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University of California Press

Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema

Sarah Bernhardt Gabrielle Réjane Mistinguett

by Victoria Duckett (Author)
Price: $12.99 / £10.99
Publication Date: Apr 2023
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 210
ISBN: 9780520382121
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Illustrations: 25 color illustrations
Series:
Endowments:

About the Book

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

At the forefront of the entertainment industries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were singular actors: Sarah Bernhardt Gabrielle Réjane and Mistinguett. Talented and formidable women with global ambitions these performers forged connections with audiences across the world while pioneering the use of film and theatrics to gain international renown. Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema traces how these women emerged from the Parisian periphery to become world-famous stars. Building upon extensive archival research in France England and the United States Victoria Duckett argues that through intrepid business prowess and the use of early multimedia to cultivate their celebrity image these three artists strengthened ties between countries continents and cultures during pivotal years of change.

About the Author

Victoria Duckett is Associate Professor of Film at Deakin University and author of Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film.

Reviews

 "With her new book, Duckett models how we feminist film historians may approach not only Mistinguett but many other silent comediennes like Sarah Duhamel and Little Chrysia, whose careers on stage and in the cinema still require further research. I have no doubt that more scholars too will enjoy Duckett’s Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema, for its fascinating case studies, breadth of historical knowledge and depth of archival research."
Early Popular Visual Culture
“Eloquently written, instructive, dense and exemplary proof of the productivity of such an integrated theatre and cinema history for feminist film history in particular.”
 
European Journal of Women’s Studies
“A vital contribution in understanding early film history and providing the space for voices that have, historically, been excluded.”
 
French Studies
“Engagingly melds feminist film historiography, early cinema studies, theatre studies, global histories of the rise of the New Woman, and interrogations of convergent intermediality.”
 
Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film
"Victoria Duckett reveals the innovation and acumen of three turn-of-the-century French actresses once dismissed as old-fashioned and theatrical in reshaping both theater and cinema—Bernhardt Réjane and Mistinguett. Réjane a trailblazing comic actress is a particular revelation. Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema demonstrates the power of transnational history in all its surprises and contradictions."—Laura Horak author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women Lesbians and American Cinema 1908–1934

"Theater and cinema history have for too long been separate and even antagonistic. Victoria Duckett has already shown her prowess in navigating both and in this new study she marshals formidable amounts of evidence to compare the transnational careers of three legendary French actresses who triumphantly crossed from stage to screen by different routes. In doing so they brought immense prestige to the new medium and to French cinema. Star studies should never be the same."—Ian Christie author of Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema

"Victoria Duckett provides a remarkably detailed analysis of the underappreciated contribution made to early film by three celebrated French performers. Her book conclusively demonstrates how closely intertwined the inherited techniques of nineteenth-century theater and the innovative possibilities of twentieth-century cinema were in practice. This is a major reassessment of a significant moment in transnational culture that casts aside disciplinary boundaries to discover a creative and complicated historical process."—John Stokes Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature King’s College London

"From Belle Époque Paris and Victorian London to cosmopolitan New York Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema takes us on an exhilarating transatlantic and transdisciplinary voyage. Archival intertextual and historiographic Victoria Duckett’s three eloquent case studies dislodge preconceptions to enlarge our vision of the international and intermedial impact of the actress-entrepreneur from transmedial networks of performance and celebrity culture to emerging film markets and business models demonstrating theater’s vital and intrinsic role in early cinema and culture."—Tami Williams author of Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations