This magisterial book offers comprehensive accounts of the professional itineraries of three women in the silent film in the Netherlands, France and North America. Annette Förster presents a careful assessment of the long career of Dutch stage and film actress Adriënne Solser; an exploration of the stage and screen careers of French actress and filmmaker Musidora and Canadian-born actress and filmmaker Nell Shipman; an analysis of the interaction between the popular stage and the silent cinema from the perspective of women at work in both realms; fresh insights into Dutch stage and screen comedy, the French revue and the American Northwest drama of the 1910s; and much more, all grounded in a wealth of archival research.
"André Bazin (1918–58) is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit, as well as with being the spiritual father of the French New Wave. Among those who came under his tutelage were four who would go on to become the most renowned directors of the postwar French cinema: François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. Bazin can also be considered the principal instigator of the equally influential auteur theory: the idea that, since film is an art form, the director of a movie must be perceived as the chief creator of its unique cinematic style.André Bazin, the Critic as Thinker: American Cinema from Early Chaplin to the Late 1950s contains, for the first time in English in one volume, much if not all of Bazin’s writings on American cinema: on directors such as Orson Welles, Charles Chaplin, Preston Sturges, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Huston, Nicholas Ray, Erich von Stroheim, and Elia Kazan; and on films such as High Noon, Citizen Kane, Rear Window, Limelight, Scarface, Niagara, The Red Badge of Courage, Greed, and Sullivan’s Travels.André Bazin, the Critic as Thinker: American Cinema from Early Chaplin to the Late 1950s also features a sizable scholarly apparatus, including a contextual introduction to Bazin’s life and work, a complete bibliography of Bazin’s writings on American cinema, and credits of the films discussed. This volume thus represents a major contribution to the still growing academic discipline of cinema studies, as well as a testament to the continuing influence of one of the world’s pre-eminent critical thinkers."
Counterpractice highlights a generation of women who used art to define a culture of experimental thought and practice during the period of the French women’s movement or Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (1970–81). It considers women’s art in relation to some of the most exciting thinkers to have emerged from the French literature and philosophy of the 1970s – Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva – forcing a timely reconsideration of the full spectrum of revolutionary practices by women in the years following the events of May ’68. Lavishly illustrated with over 200 images, the book also features an illuminating foreword by art historian Griselda Pollock.
