Recent Books in Film History

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.

Bo Florin, Transition and Transformation: Victor Sjöström in Hollywood, 1923–1930 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013)

This study takes on the task of describing what happened when Victor Sjöström left Sweden for Hollywood. While transition refers to the change of production culture, transformation refers to a key device in Sjöström's authorship, which bridges the gap in production culture. The study is based on thorough archival research, using daily production reports, cutting continuity scripts as well as contemporary press: reviews, reports, and debates.

The concept of style adds to the research on production culture and is based on the surviving films as well as on the facts that can be traced from other sources concerning the lost films. The main historical claim based on this study is that continuity in this case prevails over rupture; the films directed by Sjöström in Hollywood are based on major literary sources, and they use the dissolve as a key device.

Fig 1.

Victor Seastrom (in the middle) on the set of The Scarlet Letter (1926)

Hideaki Fujiki, Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013)

Making Personas mainly focuses on the period from the early 1910s to the early 1930s and explores how film stardom and the film star system emerged and changed in Japan, touching on a variety of its facets including the production, representation, circulation, and reception of performers' images in films and other forms of media. This entails demonstrating how a diverse array of technological, economical, political, social, and cultural factors of star formations came to comprise Japanese modernity. The Japanese film-star formations involved their complex relations with the domestic theatrical traditions as well as with the circulation of American stars' images. To reveal those processes in their historical contexts, the book analyzes a variety of sources including photogravures, synopses, film stories, and reviews in books, magazines, newspapers, and other printed materials as well as posters, fliers, still photographs, and rare extant films from the period.

Fig 2.

"Clara Bow and Fans." Shirota Shūichi, Gendai manga taikan: Gendai sesM manga [A survey of modern manga: Modern manga of social conditions] (Tokyo: ChūM bijutsusha, 1928)

Mark Glancy, Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014)

The relationship between Hollywood films and British audiences is usually framed in terms of the harmful, Americanizing influence of cinema. This book examines the relationship in greater depth and detail by exploring the concept of Americanization and investigating the British reception of key films (Gone with the Wind, Grease), genres (the gangster film, the western), and stars (Rudolph Valentino). Drawing on audience surveys, box-office reports, critical reviews, fan magazines, and promotional materials, the book offers a series of richly detailed transnational reception studies and also new perspectives on the histories of both American and British cinema.

Fig 3.

Images from fan magazines and promotional materials are analyzed in Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain, including this advertisement for Gone with the Wind (1939), which appeared in Picturegoer in 1942.

Kristen Hatch, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015)

Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood examines Shirley Temple's stardom in the context of performances of childhood on stage and screen from the nineteenth century through the 1930s. Drawing on reviews, newspaper and magazine articles, and promotional material, the book argues that Temple's star persona emerged out of a long tradition whereby white girlhood was so firmly associated with redemptive innocence that girl stars were imagined to have a transformative effect both on- and offscreen. For example, the press celebrated adult men's expressions of love for child performers...