books
Books
» ‘Forthcoming’
October 2011
Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, by Miriam Bratu Hansen, edited by Edward Dimendberg (University of California Press)
Miriam Bratu Hansen, the late professor of humanities at the University of Chicago and founding chair of its department of cinema and media studies, author of Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film and other works, studies the key role that technological media played in the critique of modernity developed by Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. In analyzing the way that the friends and colleagues considered the role of cinema and photography from the Weimar period up to the 1960s, she inspects an archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials to arrive at their theory of cinema and experience. She also suggests its relevance as moving-image culture evolves in response to digital technology. (In the series Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism.)
n
Myrna Loy: The Only Good Girl in Hollywood, by Emily W. Leider (University of California Press)
Biographer, poet, and memoirist Emily W. Leider (Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino, Becoming Mae West, and Rapid Eye Movement and Other Poems, among other books) writes the first biography of the mysterious silents-then-talkies star, who has been oddly under-studied. The results, says Anthony Slide, are “so conscientiously researched, so closely written in detail and intelligent style that there will be no need for a second.” Leider writes about the wry and sophisticated actress’s rough-and-tumble early years in Montana, her multiple and sometimes foolish marriages, and her development from exotic silent player to sophisticated lead in the Thin Man series as Nora Charles, wife to dapper detective William Powell. Leider also describes Loy’s subsequent transition into a seeming proud, understanding middle-class wife in the 1940s during a career of some 60 years. In Los Angeles in the 1920s, Loy’s striking looks caught the eye of Valentino; through her early-sound-era films of the thirties, she became a box office draw; after World War II, her career developed richly, and she befriended the likes of Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford and collaborated with John Barrymore, David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, William Wyler, and many others.
Emily Leider describes exploring Myrna Loy’s life
Myrna Loy left an archive at Boston University’s Gotlieb Archival Research Center; it includes letters (though not too many reveal intimate details of her private life), photographs, clippings, scrapbooks, and some programs and scripts. Many of the photographs in my book come from the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where I also found material on Loy or her films in the Samuel Goldwyn Collection, the files of the Production Code Administration, and (in both the Core Collection and Special Collections) on individual movies, directors, producers, organizations, and acting colleagues. The Warner Bros. Archive at USC has files on individual movies, scripts, and legal documents. I consulted the MGM and Darryl F. Zanuck Collections at the USC Cinema Library and the Dore Schary Collection at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. UCLA Performing Arts Library (Special Collections) has material on films from RKO Fox and 20th Century Fox. Among the resources for watching Myrna Loy films were the Motion Picture Division of the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center in New York City, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
There are many lost Myrna Loy silent films, most of them made at Warner Bros. Her first film, What Price Beauty?, predates her Warners contract, and was made with Natacha Rambova, the estranged wife of Rudolph Valentino; it was filmed in 1925 but not released until 1928, and exists only as a few stills. One early talkie that was believed lost for many years, The Animal Kingdom (RKO, 1932, with Leslie Howard and Ann Harding as well as Myrna Loy), was located by Ronald Haver in 1985, restored at UCLA, and screened by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at a New York tribute to Myrna Loy that same year.
n
Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas: The Reel Asian Exchange , edited by Philippa Gates and Lisa Funnell (Routledge)
Essays that examine the exchange of Asian identities taking place at the levels of both film production and film reception amongst pan-Pacific cinemas. The authors consider films that exhibit “marked transnationality” and also the multiple meanings attributed to transnational films. Topics include the innovation of Hollywood generic formulas in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong and Japanese films; the examination of Thai and Japanese raced and gendered identity in Asian and American films; the reception of Hollywood films in pre-1949 China and millennial Japan; the production and performance of Asian adoptee identity and subjectivity; the political implications and interpretations of migrating Chinese female stars; and the production and reception of pan-Pacific co-productions.
In the series Routledge Advances in Film Studies.
n