Cupboards of curiosity
From Driscollwiki
Hastie, A. (2007). Cupboards of curiosity: Women, recollection, and film history. Durham: Duke University Press.
Contents |
Goals
- Paying attention to the authorship of women in the industry, "written and collectible works" (192)
- "Active in the construction of the very epistemological fields in which they have been located" (192-3)
- Learning from their "modes of thinking" (192)
- Expand possible objects for historical inquiry, "what constitutes an archive?" (192)
- Written works less emphemeral (in early cinema), enabling entry point to embodiment, materializing collaboration with audience-fan (193)
- New ways of knowing
Characters
- Stars
- Fans
- Archivists
- Scholars
- Experts
- Collectors
- Historians
- Critics
- Filmmakers
- Gossip writers
- Documentarians
Individuals
Colleen Moore
- Silent film star, collector, scrapbooker, investor, author, philanthropist
Alice Guy-Blaché
- First female filmmaker, historian, entrepreneur, technical innovator, memoirist
- "Lost" place in history (79)
- No obit in 1968 (79)
- Few artifacts of her film productions (80)
Louise Brooks
- Actor, "anti-star" (111), critic, object of criticism, reader, intellectual, historian
- Cult figure
- Central concern for Sexuality, of herself and others (116-117)
- "Inhumane executioner of the bogus" (115)
- Present in 3 periods:
- 1920/30s NYC/DE Weimer/US Hollywood
- Mid-1950s, Paris revival screenings
- 1970s-80s, New books, Profile in New Yorker
Mary Pickford, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Sophia Loren, Zasu Pitts, Cristy Turlington, Isabella Rossellini
- (Silent) film star, expert, author, newspaper columnist, autobiographer
- Note: Moore also authored a how-to book on investing (169)
Layers
- Films and filmmakers
- Actors on and off screen
- Diary, scrapbook (unpublished)
- Memoir, autobiography (published)
- Biography, gossip, popular criticism
- Star studies, film history, theory
- Recollection, museum presentations, retrospectives
Set pieces and scenery
- Scrapbooks
- Films
- Periodicals
- Press photos
- Houses
- Dollhouse
- Miniatures
- Tie-in products (cosmetics, chocolates)
- Theaters
- Memoirs
- Autobiographies and anti-autobiographies (85)
- Interviews
- Articles and essays
- Poems (111)
- How-to manuals
Celebrity how-to manuals
"Spiritual manuals, financial guides, cookbooks, workout books and exercise memoirs, performance art instructions, and self-analysis" (157)
Women's business
- Women who write
- Women who know (160)
Expertise
- Derived from experience and intelligence (161)
- Texts rely on readers' prior knowledge of the celebrity (165)
- e.g. West as a "confident" and "sexual" woman (166)
- e.g. Moore's comparison of supermarket to stock market exchange (173)
"Conversion narrative" (170)
- Must have readers identify with author at first
Inherent autobiographical qualities
- Narrative passages
- Examples drawn from familiar areas of the star's life/work
- Cookbooks, etc. position stars within their domestic spaces
- Links between narrative film + narrative recipe structures (177)
Repetition
- Books to which we return
- To re-read, to re-enact
- Even the first reading is a re-enactment of sorts
Actions
- Collect, recollect
- Remember
- Memorialize
- Archive
- Assemble
- Author
- Storytelling
- Revive
- Repeat
- Reminisce
- Reconstruct
- Recover
- Revitalize
- Recognize
- Narrate
- Witness
- Disappear, reappear
- Neutralize
- Writing
- Penning
- Perform
- Role-play
- Cooking
- Eating
Categorical nouns
- Assemblage
- Collage
- Montage
- Collection
- Souvenir
- Retrospective
- Anecdotes
- Memories
- Direct cinema
- Advice
In negotiation
- Authority
- Expertise
- Authorship, self-authorship
- Fan-of-self (Chp 1)
- Business, family (103)
- "The economy of discourse that encircles and historicizes [Brooks]" (110)
- Crossing many modes and media: journalism, history, theory, documentary / book, film, article, interview
- Foucault's theory of "confession" and the memoirist, especially in sexual disclosure (114)
- Imbuing the secret with power
- Autobiographical nature of history, bearing witness, making an account (115)
- Category of Brooks' writing: part autobiography, part commentary and history, part analysis (123)
- Memory/History (Chp 2)
- A remembering historian (87)
- Neutrality, star-fan-authors-memories as sources (127)
- Truthfulness + direct(ion in) cinema
- Directing the filmed conversation / Editing the resulting recording (138)
- Value of women's voices / danger of their "unquestionability" (153)
- Authorship / Writer's labor (161)
- Domesticity / Marketplace / Family business (172, 174)
- Visibility+Authority / Ordinary+Invisible knowledges (181)
- Remembering / Forgetting / Being forgotten / Being Remembered
- Ephemerality / Perpetuity, linked in history, repetition, production of self
- Knowledge / Embodiment, linked through instruction (185)
- Collaboration with audiences:
- Implicit in narrative film, explicit in cookbook (186)
- Narrowly defined in archive, broadly defined in cinema
Speculation
- Tweets, blogs, emails, flickr
- Line between performance of self and diary-making fuzzier?
- Unexpected reasons for things being kept, collected (Hawks' films via Brooks fandom, 152)
- Stars as guests, hosts of shows about domestic spaces: Cribs, Food Network
- DVD commentary, extradiegetic, "behind the scenes"
Open questions
- Where do fan, collector, scholar compete, conflict, overlap? Collaborate? (Chp 1)
- What does it mean to read something "cinematically" (83)?
- Difficult to resist, shift away from a tone set forth in these self-histories (101)?
- How do the various numbers of other people (assistants, crews, etc) shift the use of author to describe both literary + filmic texts?
- When a figure like Brooks is so indistinct from her fictional characters (Lulu), how does this enable/restrict her capacity for critical/historical observation (109)?
- Where do we measure the contours of the performance made by an author of literary texts? What prepositions are most fitting? (In, around, through, with, alongside?) (113)
- Does self-disclosure put even greater import on the non-disclosed? (e.g. Brooks sexuality 119)
- Lust and sexuality in Brooks' narrative almost always framed queer? (129)
- Would less subtle editing make direct cinema more truthful? (137)
- Brooks experience suggest on-going interaction with audience (144, 147). Who is the audience for film history and how do audiences figure into the work of an author?
- Including these characters as historians is "risky" but what are the stakes (beyond instability of their truths, facts)?
- When is writing not "merely a staged performance" (169)? How does Hastie understand the author's authenticity?
