“They talk of the artist finding liberation in work, it is true. One can be someone else in another, more dramatic, more beautiful world.” Oh how true Ronald! That’s what it is like in Silver Screen Suppers world. Liberated! More dramatic and more beautiful. Lovely.
On a day that promises to be the start of a new British heatwave I am making a pie for Charley. Gadzooks – isn’t it hot enough in my kitchen?! Anyhow, it was next on the list to test cook so cooking it I am. It’s making me chuckle to think about the first time I made this pie. In Delaware with Ruthie when we were having the Silver Screen Summit. I think we’d gone to the supermarket with our token for “A Relaxing Moment” at the in-house coffee shop. Ha ha!
I am missing Ruth a LOT but it was great to have a sleepy late night conversation with her on the phone earlier this week. Things are afoot with the book proposal, we may have something cooking…
You are brave to cook in this heat–I’ve been eating fruit, hummus and trying to avoid the oven this week. Still pies and pastry are (almost) worth it. I hope it tastes yummy.
Good luck with the book proposal–I’m hammering one out now, or at least doing the readings/screenings/research necessary to get one done.
Ooh exciting – tell me more about the book proposal! It really is unusually hot here – it’s 7am and it’s already boiling!
Here goes! Off the top of my head but it might end up sounding very much like a prepared abstract which isn’t intentional..
It’s on femininity in popular film and TV (mainly US and UK)–it’s basically a combination of conceptual and historical work. While acknowledging that femininity changes, I look at textual features that are often associated with femininity and evoke a feminine address. Chapters are on the use of detail, which not only touches on a feminine way of seeing/feminine narratology, but also the importance of fashion, beauty, consumerism and mise-en-scene, on the female group protagonist (chapter two), the female look at the female body (chapter three), self-analysis (chapter 4) and work/public space/historiography (chapter 5), which reflects back on woman’s history and approaches to femininity in popular film/tv and film/tv theory/criticism/history . I’m working on my sample chapter on female group protagonists which focuses on the 50s/60s (The Best of Everything, Valley of the Dolls, The Group and The Chapman Report are key films), 60s/70s (Liver Birds, Take Three Girls) and the 90s-2000s. Drawing on the idea of femininity as relational, I look at the importance of group protagonists in woman’s films, here in the context of second wave feminism and post-feminism. I’m going to consider how this collective sensibility ties into ideas of femininity as youthful, as becoming and varied, and see how these concepts both lead to their infantalisation and to a positioning of the feminine that exists in some slightly non-heteronormative state, hence its position as something subject to critique.
There really has been no detailed study of femininity–the nearest is Jackie Stacey’s Star Gazing–so I hope this will fill a hole in the market!
Sorry to hear you are dealing with the oppressive heat too. It broke a little bit here on Friday and Saturday but the temps are creeping back up.
I got your email and will look for that reference. Let me know what dvds you want copying.
Woweee! That sounds like a humdinger m’lovely!