Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and FeminismDuke University Press, 2003 - 239 strán (strany) With the help of mirrors, trap doors, elevators, photographs, and film, women vanish and return in increasingly spectacular ways throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karen Beckman tracks the proliferation of this elusive figure, the vanishing woman, from her genesis in Victorian stage magic through her development in conjunction with photography and film. Beckman reveals how these new visual technologies projected their anxieties about insubstantiality and reproducibility onto the female body, producing an image of "woman" as utterly unstable and constantly prone to disappearance. Drawing on cinema studies and psychoanalysis as well as the histories of magic, spiritualism, and photography, Beckman looks at particular instances of female vanishing at specific historical moments—in Victorian magic’s obsessive manipulation of female and colonized bodies, spiritualist photography’s search to capture traces of ghosts, the comings and goings of bodies in early cinema, and Bette Davis’s multiple roles as a fading female star. As Beckman places the vanishing woman in the context of feminism’s discussion of spectacle and subjectivity, she explores not only the problems, but also the political utility of this obstinate figure who hovers endlessly between visible and invisible worlds. Through her readings, Beckman argues that the visibly vanishing woman repeatedly signals the lurking presence of less immediately perceptible psychic and physical erasures, and she contends that this enigmatic figure, so ubiquitous in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, provides a new space through which to consider the relationships between visibility, gender, and agency. |
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... cinema , the van- ishing lady's key twentieth - century venue.3 Standing before Baum's show window in 1900 , it would have been difficult for the casual shopper to lose herself in fantastical identif1cations with the female image on ...
... cinema , the vanish- ing lady produces desire and longing but also unrest . Given her dis- ruptive potential , it may seem somewhat surprising to discover that she appears and disappears not only in experimental films that ac- tively ...
... cinema and identity.16 This chapter's discussion of fall- ing film stars develops out of the arguments of chapter two , inves- tigating further the relationship between media , presence , and gen- der through the ontological ambivalence ...
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Obsah
Surplus Bodies Vanishing Women Conjuring Imperialism and the Rhetoric of Disappearance 18511901 | 17 |
Insubstantial Media Ectoplasm Exposure and the Stillbirth of Film | 61 |
Mother Knows Best Magic and Matricide | 93 |
Violent Vanishings Hitchcock Harlan and the Politics of Prestidigitation | 129 |
Shooting Stars Vanishing Comets Bette Davis and Cinematic Fading | 153 |
Afterword | 189 |
Notes | 195 |
Works Cited | 219 |
Filmography | 233 |
235 | |