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Television and Dating in Contemporary China: Identities, Love and Intimacy
by Chao YangThis book considers the changing nature of intimacy in contemporary China, providing a unique case study of romantic subjectivities in young people in the world’s fastest growing economy. Since the implementation of reform in 1978, the economic and socio-cultural environment of modern China has experienced a dramatic transformation under the influence of urbanization and globalization, facilitating more individualized identity among Chinese youth. This book bridges the gap between an emergent emphasis on individualisation and the country’s traditional norms and values. It focuses on young people’s understandings of various forms of relationships such as cohabitation, extramarital relationships and multiple relationships, suggesting a challenge to traditional familial values and an increasingly diversified understanding of the concepts of love and romance. By examining the formation of relationships among 21st century Chinese youth, notably through the lens of popular Chinese TV dating programs, this book considers how dating and relationships mirror China’s changing societal structure and examines social and cultural transformations in Chinese society.
Television and Dating in Contemporary China: Identities, Love and Intimacy
by Chao YangThis book considers the changing nature of intimacy in contemporary China, providing a unique case study of romantic subjectivities in young people in the world’s fastest growing economy. Since the implementation of reform in 1978, the economic and socio-cultural environment of modern China has experienced a dramatic transformation under the influence of urbanization and globalization, facilitating more individualized identity among Chinese youth. This book bridges the gap between an emergent emphasis on individualisation and the country’s traditional norms and values. It focuses on young people’s understandings of various forms of relationships such as cohabitation, extramarital relationships and multiple relationships, suggesting a challenge to traditional familial values and an increasingly diversified understanding of the concepts of love and romance. By examining the formation of relationships among 21st century Chinese youth, notably through the lens of popular Chinese TV dating programs, this book considers how dating and relationships mirror China’s changing societal structure and examines social and cultural transformations in Chinese society.
Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Cinema: Zhang Yimou's Genre Films
by Xuelin ZhouThis pivot considers key transformations within the Chinese film industry since the country opened its doors to the outside world in the late 1970s, and moved from an ideologically-centred censorship system to one of contestation and cooperation between politics, art and market. Focusing on Zhang Yimou, arguably one of China’s most innovative and controversial filmmakers and directors, the author addresses the challenges faced by contemporary Chinese cinema in the face of Hollywood dominance, notably making genre films in an increasingly globalized context, and the necessary compromises between the local and global, the national and the international. Through a combination of textual analysis and context study, it examines action-oriented films Zhang made as responses to a rapidly changing film market and industry.
Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Cinema: Zhang Yimou's Genre Films(PDF)
by Xuelin ZhouThis pivot considers key transformations within the Chinese film industry since the country opened its doors to the outside world in the late 1970s, and moved from an ideologically-centred censorship system to one of contestation and cooperation between politics, art and market. Focusing on Zhang Yimou, arguably one of China’s most innovative and controversial filmmakers and directors, the author addresses the challenges faced by contemporary Chinese cinema in the face of Hollywood dominance, notably making genre films in an increasingly globalized context, and the necessary compromises between the local and global, the national and the international. Through a combination of textual analysis and context study, it examines action-oriented films Zhang made as responses to a rapidly changing film market and industry.
French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 1: 1907-1929
by Richard AbelThese two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of André Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.
French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume 2: 1929-1939
by Richard AbelThese two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.
The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture
by Anke GleberAnke Gleber examines one of the most intriguing and characteristic figures of European urban modernity: the observing city stroller, or flaneur. In an age transformed by industrialism, the flaneur drifted through city streets, inspired and repelled by the surrounding scenes of splendor and squalor. Gleber examines this often elusive figure in the particular contexts of Weimar Germany and the intellectual sphere of Walter Benjamin, with whom the concept of flanerie is often associated. She sketches the European influences that produced the German flaneur and establishes the figure as a pervasive presence in Weimar culture, as well as a profound influence on modern perceptions of public space. The book begins by exploring the theory of literary flanerie and the technological changes--street lighting, public transportation, and the emergence of film--that gave a new status to the activities of seeing and walking in the modern city. Gleber then assesses the place of flanerie in works by Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and other representatives of Weimar literature, arts, and theory. She draws particular attention to the works of Franz Hessel, a Berlin flaneur who argued that flanerie is a "reading" of the city that perceives passersby, streets, and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity. Gleber also examines connections between flanerie and Weimar film, and discusses female flanerie as a means of asserting female subjectivity in the public realm. The book is a deeply original and searching reassessment of the complex intersections among modernity, vision, and public space.
The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock's Films
by Lesley BrillWas Alfred Hitchcock a cynical trifler with his audience's emotions, as he liked to pretend? Or was he a profoundly humane artist? Most commentators leave Hitchcock's self-assessment unquestioned, but this book shows that his movies convey an affectionate, hopeful understanding of human nature and the redemptive possibilities of love. Lesley Brill discusses Hitchcock's work as a whole and examines in detail twenty-two films, from perennial favorites like North by Northwest to neglected masterpieces like Rich and Strange.
Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, With a New Postscript and a Filmography Brought up to the Present
by Jay LeydaThis history of the turbulent destiny of Kino ("film" in Russian) documents the artistic development of the Russian and Soviet cinema and traces its growth from 1896 to the death of Sergei Eisenstein in 1948. The new Postscript surveys the directions taken by Soviet cinema since the end of World War II. Beginning with the Lumiere filming of the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, Jay Leyda links Russia's pre-Revolutionary past with its Communist present through the observation of a major cultural phenomenon: the evolution of the Soviet film as an artistic and political instrument. The book contains 150 drawings and photographs and five appendices, including a list of selected Russian and Soviet films from 1907 to the present.
The Theater and Cinema of Buster Keaton
by Robert KnopfFamous for their stunts, gags, and images, Buster Keaton's silent films have enticed everyone from Hollywood movie fans to the surrealists, such as Dalí and Buñuel. Here Robert Knopf offers an unprecedented look at the wide-ranging appeal of Keaton's genius, considering his vaudeville roots and his ability to integrate this aesthetic into the techniques of classical Hollywood cinema in the 1920s. When young Buster was being hurled about the stage by his comically irate father in the family's vaudeville act, The Three Keatons, he was perfecting his acrobatic skills, timing, visual humor, and trademark "stone face." As Knopf demonstrates, such theatrics would serve Keaton well as a film director and star. By isolating elements of vaudeville within works that have previously been considered "classical," Knopf reevaluates Keaton's films and how they function. The book combines vivid visual descriptions and illustrations that enable us to see Keaton at work staging his memorable images and gags, such as a three-story wall collapsing on him (Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928) and an avalanche of boulders chasing him down a mountainside (Seven Chances, 1925). Knopf explains how Keaton's stunts and gags served as fanciful departures from his films' storylines and how they nonetheless reinforced a strange sense of reality, that of a machine-like world with a mind of its own. In comparison to Chaplin and Lloyd, Keaton made more elaborate use of natural locations. The scene in The Navigator, for example, where Buster brandishes a swordfish to fend off another swordfish derives much of its power from actually being shot under water. Such "hyper-literalism" was but one element of Keaton's films that inspired the surrealists. Exploring Keaton's influence on Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Federico García Lorca, and Robert Desnos, Knopf suggests that Keaton's achievement extends beyond Hollywood into the avant-garde. The book concludes with an examination of Keaton's late-career performances in Gerald Potterton's The Railrodder and Samuel Beckett's Film, and locates his legacy in the work of Jackie Chan, Blue Man Group, and Bill Irwin.
Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema
by Janet StaigerEmploying a wide range of examples from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Birth of a Nation to Zelig and Personal Best, Janet Staiger argues that a historical examination of spectators' responses to films can make a valuable contribution to the history, criticism, and philosophy of cultural products. She maintains that as artifacts, films do not contain immanent meanings, that differences among interpretations have historical bases, and that these variations are due to social, political, and economic conditions as well as the viewers' constructed images of themselves. After proposing a theory of reception study, the author demonstrates its application mainly through analyzing the varying responses of audiences to certain films at specific moments in history. Staiger gives special attention to how questions of class, gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity enter into film viewers' interpretations. Her analysis reflects recent developments in post-structuralism, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies, and includes a discussion of current reader-response models in literary and film studies as well as an alternative approach for thinking about historical readers and spectators.
The Japanese Film: Art and Industry
by Joseph L. Anderson Donald RichieTracing the development of the Japanese cinema from 1896 (when the first Kinetoscope was imported) through the golden ages of film in Japan up to today, this work reveals the once flourishing film industry and the continuing unique art of the Japanese film. Now back in print with updated sections, major revaluations, a comprehensive international bibliography, and an exceptional collection of 168 stills ranging over eight decades, this book remains the unchallenged reference for all who seek a broad understanding of the aesthetic, historical, and economic elements of motion pictures from Japan.
Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany
by Patrice PetroPatrice Petro challenges the conventional assessment of German film history, which sees classical films as responding solely to male anxieties and fears. Exploring the address made to women in melodramatic films and in popular illustrated magazines, she shows how Weimar Germany had a commercially viable female audience, fascinated with looking at images that called traditional representations of gender into question. Interdisciplinary in her approach, Petro interweaves archival research with recent theoretical debates to offer not merely another view of the Weimar cinema but also another way of looking at Weimar film culture. Women's modernity, she suggests, was not the same as men's modernism, and the image of the city street in film and photojournalism reveals how women responded differently from men to the political, economic, and psychic upheaval of their times.
The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani
by Gaetana MarroneIn this, the first comprehensive book on Liliana Cavani, Gaetana Marrone redraws the map of postwar Italian cinema to make room for this extraordinary filmmaker, whose representations of transgressive eroticism, spiritual questing, and psychological extremes test the limits of the medium, pushing it into uncharted areas of discovery. Cavani's film The Night Porter (1974) created a sensation in the United States and Europe. But in many ways her critically renowned endeavors--which also include Francesco di Assisi, Galileo, I cannibali, Beyond Good and Evil, The Berlin Affair, and several operas and documentaries--remain enigmatic to audiences. Here Marrone presents Cavani's work as a cinema of ideas, showing how it takes pleasure in the telling of a story and ultimately revolts against all binding ideological and commercial codes. The author explores the rich visual language in which Cavani expresses thought, and the cultural icons that constitute her style and images. This approach affords powerful insights into the intricate interlacing of narrated events. We also come to understand the importance assigned to the gaze in the genesis of desire and the acquisition of knowledge. The films come to life in this book as the classical tragedies Cavani intended, where rebels and madmen experience conflict between historical and spiritual reality, the present and the past. Offering intertextual analyses within such fields as psychology, history, and cultural studies, along with production information gleaned from Cavani's personal archives, Marrone boldly advances our understanding of an intriguing, important body of cinematic work.
The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience
by Vivian SobchackCinema is a sensuous object, but in our presence it becomes also a sensing, sensual, sense-making subject. Thus argues Vivian Sobchack as she challenges basic assumptions of current film theory that reduce film to an object of vision and the spectator to a victim of a deterministic cinematic apparatus. Maintaining that these premises ignore the material and cultural-historical situations of both the spectator and the film, the author makes the radical proposal that the cinematic experience depends on two "viewers" viewing: the spectator and the film, each existing as both subject and object of vision. Drawing on existential and semiotic phenomenology, and particularly on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack shows how the film experience provides empirical insight into the reversible, dialectical, and signifying nature of that embodied vision we each live daily as both "mine" and "another's." In this attempt to account for cinematic intelligibility and signification, the author explores the possibility of human choice and expressive freedom within the bounds of history and culture.
Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch
by Sabine HakeA collaborator with Warner Brothers and Paramount in the early days of sound film, the German film director Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is famous for his sense of ironic detachment and for the eroticism he infused into such comedies as So This Is Paris and Trouble in Paradise. In a general introduction to his silent and early sound films (1914-1932) and in close readings of his comedies, Sabine Hake focuses on the visual strategies Lubitsch used to convey irony and analyzes his contribution to the rise of classical narrative cinema. Exploring Lubitsch's depiction of femininity and the influence of his early German films on his entire career, she argues that his comedies represent an important outlet for dealing with sexual and cultural differences. The readings cover The Oyster Princess, The Doll, The Mountain Cat, Passion, Deception, So This Is Paris, Monte Carlo, and Trouble in Paradise, which are interpreted as part of an underlying process of negotiation between different modes of representation, narration, and spectatorship--a process that comprises the conditions of production in two different national cinemas and the ongoing changes in film technology. Drawing attention to Lubitsch's previously neglected German films, this book presents the years until 1922 as the formative period in his career.
The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa
by Stephen PrinceThe Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa, who died at the age of 88, has been internationally acclaimed as a giant of world cinema. Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen Prince provides two new chapters that examine Kurosawa's remaining films, placing him in the context of cinema history. Prince also discusses how Kurosawa furnished a template for some well-known Hollywood directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. Providing a new and comprehensive look at this master filmmaker, The Warrior's Camera probes the complex visual structure of Kurosawa's work. The book shows how Kurosawa attempted to symbolize on film a course of national development for post-war Japan, and it traces the ways that he tied his social visions to a dynamic system of visual and narrative forms. The author analyzes Kurosawa's entire career and places the films in context by drawing on the director's autobiography--a fascinating work that presents Kurosawa as a Kurosawa character and the story of his life as the kind of spiritual odyssey witnessed so often in his films. After examining the development of Kurosawa's visual style in his early work, The Warrior's Camera explains how he used this style in subsequent films to forge a politically committed model of filmmaking. It then demonstrates how the collapse of Kurosawa's efforts to participate as a filmmaker in the tasks of social reconstruction led to the very different cinematic style evident in his most recent films, works of pessimism that view the world as resistant to change.
Transcultural Cinema
by David Macdougall Lucien TaylorDavid MacDougall is a pivotal figure in the development of ethnographic cinema and visual anthropology. As a filmmaker, he has directed in Africa, Australia, India, and Europe. His prize-winning films (many made jointly with his wife, Judith MacDougall) include The Wedding Camels, Lorang's Way, To Live with Herds, A Wife among Wives, Takeover, PhotoWallahs, and Tempus de Baristas. As a theorist, he articulates central issues in the relation of film to anthropology, and is one of the few documentary filmmakers who writes extensively on these concerns. The essays collected here address, for instance, the difference between films and written texts and between the position of the filmmaker and that of the anthropological writer.In fact, these works provide an overview of the history of visual anthropology, as well as commentaries on specific subjects, such as point-of-view and subjectivity, reflexivity, the use of subtitles, and the role of the cinema subject. Refreshingly free of jargon, each piece belongs very much to the tradition of the essay in its personal engagement with exploring difficult issues. The author ultimately disputes the view that ethnographic filmmaking is merely a visual form of anthropology, maintaining instead that it is a radical anthropological practice, which challenges many of the basic assumptions of the discipline of anthropology itself. Although influential among filmmakers and critics, some of these essays were published in small journals and have been until now difficult to find. The three longest pieces, including the title essay, are new.
