A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema marks a new era of feminist film scholarship. The twenty essays collected here demonstrate how feminist historiographies at once alter and enrich ongoing debates over visuality and identification, authorship, stardom, and nationalist ideologies in cinema and media studies. Drawing extensively on archival research, the collection yields startling accounts of women's multiple roles as early producers, directors, writers, stars, and viewers. It also engages urgent questions about cinema's capacity for presenting a stable visual field, often at the expense of racially, sexually, or class-marked bodies. While fostering new ways of thinking about film history, A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema illuminates the many questions that the concept of "early cinema" itself raises about the relation of gender to modernism, representation, and technologies of the body. The contributors bring a number of disciplinary frameworks to bear, including not only film studies but also postcolonial studies, dance scholarship, literary analysis, philosophies of the body, and theories regarding modernism and postmodernism. Reflecting the stimulating diversity of early cinematic styles, technologies, and narrative forms, essays address a range of topics—from the dangerous sexuality of the urban flâneuse to the childlike femininity exemplified by Mary Pickford, from the Shanghai film industry to Italian diva films—looking along the way at birth-control sensation films, French crime serials, "war actualities," and the stylistic influence of art deco. Recurring throughout the volume is the protean figure of the New Woman, alternately garbed as childish tomboy, athletic star, enigmatic vamp, languid diva, working girl, kinetic flapper, and primitive exotic. Contributors. Constance Balides, Jennifer M. Bean, Kristine Butler, Mary Ann Doane, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Amelie Hastie, Sumiko Higashi, Lori Landay, Anne Morey, Diane Negra, Catherine Russell, Siobhan B. Somerville, Shelley Stamp, Gaylyn Studlar, Angela Dalle Vacche, Radha Vatsal, Kristen Whissel, Patricia White, Zhang Zhen

She’s undercover to expose a cult leader. He’s on a mission to save his family . . . Officer Jake Lohmiller can’t believe the dark-haired, self-contained woman who earlier caught his eye was able to get the drop on him. Or that Carmen Redhorse is an undercover Ranger Brigade sergeant investigating the same Colorado cult his mother and sister are in. When a sniper opens fire on the encampment, the two join forces to bring down a killer. But even as the danger—and the death count—escalates, Jake sees the possibilities of teaming up with the smart, sexy cop on a permanent basis. If they can make it out alive . . . “Grabbed my interest from the very start and kept it.” —Books & Spoons

You and Caius Zip will uncover a mystery in Paris, 1885. The characters will be on the stage of the Opera of Paris, and in rehearsals, watching and participating in the staging of Bizet's opera, Carmen. Behind the scenes, a phantom lurks. But is he from the opera? Murders take place that you and Caius, together with the young H.G. Wells and Sherlock Holmes, must solve by using deduction. The entire cast of the opera will concentrate on performing the whole four acts of Carmen, and will do whatever is in their power to lift those curtains, facing the fear and uncertainty of the final outcome. In the meantime, impressionist art will show the extent to which it is interrelated with science. How? Read about the meeting at Monet's house with the painters Van Gogh, Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Lautrec, Rodin, Berth Morisot, and the participation of Sherlock, Wells and Caius who, like the great painters, will add their own brushstrokes to the discussion on creative forms of time travel.

A comprehensive guide to Bizet's CARMEN, featuring insightful and in depth Commentary and Analysis, a complete, newly translated Libretto with French/English side-by side, and over 30 music highlight examples."