Cupboards of curiosity review
From Driscollwiki
Hastie, A. (2007). Cupboards of curiosity: Women, recollection, and film history. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN: 0822336871/978-0822336877
Throughout Cupboards of Curiosity, Hastie demonstrates the value of an expanded archive for the production of feminist film history. Looking well beyond films themselves, Hastie explores the writerly practices taken up by women in film to take control over the telling (and re-telling) of their histories. Along the way, scrapbooks, how-to manuals, diaries, and miniature furniture suggest "new modes of thinking" for the historian. Entwined with this methodological argument is a rich discussion of the connections and conflicts among authors, authorship, authority, and historical narrative.
The central chapters in Hastie’s book correspond to three key figures – Colleen Moore, Alice Guy-Blanché, and Louise Brooks – but these do not constitute simple biographical sketches. Rather, the investigation into each individual illustrates a set of gaps that can emerge between a film-making career and its historicization; between a life as it is lived and a life as it is recalled by critics, fans, and scholars. In Moore, Hastie finds an avid collector, philanthropist, and astute investor; in Guy-Blanché, a pioneering female film-maker, technical innovator, and entrepreneur; and in Brooks, a star who, through writing, becomes both a critic and an object of criticism. Each of the three figures is further characterized by the relationships that develop between the ways that scholars have come to know them and the strategies that they have undertaken to preserve and present their own stories. Moore is “the collector”, Guy-Blanché, “the historian”, and Brooks, “the critic”.
In the final chapter, Hastie introduces a fourth archetype through an analysis of various how-to manuals. The diverse artifacts collected here range from Marlene Dietrich’s cookbook to Jane Fonda’s workout videos to Colleen Moore’s fascinating book for women about investing in the stock market. Titling this final chapter "the expert", Hastie's analysis finds the how-to genre a particularly able vehicle for the development of self-narrative. On one level, the author may recount autobiographical anecdotes in the course of sharing recipes or proscribing yoga poses. While on another, she invites readers to quite literally re-enact the bodily practices of her off-screen life.
As Hastie’s project unfolds, Colleen Moore emerges as its star. Her priceless dollhouse, designed and constructed by a near-army of Hollywood craftspeople, provides a material and metaphorical structure within which Hastie locates Moore’s efforts to assert authorship and control over the historicization of her life and career. Moore had a fan's impulse to collect Hollywood ephemera and left a considerable archive for historical analysis. Taken in sum, such extra-filmic practices present multi-dimensional historical narratives that are not accessible via Moore's surviving films alone. As her relatives, archivists, critics, and scholars engage in the collecting, preserving, archiving, and recollecting these artifacts over time, the number and diversity of authorial voices grows. Scholars must learn to identify the contradictions that necessarily accompany any effort to unpack such a complex narrative knot.
Across the book's many examples, Hastie challenges readers to consider the roles that historical subjects play in establishing the terms by which they are remembered. How should the historian interpret the voices of silent film stars speaking through memoir, as did Guy-Blanché, or marginalia, as did Brooks? To what extent can these women be reliable collaborators for the scholar of film history? Where do the roles of star, fan, critic, and scholar meet, compete, and overlap?
The theoretical apparatus Hastie develops in her discussion of Moore does not always transfer easily onto the other figures in her project. While a discussion of the “cinematic” elements of Moore's dollhouse illuminates its narrative power, the same analogy feels stretched in the consideration of certain works by Guy-Blanché and Brooks. For example, during a discussion of a filmed interview with Brooks, extra attention paid to the editing of direct cinema distracts somewhat from an otherwise fascinating close-reading.
Ultimately, Hastie's book requires readers to constantly reconsider the negotiation of authority between audience and author when "audience" and "author" prove unstable categories. In the case of Moore's collection of scrapbooks, Hastie finds that some were evidently written by assistants, some by fans, and still others by the star herself. Yet the collection, taken as a whole, provides a fourth meta-narrative that exceeds the story found in any single element. This insight seems to enlarge the scope of film history to encompass not only the various extra-filmic artifacts produced by women in the film industry, but also the institutional and ideological structures by which these artifacts come to be findable, found, collected, and analyzed.
Cupboards of Curiosity is a convincing demonstration of the value that non-film artifacts bring to projects of film history. As the expressive artifacts of today's film fans and stars increasingly circulate on common technological platforms like YouTube and Twitter, Hastie provides a useful foundation for theorizing the online performance of celebrity. Although this book speaks most clearly to film historians, it will also compel scholars of media history, popular culture, memory studies, and fan and star studies.