Breaking the Glass Armor
by Kristin Thompson"Classical works have for us become covered with the glassy armor of familiarity," wrote Victor Shklovsky in 1914. Here Kristin Thompson "defamiliarizes" the reader with eleven different films. Developing the technique formulated in her Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Princeton, 1981), she clearly demonstrates the flexibility of the neoformalist approach. She argues that critics often use cut-and-dried methods and choose films that easily fit those methods. Neoformalism, on the other hand, encourages the critic to deal with each film differently and to modify his or her analytical assumptions continually. Thompson's analyses are thus refreshingly varied and revealing, ranging from an ordinary Hollywood film, Terror by Night, to such masterpieces as Late Spring and Lancelot du Lac. She proposes a formal historical way of dealing with realism, using Bicycle Thieves and The Rules of the Game as examples. Stage Fright and Laura provide cases in which the classical cinema defamiliarizes its own conventions by playing with audience expectations. Other chapters deal with Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Play Time and Godard's Tout va bien and Sauve qui peut (la vie). Although neoformalist analysis is a rigorous, distinctive approach, it avoids extensive specialized vocabulary and esoteric concepts: the essays here can be read separately by those interested in the individual films. The book's overall purpose, however, goes beyond making these particular films more accessible and intriguing to propose new ways of looking at cinema as a whole.
Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (PDF)
by Virginia Wexman WexmanWho decides how, when, and where Americans fall in love and get married? Virginia Wexman's acute observations about movie stars and acting techniques show that Hollywood has often had the most powerful voice in demonstrating socially sanctioned ways of becoming a couple. Until now serious film critics have paid little attention to the impact of performance styles on American romance, and have often treated "patriarchy," "sexuality," and the "couple" as monolithic and unproblematic concepts. Wexman, however, shows how these notions have been periodically transformed in close association with the appearance, behavior, and persona of the stars of films such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Way Down East, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Sunset Boulevard, On the Waterfront, Nashville, House of Games, and Do the Right Thing. The author focuses first on the way in which traditional marriage norms relate to authorship (the Griffith-Gish collaboration) and genre (John Wayne and the Western). Looking at male and female stardom in terms of the development of "companionate marriage," she discusses the love goddess and the impact of method acting on Hollywood's ideals of maleness. Finally she considers the recent breakdown of the ideal of monogamous marriage in relation to Hollywood's experimentation with self-reflexive acting styles. Creating the Couple is must reading for film scholars and enthusiasts, and it will fascinate everyone interested in the changing relationships of men and women in modern culture.
The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition
by Andrew Horton Michael BrashinskyNow faced with the "zero hour" created by a new freedom of expression and the dramatic breakup of the Soviet Union, Soviet cinema has recently become one of the most interesting in the world, aesthetically as well as politically. How have Soviet filmmakers responded to the challenges of glasnost? To answer this question, the American film scholar Andrew Horton and the Soviet critic Michael Brashinsky offer the first book-length study of the rapid changes in Soviet cinema that have been taking place since 1985. What emerges from their collaborative dialogue is not only a valuable work of film criticism but also a fascinating study of contemporary Soviet culture in general. Horton and Brashinsky examine a wide variety of films from BOMZH (initials standing for homeless drifter) through Taxi Blues and the glasnost blockbuster Little Vera to the Latvian documentary Is It Easy to Be Young? and the "new wave" productions of the "Wild Kazakh boys." The authors argue that the medium that once served the Party became a major catalyst for the deconstruction of socialism, especially through documentary filmmaking. Special attention is paid to how filmmakers from 1985 through 1990 represent the newly "discovered" past of the pre-glasnost era and how they depict troubled youth and conflicts over the role of women in society. The book also emphasizes the evolving uses of comedy and satire and the incorporation of "genre film" techniques into a new popular cinema. An intriguing discussion of films of Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Kazakhstan ends the work.
To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground
by David E. JamesJonas Mekas, one of the driving forces behind New York's alternative film culture from the 1950s through the 1980s, made for an unlikely counterculture hero: a Lithuanian emigr and fervent nationalist from an agrarian family, he had not grown up with either capitalist commercialism or the postwar rebellion against it. By focusing on his sensitivity to political struggle, however, leading film commentators here offer fascinating insights into Mekas's career as a writer, filmdistributor, and film-maker, while exploring the history of independent cinema in New York since World War II. This collection of essays, interviews, and photographs addresses such topics as Mekas's column in the Village Voice, his foundation and editorship of Film Culture, his role in the establishment of Anthology Film Archives and The Film-Makers Co-op (the major distribution center for independent film), his interaction with other artists, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and finally the critical assessment of his own films, from Guns of the Trees and The Brig in the sixties to the diary films that followed Walden. The contributors to this volume are Paul Arthur, Vyt Bakaitis, Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Rudy Burckhardt, David Curtis, Richard Foreman, Tom Gunning, Bob Harris, J. Hoberman, David E. James, Marjorie Keller, Peter Kubelka, George Kuchar, Richard Leacock, Barbara Moore, Peter Moore, Scott Nygren, John Pruitt, Lauren Rabinovitz, Michael Renov, Jeffrey K. Ruoff, and Maureen Turim.
Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past
by Robert A. RosenstoneIn Revisioning History thirteen historians from around the world look at the historical film on its own terms, not as it compares to written history but as a unique way of recounting the past. How does film construct a historical world? What are the rules, codes, and strategies by which it brings the past to life? What does that historical construction mean to us? In grappling with these questions, each contributor looks at an example of New History cinema. Different from Hollywood costume dramas or documentary films, these films are serious efforts to come to grips with the past; they have often grown out of nations engaged in an intense quest for historical connections, such as India, Cuba, Japan, and Germany. The volume begins with an introduction by Robert Rosenstone. Part I, "Contesting History," comprises essays by Geoff Eley (on the film Distant Voices, Still Lives), Nicholas B. Dirks (The Home and the World), Thomas Kierstead and Deidre Lynch (Eijanaika), and Pierre Sorlin (Night of the Shooting Stars). Contributing to Part II, "Visioning History," are Michael S. Roth (Hiroshima Mon Amour), John Mraz (Memories of Underdevelopment), Min Soo Kang (The Moderns) and Clayton R. Koppes (Radio Bikini). Part III, "Revisioning History" contains essays by Denise J. Youngblood (Repentance), Rudy Koshar (Hitler: A Film from Germany), Rosenstone (Walker), Sumiko Higashi (Walker and Mississippi Burning), and Daniel Sipe (From the Pole to the Equator).
Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (PDF)
by Charles J. MalandCharles Maland focuses on the cultural sources of the on-and-off, love-hate affair between Chaplin and the American public that was perhaps the stormiest in American stardom.
Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon
by Shelley StampMovie-Struck Girls examines women's films and filmgoing in the 1910s, a period when female patronage was energetically courted by the industry for the first time. By looking closely at how women were invited to participate in movie culture, the films they were offered, and the visual pleasures they enjoyed, Shelley Stamp demonstrates that women significantly complicated cinemagoing throughout this formative, transitional era. Growing female patronage and increased emphasis on women's subject matter did not necessarily bolster cinema's cultural legitimacy, as many in the industry had hoped, for women were not always enticed to the cinema by dignified, uplifting material, and once there, they were not always seamlessly integrated in the social space of theaters, nor the new optical pleasures of film viewing. In fact, Stamp argues that much about women's films and filmgoing in the postnickelodeon years challenged, rather than served, the industry's drive for greater respectability. White slave films, action-adventure serial dramas, and women's suffrage photoplays all drew female audiences to the cinema with stories aimed directly at women's interests and with advertising campaigns that specifically targeted female moviegoers. Yet these examples suggest that women's patronage was built with stories focused on sexuality, sensational thrill-seeking, and feminist agitation, topics not normally associated with ladylike gentility. And in each case concerns were raised about women's conduct at cinemas and the viewing habits they enjoyed, demonstrating that women's integration into motion picture culture was not as smooth as many have thought.