In September 2013, Professor Karl Toepfer appeared in an episode of the BBC television series Who Do You Think You Are? with the pop singer Marianne Faithfull, whose mother was Eva von Sacher-Masoch, a dancer in Berlin in the early 1930s. Much of the episode was filmed in Berlin, where Professor Toepfer shared information about Eva von Sacher-Masoch’s dance work that Ms. Faithfull had not previously known.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01gssr8
Congratulations Dr. Alison McKee on the publication of her article,
‘Think of me fondly’: Voice, body, affect and performance in Prince/Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera” in the journal: Studies in Musical Theatre (2013). Volume 7 Number 3, pp. 309–325.
This is a link to the complete article.
Abstract
This article argues that Lloyd Webber’s megamusical The Phantom of the Opera, and specifically Michael Crawford’s original performance of the title role in London, New York and Los Angeles, combined sound, voice, gesture and technology in a unique physical expression of desire that reinscribed, exceeded and even redefined spectacle at the level of both the visual and the aural realms (paradoxical as that may seem). This argument runs counter to existing arguments about the separation of scopophilia and audiophilia in the theatre and also departs from some of the arguments about the narrative in different forms which is often discussed as privileging sound and hearing over image and sight.
Congratulations Dr. Alison McKee on the publication of her book: “The Woman’s Film of the 1940s.”
[It is available on AMAZON.COM]
The book explores the relationship among gender, desire, and narrative in 1940s woman’s films which negotiate the terrain between public history and private experience. The woman’s film and other form of cinematic melodrama have often been understood as positioning themselves outside history, and this book challenges and modifies that understanding, contextualizing the films it considers against the backdrop of World War II. In addition, in paying tribute to and departing from earlier feminist formulations about gendered spectatorship in cinema, McKee argues that such models emphasized a masculine-centered gaze at the inadvertent expense of understanding other possible modes of identification and gender expression in classical narrative cinema. She proposes ways of understanding gender and narrative based in part on literary narrative theory and ultimately works toward a notion of an androgynous spectatorship and mode of interpretation in the 1940s woman’s film.
Congratulations, Drew Todd on his upcoming publication:
“Story to Film: The Politics and Poetics of Satyajit Ray’s The Postmaster (1961).” Art of the Particular: The Cinema of Satyajit Ray. Ed. Dilip K. Basu. Ahmedabad: Mapin Press; London: BFI; Seattle: University of Washington Press. Forthcoming 2014.