Amelie Hastie – författare

In Cupboards of Curiosity Amelie Hastie rethinks female authorship within film history by expanding the historical archive to include dollhouses, scrapbooks, memoirs, cookbooks, and ephemera. Focusing on women who worked during the silent-film era, Hastie reveals how female stars, directors, and others appropriated personal or “domestic” cultural forms not only to publicize their own achievements but also to reflect on specific films and the broader film industry. Whether considering Colleen Moore’s thirty-six scrapbooks or Dietrich’s eccentric book Marlene Dietrich’s ABC, Hastie emphasizes how these women spoke for themselves-as collectors, historians, critics, and experts-often explicitly contemplating the role their writings and material objects would play in subsequent constructions of history.Hastie pays particular attention to the actresses Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks and Hollywood’s first female director, Alice Guy-BlachÉ. From the beginning of her career, Moore worked intently to preserve a lasting place for herself as a Hollywood star, amassing collections of photos, souvenirs, and clippings as well as a dollhouse so elaborate that it drew extensive public attention. Brooks’s short essays reveal how she participated in the creation of her image as Lulu and later emerged as a critic of film stardom. The recovery of BlachÉ’s role in film history by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s was made possible by the existence of the director’s own autobiographical history. Broadening her analytical framework to include contemporary celebrities, Hastie turns to how-to manuals authored by female stars, from Zasu Pitts’s cookbook Candy Hits to Christy Turlington’s Living Yoga. She discusses how these assertions of celebrity expertise in realms seemingly unrelated to film and visual culture allow fans to prolong their experience of stardom.

In Cupboards of Curiosity Amelie Hastie rethinks female authorship within film history by expanding the historical archive to include dollhouses, scrapbooks, memoirs, cookbooks, and ephemera. Focusing on women who worked during the silent-film era, Hastie reveals how female stars, directors, and others appropriated personal or “domestic” cultural forms not only to publicize their own achievements but also to reflect on specific films and the broader film industry. Whether considering Colleen Moore’s thirty-six scrapbooks or Dietrich’s eccentric book Marlene Dietrich’s ABC, Hastie emphasizes how these women spoke for themselves—as collectors, historians, critics, and experts—often explicitly contemplating the role their writings and material objects would play in subsequent constructions of history.

Hastie pays particular attention to the actresses Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks and Hollywood’s first female director, Alice Guy-Blaché. From the beginning of her career, Moore worked intently to preserve a lasting place for herself as a Hollywood star, amassing collections of photos, souvenirs, and clippings as well as a dollhouse so elaborate that it drew extensive public attention. Brooks’s short essays reveal how she participated in the creation of her image as Lulu and later emerged as a critic of film stardom. The recovery of Blaché’s role in film history by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s was made possible by the existence of the director’s own autobiographical history. Broadening her analytical framework to include contemporary celebrities, Hastie turns to how-to manuals authored by female stars, from Zasu Pitts’s cookbook Candy Hits to Christy Turlington’s Living Yoga. She discusses how these assertions of celebrity expertise in realms seemingly unrelated to film and visual culture allow fans to prolong their experience of stardom.

For decades, generations of television fans have been enraptured by Lt. Columbo, played by Peter Falk, as he unravels clues to catch killers who believe they are above the law. In her investigation of the 1970s series cocreated by Richard Levinson and William Link, Amelie Hastie explores television history through an emphasis on issues of stardom, authorship, and its interconnections with classical and New Hollywood cinema. Through close textual analysis, attentive to issues of class relations and connections to other work by Falk as well as Levinson and Link, Columbo: Make Me a Perfect Murder sees American television as an intertextual system, from its origins as a commercial broadcast medium to its iterations within contemporary streaming platforms. Ultimately, Hastie argues, in the titular detective’s constant state of learning about cultural trends and media forms, Columbo offers viewers the opportunity to learn with him and, through his tutelage, to become detectives of television itself.

