Description
This premier analysis of her body of work explores how Dressler refocused the generic frame of her films beyond the shallow problems of the rich and beautiful, instead dignifying the marginalized, the elderly, women, and the poor. Sturtevant inteprets the meanings of Dressler's body through different genres, venues, and historical periods by looking at her vaudeville career, her transgressive representation of an "unruly" yet sexual body in Emma and Christopher Bean, ideas of the body politic in the films Politics and Prosperity, and Dressler as a mythic body in Min and Bill and Tugboat Annie.
A captivating study of one of classic Hollywood's most fascinating bodies
About the Author
Victoria Sturtevant is an associate professor of film and video studies at the University of Oklahoma.
Reviews
"An eminently good read."--The Bay Area Reporter
"[An] excellent, superbly detailed and illustrated book. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice
"An important, groundbreaking work. In reminding us of the stardom of Marie Dressler--the most significant female box-office star of the early sound era in Hollywood--Sturtevant not only tells the definitive story of this unjustly forgotten figure, but calls into question the very idea that stardom is simply an 'industry of desire.'"--David Desser, coeditor of Hollywood Goes Shopping
"Rich with archival materials, this marvelous study of Marie Dressler's film career deranges the norm, questions critical assumptions, and challenges our historical comprehension of the period."--Jennifer M. Bean, coeditor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema
Book Information
ISBN 9780252034282
Author Victoria Sturtevant
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint University of Illinois Press
Publisher University of Illinois Press
Series Women's Media History Now!
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 20mm