Peter Brook’s “Lord of the Flies”: Violence on Vieques

By Catherine Russell

The 1963 film adaptation of William Golding’s 1954 novel of Lord of the Flies has become a classic of US Independent Cinema. By comparing the situation of the film shoot on the Caribbean island of Vieques (part of Puerto Rico) with Golding’s parable about human violence, this article explores the ironic failure of the filmmakers to recognise the historical violence that continued to plague this particular island as a contested site. Peter Brook’s approach to the novel demanded an attitude of innocence on the part of his novice actors and crew members to capture the authenticity that he sought. His so-called documentary approach to an island narrative was only achieved through the fiction of obfuscating the real violence taking place on and around Vieques.

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Summer of Soul: The Angel of History Comes to Harlem

By Catherine Russell

The fifth title in the Docalogue series, this book examines Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s 2021 documentary, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in multiple areas including but not limited to archival studies, Black studies, cultural studies, documentary studies, historiography, and music studies.

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Review of Nasty Women DVD set

By Catherine Russell

Cinema’s First Nasty Women presents a rambunctious roster of talented ladies from the silent era challenging gender norms from every direction. They turn households inside out; they invert class and racial hierarchies; they do everything that men do, and they do it all in high spirits. These women actors and characters, who are white, Indigenous, Asian, and African American, are brought together in a groundbreaking Kino Lorber box set of ninetynine films made between 1899 and 1926, constituting more than fourteen hours of running time. Based in equally significant scholarship by Maggie Hennefeld, author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018) and Laura Horak, author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers University Press, 2016), this collection remakes and expands the living history of the silent period. Hennefeld and Horak are the Project Directors, with archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakcp from Amsterdam’s Eye Film Museum as cocurator.

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The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star

By Catherine Russell

From The Lady Eve, to The Big Valley, Barbara Stanwyck played parts that showcased her multidimensional talents but also illustrated the limits imposed on women in film and television. Catherine Russell’s A to Z consideration of the iconic actress analyzes twenty-six facets of Stanwyck and the America of her times. Russell examines Stanwyck’s work onscreen against the backdrop of costuming and other aspects of filmmaking. But she also views the actress’s off-screen performance within the Hollywood networks that made her an industry favorite and longtime cornerstone of the entertainment community. Russell’s montage approach coalesces into an engrossing portrait of a singular artist whose intelligence and savvy placed her center-stage in the production of her films and in the debates around women, femininity, and motherhood that roiled mid-century America.

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Fire of Love

By Catherine Russell

The relation between volcanoes and love has a long history in Japan, as hundreds of lovers and spurned lovers have leapt to their deaths in the fiery depths of Mount Mihara for centuries, but most famously during the Twenties and Thirties. Later in the century, in 1991, another pair of lovers—volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft—perished at the foot of Japan’s Mount Unzen. Having rushed there to observe an imminent eruption to film and photograph it in action, they, along with forty-one journalists and firefighters, were swallowed by Unzen’s powerful excretion of moving earth. Sara Dosa’s remarkable documentary, created largely from the Kraffts’ visual archive, includes a shot of their final volcano erupting, as captured by a camera abandoned by a fleeing journalist. Although Japanese TV has only recently discovered the beauty and attraction of volcano imagery, the Kraffts had known and pursued these aspects throughout their working lives.

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The File on Theresa Harris, Black Star of the Archive

By Catherine Russell

The file on Black actor Theresa Harris includes 103 Hollywood films and TV shows for which she has screen credit, along with many that she does not, from 1929 to 1958. She was cast as an extra, a bit player, or a character actor with lines, most of the time as a maid. In this speculative history of her career, I examine a selection of her roles in films such as Baby Face (1933), Jezebel (1938), I Married a Zombie (1943), Out of the Past (1947), and Lady from Shanghai (1947) as if they were racial events. The act of critical viewing, of actually noticing Harris’s contribution to these and other films, can arguably alter the reading of the films in important ways. My reparative readings are inspired by the theoretical work of Eve Sedgwick and Christine Goding-Doty, and the historiographical work of Saidiya Hartman and Daphne Brooks.

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Sensing the Archive: Exploring The Digital (Im)materiality of the Moving Image Archive

By Catherine Russell

The articles, video essays, and short pieces collected in this issue of Frames Cinema Journal are not only about archival materials, but offer valuable insight into the media archive itself. I am pleased to see that my open-ended neologism of archiveology has been adapted and bent into so many creative and critical shapes.1Media archives emerge from this dossier as fluid and shape-shifting media in themselves that not only collect store, catalogue and save, but have the capacity for time-travel, regeneration, and renewal–sometimes within the very context of ruin, degeneration, and loss.The various essays, artists’ statements and discussions, along with video essays and discussions of single films in this dossier, tease out the complex historiographies embedded in archiveological media.

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Migrant Cinema: Scenes of Displacement

By Catherine Russell

Films about people fleeing intolerable conditions, heading for promised lands of opportunity, have been flooding festival screens for at least the last ten years. As dumentary subjects, displaced people crossing deserts and seas, waiting in nowhere zones for asylum, are significant subjects for filmmakers committed to social justice. Documentarians can put names and faces to migrants, hear their stories, and witness their humiliations; they can recognize the humanitarian helpers along the way, as well as the brutality of those who hold them back. The best of migrant cinema, though, dignifies the migrant through aesthetic techniques of framing, lighting, and portraiture, and is best described as experimental non fiction. Given their homelessness, their fugitive status, and their open-ended journeys, the migrants’ plight lends itself to experimental treatments that challenge the cliches of conventional TV journalism.

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Review of Johnny Guitar, Blu-ray

By Catherine Russell

Johnny Guitar was shot in the dramatic landscape of Sedona, Arizona, which before this new Blu-ray release featuring the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio could be glimpsed only at the edges of the frame. While the terrain is still mere background to a melodrama of loyalty and desire, the film’s coloring and staging make much more sense when complemented by the vista of towering, sculptured red mesas.

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Review of The Lady Eve DVD

By Catherine Russell

Film critic Robin Wood once described The Lady Eve as a “perfect film.” Peter Bogdanovich in his introduction to the new Criterion Blu-ray says that “you can’t get a better movie,” and indeed it is a standout comedy in Preston Sturges’s short career, in Barbara Stanwyck’s long career, and among early Forties studio releases. The writing is sharp, smart, and loaded with double entendres that provocatively challenge the mores of the Production Code. Sturges’s script, very loosely based on a story by Monckton Hoffe, takes an elliptical, allegorical detour through the Garden of Eden, aka the Amazon, where there are women, but none of them “white.”

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