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Post by dreamer on Dec 24, 2006 9:27:46 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Jan 17, 2007 17:30:07 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Jan 17, 2007 17:32:27 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Jan 17, 2007 17:34:18 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Apr 3, 2007 11:15:23 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Jun 26, 2007 19:21:55 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Jul 3, 2007 1:19:58 GMT -5
An ad.
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Post by dreamer on Aug 29, 2007 13:28:43 GMT -5
These two shots are some of my fav ones from Sylvia Scarlett
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Post by dreamer on Oct 4, 2007 12:04:29 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Oct 4, 2007 12:05:34 GMT -5
This is one of the more beautiful shots from SS
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Hepburner
Full Member
'Enemies are so stimulating'
Posts: 180
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Post by Hepburner on Oct 25, 2007 2:06:57 GMT -5
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Post by dreamer on Nov 19, 2007 6:10:00 GMT -5
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Sofia
Junior Member
? Hep-Hep... Hooray!
Posts: 79
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Post by Sofia on May 22, 2009 15:32:45 GMT -5
This is an article I found some time ago online From "Queer cinema" (Harry M. Benshoff, Sean Griffin) (...) Cukor's Sylvia Scarlett is one of the queerest films ever made in Hollywood. This is the film in which Katharine Hepburn plays a teenaged boy for most of the running time. It opens with a printed prologue that hints at the queerness to come: "To the adventurer, to all who stray from the beaten track, life is an extravagance in which laughter and luck and love come in odd ways; but they are nonetheless sweet fot that". Cukor had wanted the film to begin with Hepburn already dressed as a boy, but the studio forced him to modify this opening: "We had to add a silly, frivolous prologue, to explain why this girl was dressed like a boy, and being so good at it. We weren't allowed to give the impression that she liked it, or that she's done it before, or that it came naturally". Although a commercial failure in 1936, many critics were taken with Hepburn's abilities as androgyne. Time magazine's critic noted the film revealed "the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better-looking as a boy than as a woman". The New York Herald Tribune effused, "The dynamic Miss Hepburn is the handsomest boy of the season". Discussing Sylvia Scarlett in his first book on cult films, Danny Peary finds it "quite remarkable that during a period when such things as transvestism and bisexuality were taboo no one ever mentioned the strange sights found in this picture". Peary proceeds to enumerate some of these "strange sights" in language that veers between the heterocentric and the homophobic. "We actually see Katharine Hepburn kissed on the lips by another woman", Peary breathlessly notes. And he feels compelled to follow this observation with the straight-comforting explanation that this queer kiss occurs when Maudie thinks Sylvia is a boy and tries to seduce "him". Peary then goes on about the scene in which the artist Michael Fane invites the person he knows as Sylvester to share a bed with him. Though Peary tries to suggest that "Fane's intentions may be innocent", he adds, "but how many men in their thirties are such good friends with teen-aged boys?". "Then, of course", Peary concludes, "there is Fane's famous line to Sylvester: "I don't know what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look at you". Actually Peary misquotes the line. What Fane says to Sylvester is "I know |not 'I don't know'| what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look at you". Peary's rewriting bespeaks denial and repression of queerness: Cukor's film of the recognition and assertion of queerness. And it is a queerness that ultimately has bisexuality as the foundation of its erotic politics: Michael Fane, the painter (Brian Aherne); Jimmy Monkley, the con artist (Cary Grant); and Lily, the countess (Natalie Paley) are all shown to be attracted both to Sylvester and to Sylvia. Since we know Sylvester is Sylvia, even Maudie's (Dennie Moore) flirtations with Sylvester carry some bisexual charge in addition to their lesbian suggestiveness. The narrative concludes with the union of two bisexual couples: Jimmy and Lily (after she leaves Fane) and Fane and Sylvia-Sylvester. The public and critical silence in 1936 about the "strange sights" in Sylvia Scarlett is not so remarkable considering that a commentator in 1981 can't even see what the film is really about -or, perhaps, can't comfortably accept what he sees because it gives him the same "queer feelings" Fane gets when he looks at Sylvester. After homophobically declaring that "modern thinking has added unfortunate connotations" to "trans-gender impersonation", Cukor critic Gary Carey admits that audiences who find cross-gender material "embarrassing and alienating" do so because "too often it cuts close to our own suspicions about the actors involved or to our fears about ourselves". Queerly seen, Sylvia Scarlett is an erotically daring film whose seriocomic uses of transvetism within the conventions of a mistaken identity plot playfully invite all spectators to experience "queer feelings" as they move through the range of homo-, bi-, and heterosexual desires articulated in the text. And the film gains added dimensions if you know that Cary Grant's real-life bisexuality could be playing a major role in its gender -and sexuality- blurring proceedings. While Cukor and Hepburn often joked about the film as a failure, Cukor said he was pleased about its "sexuality before its time" cult status, admitting that although Sylvia Scarlett was a "flop" it was "still [his] favorite picture". No doubt much of Cukor's fondness for the film had to do with what he called the "impertinence" of the proect, and his collaboration with Hepburn, Grant, and scenarist John Collier ("a daring kind of writer"). "But the picture did something to me", Cukor told one interviewer. "It slowed me up. I wasn't going to be so goddamned daring after that. I thought, 'Well, kiddo, don't you break all sorts of new paths, you just watch it'". Three years before Sylvia Scarlett, Hepburn revealed her butch potential for the first time in film as record-breaking pilot Cynthia Darrington in Arzner's Christopher Strong and as Jo March in Cukor's Little Women, in which she cut off her hair to raise money for her mother. A queer-cultural-history-meets-auteurism question occurs here. Would Hepburn's screen image have been established as quite so appealingly butch, or androgynous if you like, if Cukor and Arzner hadn't been assigned to guide her through most of her early RKO starmaking films, including her screen debut in Cukor's A Bill of Divorcement (1932)? In the context of queer film history, it is no coincidence that Hepburn's best post-1930s butch role was in Cukor's Pat and Mike, in which she plays a professional athlete. Arzner's and Cukor's important connection to a star image that has been developed in queer cultures largely without reference to directorial auteurism brings this chapter back to its original question about autorship, queerness, and queer cultures. That is, how compatible are auteurist cult-of-the-director (star, writer, etc.) notions with non-academic and academic queer approaches to mass culture? Armed with the knowledge of Cukor's and Arzner's queerness (even if we can't always be certain about how they would define it), and knowing of their often highly influential roles in production, we might recognize a queer version of autorship in which queerly positioned readers examine mass culture texts -here Cukor and Arzner films- in order to indicate where and how the queer discourses of both producers and readers might be articulated within, alongside, or against the presumably straight ideological agendas of most texts. These types of queer readings are tricky and interesting because they establish queer authorial discourses by negotiating a range of textual meanings caught somewhere between auteurist considerations of director (or star, writer, etc.) intentionality and cultural/cultural studies considerations of reception practices and uses of texts. Most generally, I hope this chapter has suggested the potential for combining queer cultural history and cultural practices with established critical and theoretical models, such as auteurism and authorship, in order to develop a variety of distinctively queer-inflected approaches to discussing mass culture.
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Post by Alicia on May 22, 2009 22:36:12 GMT -5
Cool article, Sofia! I wish I had that when I wrote my film studies paper last quarter... It would have been perfect!
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Sofia
Junior Member
? Hep-Hep... Hooray!
Posts: 79
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Post by Sofia on May 23, 2009 3:08:44 GMT -5
Cool article, Sofia! I wish I had that when I wrote my film studies paper last quarter... It would have been perfect! Wow that's a cool subject!!! Actually my paper has to be more specific (it's for the former graduation, here in Italy we have the Bologna system, with 3+2 years), so I'm writing it about My Fair Lady (stage version and movie version compared)... but I think my next paper will be all about Kath
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