Other than going to yoga, I spent most of this beautiful sunny day inside constructing the syllabus for my grad class on the woman's picture. Perhaps it's because this does overlap with the new book project (on femininity and popular film/TV), I've spent ages on the reading. The students have three assigned text but the scholarship on woman's films is so dated--largely petering out in the early 1990s after a major paradigm shift in the field. I'm trying to have a mix of conceptual, historical, theoretical and textual studies, complete with some reception and institutional work. Alas, some areas are scantily covered at best. I've put 11 articles up on Blackboard and the syllabus really leans heavily on my reaearch--as yet in progress. It's going to help me cover some corners but I'd love to reteach this when the book is out so the gaps won't be quite as obvious--to me, at any rate.
Tomorrow, I just have to chose films. Some are already in there--films like
The Group,
Valley of the Dolls and
The Best of Everything that are at the core of the chapter I'm currently writing.
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| Valley of the Dolls |
Others are impossible to pick--how do you just cut a whole area down to one screening and a few clips? I'm starting with
The Women. Nothing could be more perfect, right? Especially with its Technicolor fashion show (below).
Now time for
Mad Men. My favorite show and it certainly is almost too perfect for my book, and my long-held love of the early and mid-1960s.
1 comment:
What other films on femininity would you recommend? I regret not taking any film classes in college.
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