For decades, generations of television fans have been enraptured by Lt. Columbo, played by Peter Falk, as he unravels clues to catch killers who believe they are above the law. In her investigation of the 1970s series cocreated by Richard Levinson and William Link, Amelie Hastie explores television history through an emphasis on issues of stardom, authorship, and its interconnections with classical and New Hollywood cinema. Through close textual analysis, attentive to issues of class relations and connections to other work by Falk as well as Levinson and Link, Columbo: Make Me a Perfect Murder sees American television as an intertextual system, from its origins as a commercial broadcast medium to its iterations within contemporary streaming platforms. Ultimately, Hastie argues, in the titular detective’s constant state of learning about cultural trends and media forms, Columbo offers viewers the opportunity to learn with him and, through his tutelage, to become detectives of television itself.

For decades, generations of television fans have been enraptured by Lt. Columbo, played by Peter Falk, as he unravels clues to catch killers who believe they are above the law. In her investigation of the 1970s series cocreated by Richard Levinson and William Link, Amelie Hastie explores television history through an emphasis on issues of stardom, authorship, and its interconnections with classical and New Hollywood cinema. Through close textual analysis, attentive to issues of class relations and connections to other work by Falk as well as Levinson and Link, Columbo: Make Me a Perfect Murder sees American television as an intertextual system, from its origins as a commercial broadcast medium to its iterations within contemporary streaming platforms. Ultimately, Hastie argues, in the titular detective’s constant state of learning about cultural trends and media forms, Columbo offers viewers the opportunity to learn with him and, through his tutelage, to become detectives of television itself.

Directed by the actor/film-maker Ida Lupino, The Bigamist (1953) is the story of Harry Graham, a salesman travelling between two towns and two wives. In its portrayal of Harry''s ''double life'', the film takes on a double life of its own, hovering as it does between two genres. Telling the story through Harry''s voice-over, yet eschewing the iconic character of the femme fatale, Lupino''s film reveals and recasts film noir as male melodrama par excellence. In its rendering of this emotionally paralysed man, The Bigamist is a fascinating study of the post-War male. A collaborative affair, The Bigamist was written and produced by Lupino''s ex-husband Collier Young, co-starring his current wife, Joan Fontaine, as bride number one, with Lupino in a turn as bride number two. The last of five films that Lupino directed for the independent production company that she co-founded, The Filmakers, it was notably the only film of its period with a woman director who also played a starring role.Amelie Hastie explores the film in the context of Lupino''s personal and professional history. This is a film, Hastie argues, that reveals the changing structure of Hollywood film production in light of the emergence of independent studies; it delineates the life and exemplifies the work of one of only two women directors in the ''Classical'' Hollywood era; and it provides a complex commentary on the fantasies and fear of mid-century domestic life in the USA.Amelie Hastie is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection and Film History (2007).

Directed by the actor/film-maker Ida Lupino, The Bigamist (1953) is the story of Harry Graham, a salesman travelling between two towns and two wives. In its portrayal of Harry's 'double life', the film takes on a double life of its own, hovering as it does between two genres. Telling the story through Harry's voice-over, yet eschewing the iconic character of the femme fatale, Lupino's film reveals and recasts film noir as male melodrama par excellence. In its rendering of this emotionally paralysed man, The Bigamist is a fascinating study of the post-War male. A collaborative affair, The Bigamist was written and produced by Lupino's ex-husband Collier Young, co-starring his current wife, Joan Fontaine, as bride number one, with Lupino in a turn as bride number two. The last of five films that Lupino directed for the independent production company that she co-founded, The Filmakers, it was notably the only film of its period with a woman director who also played a starring role.Amelie Hastie explores the film in the context of Lupino's personal and professional history. This is a film, Hastie argues, that reveals the changing structure of Hollywood film production in light of the emergence of independent studies; it delineates the life and exemplifies the work of one of only two women directors in the 'Classical' Hollywood era; and it provides a complex commentary on the fantasies and fear of mid-century domestic life in the USA.Amelie Hastie is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection and Film History (2007).