The marvellous Mistinguett is finally included in a major publication on film history — and I could not be happier. In many ways, this moment sits at the heart of the work I have been doing for years: trying to bring women performers, popular entertainers, and overlooked screen histories back into visibility.
Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema: Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, Mistinguett was the culmination of more than seven years of archival research across France, Italy, the UK, and the United States — though in many ways it grew out of a much longer commitment to understanding women's central role in the emerging entertainment industries....
My interviews with Mike Mashon (Head, Moving Image section, Library of Congress) and Haden Guest (Director, Harvard Film Archive) have just been published this month in The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists ("Are We There Yet? North American Road Maps to Recovery"). This is the conclusion to a series focusing...
Can this Melbourne Theatre Company article count for academic writing? I am not sure. But I did enjoy distilling my thoughts about Hamlet and Bernhardt into what I hope is an interesting read. See the link below this frame grab...
A whole LOT! With thanks to Devin Orgeron, editor of The Moving Image (University of Minnesota Press), for enabling this series of
1. Giannini was a populist politician who knew how to use new media to reach a broad and new public. We think populism is important today, both as a contemporary political movement to study, and as a movement with historical roots we can explore and explain.
In 2016 I was invited to contribute to a year-long celebration of female achievement. As the project leaders explained:
For roughly a century, Sarah Bernhardt's centrality to modernism has been largely ignored. Her inspiration and patronage of the twirling, tendrilic forms of Art Nouveau is often discussed in relation to her capacity for self-promotion and commercialization rather than as evidence of a pioneering performance style that subsequently helped drive...
Exploring Celebrity reception in the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, Exeter, UK
My first Conversation article! But I am sorry that it is about the lack of access we have to our very own NFSA, as compared to the film archive in Milan, and the British Film Institute. I held interviews (on zoom) with the directors and curators of these archives, and it was fascinating to see what they made available to...
I authored this special issue on 'The Actress-Manager and Silent Film', with Vito Adriaensens (Columbia University) because I was tired of seeing actresses discussed as 'only' actresses, or stars, or women who looked good but were not (it is implied) working as strategic business women.
What is lost and gained in the shift from physical to digital archiving? What and how do archives preserve, and how do they curate public access? How do we search for digital material? Which tools are used to modify and limit our search options, and what does this tell us about digital networks and our relationships to them? Who...