Crazy Cats Crying: Re-presentations of High/Low Culture in Film

Session Organizer: Alice Haisman, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago

Alice Haisman
University of Illinois at Chicago

ahaism1@uic.edu

Title: The Vulnerable Metaphor: Guy Madden’s Saddest Music in the World and Aesthetics of Prosthetics Abstract: This paper uses as its starting point “The Vulnerable Articulate: James Gillingham, Aimee Mullins, and Matthew Barney” by Marquard Smith. Using Smith’s framework for examining technofetishism as risk and reward I examine Guy Madden’s, Saddest Music in the World, a film that has as its central character a double-amputee beer baroness who devises a ploy to extract money from the poor and desperate during the depression. Saddest Music, like “Vulnerable Articulate,” addresses some complicated issues about eroticization of prosthesis, disability, and technology as well as passing on the part of amputees. Where Smith is wary of metaphorical opportunism even as he supports the visibility of Aimee Mullins’ various incarnations, Madden’s dialogue with the audience, one that is rife with references to disability’s place in film history and challenges to the high culture/low culture dichotomy, often flirts with metaphorical opportunism for the purposes of examining disability and prosthesis as a concept that is always in flux.

JoAnne Ruvoli

University of Illinois at Chicago
jgruba1@uic.edu

Title: Doubled Exposure: Mary Pickford's Stella Maris and Little Lord Fauntleroy

Abstract: Mary Pickford's popular series of growing girl films like the Poor Little Rich Girl, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Little Princess all from 1917, established an appealing and entertaining formula that catapulted Pickford to international stardom. Ambitious and technically skilled, Pickford headed her own production company and was a major player in the ground breaking distribution company United Artists. With her creative control secured by her corporate success, she successfully sought out challenges to make each film better than the next. However each attempt to break out of her popular little girl film persona with adult, mature roles while praised by critics met resistance by fans.   This paper will look more closely at Pickford's Stella Maris (1918) and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921), Pickford's two dual role films, to examine how within each film
she plays two divergent characters and achieves both a nuanced mature performance to satisfy her acting ambitions and the popular typed characters that her audience demanded.

Carrie Lynn Messenger

University of Illinois at Chicago

cmesse1@uic.edu

Title: Social Realism, Bollywood Style: Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas and the Indian Diaspora Abstract: The vast and rich world of Bollywood cinema offers film theory a commercial, popular yet alternative site to Hollywood, and at the same time India's colonial past has lead to a cinema that has been useful for post-colonial theorists.  My own interest in Bollywood began with an opportunity to look at one intersection where film theory and post-colonial theory meet, but the more contemporary Bollywood films I watched, the more captivated I was by the spectacle and song.  Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas (2002) takes full advantage of Bollywood's narrative strategies to tell the story of a tragic love triangle.  The Devdas story has been filmed ten times in India, and Bhansali's film refers especially to Bimal Roy's 1955 version.  In Bhansali's Devdas, the alcoholic Devdas and the devoted Paro remain consistent to Roy's, more or less, but Chandramukhi the prostitute who loves Devdas is quite different.  In this paper, I will argue that the changes in Chandramukhi's story point to Bhansali's audience in the Indian diaspora, to the influence of the prostitute characters in Indian auteur Guru Dutt's 1950s films Pyaasa and Kagooz Ke Phool, and to the associations of Chandramukhi's character to artifice itself and therefore to the artifice of this film and film in general.  Bhansali's Devdas is a self-reflective, highly stylized film playing with the characters and ideas of Roy's social realism.

James Pate

University of Illinois at Chicago

jpate2@uic.edu

Title: War Melodrama and Guy Maddin's 'Archangel' Abstract: This paper focuses on Guy Maddin's movie Archangel, and the ways in which it reflects – and sometimes subverts - elements from war movie melodrama. In the film, Maddin uses many of the techniques associated with war melodrama (theatrical acting, surprising plot twists, loss of identity), but often for distinctly non-melodramatic ends. In the paper, I will compare Archangel to certain war melodramas from the 40's and 50's, and examine how Maddin's movie radically reworks many of the recurring themes found in those films.