Written on the screen: Mediation and immersion in Far from Heaven

Camera Obscura

Volumn 19, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 187-218

  Joyrich, Lynne ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 36649013069     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-19-3_57-187     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. Studies on spectatorship and viewers' involvement with texts are too numerous to list here, yet for useful summaries of debates on the topic, see Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1993);
2. Pam Cook and Meike Bernink, eds., The Cinema Book, 2nd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 1999), especially the section "Spectatorship and Audience Research," 366-74.
3. On the relationship between Sirk and Fassbinder, see, for example, Laura Mulvey, "Fassbinder and Sirk," in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 45-48;
4. Andrew Sarris, "Fassbinder and Sirk: The Ties That Unbind," Village Voice, 3 September 1980, 37-38.
5. For a wonderful analysis of Far from Heaven that addresses (among other things) the relationship between Haynes's and Sirk's work, see Sharon Willis, "The Politics of Disappointment: Todd Haynes Rewrites Douglas Sirk," Camera Obscura, no. 54 (2003): 130-75.
6. For analyses of Rock Hudson's star image, specifically in regard to sexuality, see Richard Dyer, "Rock: The Last Guy You'd Have Figured?" in his collection The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002), 159-74;
7. Richard Lippe, "Rock Hudson: His Story," CineAction, no. 10 (1987): 46-54;
8. Richard Meyer, "Rock Hudson's Body," in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 258-88.
9. There is a great deal of critical work on Sirk's films, but for just some of the founding texts, see Paul Willemen, "Distanciation and Douglas Sirk," Screen 12 (1971): 63-67;
10. Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972);
11. Jon Halliday and Laura Mulvey, eds., Douglas Sirk (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival, 1972);
12. Paul Willemen, "Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System," Screen 13 (1972-73): 128-34;
13. Stephen Neale, "Douglas Sirk," Framework 5 (1976-77);
14. Laura Mulvey, "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama," Movie 25 (1977-78): 53-56;
15. Michael Stern, Douglas Sirk (Boston: Twayne, 1979);
16. Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
17. There are too many texts on melodrama to cite them all here. The following anthologies include some of the most important and influential essays on the subject: Christine Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987);
18. Marcia Landy, Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991);
19. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds., Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994).
20. These questions of excess, distanciation, hysteria, and/or irony arise in many of the aforementioned texts on melodrama. However, for a specific debate on the subject, see Griselda Pollock, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, and Stephen Heath, "Dossier on Melodrama," Screen 18 (1977): 105-19.
21. One critical text that I have found very intriguing and productive for my own thoughts about the way in which one might think through the media (though the piece itself does not address Haynes's work) is David Pendleton, "My Mother, the Cinema," Wide Angle 15 (1993): 39-49.
22. For an important, founding discussion of the melodramatic medical film, see Mary Ann Doane, "Clinical Eyes: The Medical Discourse," in her The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 38-69.
23. For a discussion of the trope of split and/or multiplied female identities in film, see Lucy Fisher, "Two-Faced Women: The 'Double' in Women's Melodrama of the 1940s," Cinema Journal 23 (1983): 20-38.
24. Neither of those texts specifically address The Three Faces of Eve, but for readings of the film itself, see Justine Lloyd and Lesley Johnson, "The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-war Housewife, Melodrama, and Home," in Conference Proceedings for "Affective Encounters: Rethinking Embodiment in Feminist Media Studies," ed. Anu Koivunen and Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, 2001), 138-51, available at www.utu.fi/hum/mediatutkimus/affective/proceedings.pdf;
25. Allison Graham, "'The Loveliest and Purest of God's Creatures': The Three Faces of Eve and the Crisis of Southern Womanhood," in Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness, ed. Daniel J. Bernardi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 95-110.
26. For a description of the so-called commutation test as a way of considering the impact of the very presence of particular actors and/or stars in a film, see John O. Thompson, "Screen Acting and the Commutation Test," Screen 19 (1978): 55-69;
27. John O. Thompson, "Beyond Commutation: A Reconsideration of Screen Acting," Screen 26 (1985): 64-76.
28. For a very interesting and influential discussion of women's positions as spectators and/or spectacles, see Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator," in her Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), 7-32.
29. For interesting readings of two other films (Pillow Talk [dir. Michael Gordon, US, 1959] and Sorry, Wrong Number [dir. Anatole Litvak, US, 1948]) that also make heavy use of the telephone, see E. L. McCallum, "Mother Talk: Maternal Masquerade and the Problem of the Single Girl," Camera Obscura, no. 42 (1999): 70-95;
30. David Crane, "Projections and Intersections: Paranoid Textuality in Sorry, Wrong Number," Camera Obscura, no. 51 (2002): 70-97. The latter piece, in particular, employs a strategy of reading the structural arrangement of phone calls across the film that is similar to my strategy here.
31. For descriptions of such rhyme schemes, see Joan Zimmerman, "The Sonnet Verse Form," available at www.baymoon.com/ariadne/form/sonnet.htm (accessed April 2004);
32. Numerous television studies scholars have analyzed broadcast television's illusions of "liveness" and discourse. For some of the founding work, see Stephen Heath and Gillian Skirrow, "Television: A World in Action," Screen 18 (1977): 7-59;
33. John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982);
34. Jane Feuer, "The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology," in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches; an Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, MD: American Film Institute/University Publications of America, 1983), 12-22;
35. Margaret Morse, "The Television News Personality and Credibility: Reflections on the News in Transition," in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 55-79.
36. Many television studies scholars have argued that television viewers should be conceptualized as active producers (of meanings, pleasures, intertexts, viewing communities, and so on) rather than simply as passive receivers. For a selection of some of the founding arguments on this, see John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987);
37. the essays in Ellen Seiter et al., eds., Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power (London: Routledge, 1989);
38. David Motley, Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992);
39. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992);
40. Ien Ang, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World (London: Routledge, 1996).
41. Lynne Joyrich, "All That Television Allows: TV Melodrama, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture," Camera Obscura, no. 16 (1988): 129.
42. Dottie Gets Spanked itself aired on television as part of the 1994 PBS/ITVS series TV Families from producer James Schamus. For a wonderful analysis of Dottie Gets Spanked in terms of what she calls " retrospectatorship" - the way in which a viewer's reception of a text engages fantasy, memory, and past experiences, including fantasies, memories, and experiences of other media texts - see Patricia White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 197-202.