapters considers what the digital turn has meant for Canadian cinema studies, a national cinema of minor genres, disused formats, and independent production that, historically speaking, is structurally composed of orphans. Adopting a media-archaeological approach to this history, contributors cover a wide range of pressing issues relating to Canadian cinema’s ephemerality, including neglected or overlooked histories; the work of experimental found footage filmmakers; and questions about access, copyright, and other practical issues of film archiving. Spurred by rapid changes to technologies of production, viewing, and preservation, the collection highlights scholarship that grapples with the shifting meaning of cinema as an object of study. Considering a wide range of cases from the...

pdf

Share