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For decades, feminist film analysis has been focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation? In Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality, Genevieve Yue explores how gender and sexual difference have been deeply embedded within film materiality. Though the industrial practices she examines are typically hidden from view, they are no less gendered than the images projected onscreen. In rich archival and technical detail, Yue examines three sites of technical film production: the film laboratory, editing practices, and the film archive. Within each site, she locates a common motif, the vanishing female body, which is transformed into material to be used in the making of a film. Yue develops a theory of gender and film materiality through readings of narrative film, early cinema, experimental film, and moving image art. In this original work of feminist media history, Girl Head shows how gender has had a surprising and persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen.

Techne of Giving intervenes in two debates: the first, the relation between an affirmative biopolitics and biopower; and the second, how cinema, Italian cinema especially, can provides fresh perspectives on how to engage generously with biopolitical apparatuses. In so doing, the book brings together contemporary philosophy and film studies in order to argue for the generous features of the cinematic apparatus. Not all apparatuses are the same—some are more generous than others to the degree that they allow the spectator to experience, in the workings of the visible and invisible, a mode of non-mastery able to respond to biopower. As the canon of biopolitical critique solidifies, Techne of Giving therefore pushes back against thanatopolitical readings of biopolitics. Drawing on authors as diverse as Adorno, Winnicott, Metz, Irigaray, and Lyotard, Techne of Giving skirts the fields of visual studies and contemporary thought to imagine a generous form of life. In so doing, the book is intended to jumpstart discussions of what it means to be generous and what part gratitude plays when considering different forms of being in common. The hope is to short-circuit neoliberal models of giving with their buyers and sellers, and instead to posit forms of non-giving and non-receiving. In addition the book follows the visual traces of such a model of generosity and giving across a number of classic Italian films. By so doing, it sketches a sensibility in which protagonists neither give nor receive in any traditional sense.

In this book the author repositions the advertising industry as a central agent in the development of broadcasting in the USA and challenges conventional views about the role of advertising in culture, the integration of media industries, and the role of commercialism in broadcasting history. It describes the “golden age” of radio, from roughly the late 1920s until the late 1940s, when advertising agencies were arguably the most important sources of radio entertainment. The book is based largely on archival materials from academics, advertising agencies and contemporaneous trade publications and on the voluminous correspondence between NBC and agency executives held in the NBC Records at the Wisconsin Historical Society. It shows how admen combined “showmanship” with “salesmanship” to produce a uniquely American form of commercial culture. In recounting the history of this form, the author enriches and corrects our understanding not only of broadcasting history but also of advertising history, business history and American cultural history from the 1920s to the 1940s.