Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade

by Vicki Callahan

Overview

A feminist analysis of the "cinema of uncertainty" through an examination of the crime serials of Louis Feuillade and the work of actress Musidora.

The crime serials by French filmmaker Louis Feuillade provide a unique point of departure for film studies, presenting modes rarely examined within early cinematic paradigms. Made during 1913 to 1920, the series of six films share not only a consistency of narrative structure and style but also a progressive revelation of the criminal threat—a dislocation of both cinematic and ideological subjectivity—as it shifts realms of social, cultural, and aesthetic disturbance. Feuillade’s work raises significant questions of cinema authorship, film history, and film aesthetics, all of which are examined in Vicki Callahan’s groundbreaking work Zones of Anxiety, the first study to address the crime serials of Louis Feuillade from a feminist perspective.

Zones of Anxiety merges cultural history and feminist film theory, arguing for a different kind of film history, a "poetic history" that is shaped by the little-examined cinematic mode of "uncertainty." Often obscured by film technique and film historians, this quality of uncertainty endemic to the cinema comes in part from the formal structures of repetition and recursion found in Feuillade’s serials. However, Callahan argues that uncertainty is also found in the "poetic body" of the actress Musidora who is featured in two of the serials. It is the mobility of the Musidora figure—socially, culturally, sexually, and textually—that makes her a powerful image and also a place to view the historical blind spots of film studies and feminist studies with regard to questions of race, class, and sexuality.

Callahan’s substantial focus on archival research builds a foundation for a host of compelling arguments for a new feminist history of film. Other studies have touched on the issue of gender in early cinema, though until now neither Feuillade’s work nor French silent film have been examined in light of feminist film theory and history. Zones of Anxiety opens up the possibility of alternate readings in film studies, illuminating our understanding of subjectivity and situating a spectatorship that acknowledges social and cultural differences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814337370
Publisher:	Wayne State University Press
Publication date:	01/10/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Vicki Callahan is associate professor of film in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: Writing a Feminist Poetic History through the Cinema of Uncertainty	1
1	Louis Feuillade and the Cinema of Uncertainty: Scenes of Dislocation in Early Cinema/History	13
2	The Fantomas Series: Cinematic Vision and the Test of "Immediate Certainty"	45
3	"Qui? Quoi? Quand? Ou?": Interrogating Woman in Les vampires and Judex	73
4	Stigma and Stigmata: The Cries and Cure of the Fantastic Narrative	117
	Afterword: The Cinematic Legacy of Feuillade and Musidora and a Different Way of Knowing	145
	Notes	153
	Works Cited	171
	Index	181

What People are Saying About This

Rutgers University, Author of to Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema - Sandy Flitterman-Lewis

With nuanced understanding of the field-defining concepts of intertextuality, Callahan interweaves numerous discursive strands around a conceptual 'moment' in the history of representations. The result is a truly interdisciplinary work, as wide-ranging as the encyclopedia scholarship of the eighteenth century, as focused as the most scrupulous histories of a particular time and place, and, what's more, as pleasurable as the most imaginative of surrealist texts, with its unexpected insights lurking just around every page, and its suggestive resonances for the reader of any interest."

University of Michigan, Author of the CinÉ Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914 - Richard Abel

Callahan offers a new reading of Louis Feuillade's famous crime series and serials (1913–1920) as a single text in which the threat of criminality is mapped as a disturbing form of profound uncertainty, or 'dislocation,' that produces shifting (yet related) 'zones of anxiety' from Fantômas to Barrabas. Although that anxiety shifts over time-first linked to the modern city and the bourgeois family, then to the female body and psyche, and finally to the male body and psyche-the greatest threat is embodied, in Les vampires and Judex, in the elusive, ever-changing figure of Musidora."

Ohio State University, Author of Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture - Judith Mayne

Zones of Anxiety is a wonderful analysis of Louis Feuillade's cinematic serials, which have been an inspiration to filmmakers and other artists throughout the twentieth century. Vicki Callahan gives us a fresh approach to Feuillade's work, not only situating it within the context of early French film history, but also within feminist theory and feminist film history. Indeed, Callahan's book demonstrates why feminist questions of spectatorship, stardom, and film form are central to the writing (and rewriting) of film history."

Editorial Reviews

Vicki Callahan's Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade is the first work of its length on Feuillade's serials to appear in the United States, and for this we can all be thankful. Callahan's work is not only the first full-length English language work on Feuillade, but also the first full-length English language work on Musidora. Her book will doubtless become one of the key references on both seminal figures of French cinema."

The Velvet Light Trap

Zones of Anxiety is a wonderful analysis of Louis Feuillade's cinematic serials, which have been an inspiration to filmmakers and other artists throughout the twentieth century. Vicki Callahan gives us a fresh approach to Feuillade's work, not only situating it within the context of early French film history, but also within feminist theory and feminist film history. Indeed, Callahan's book demonstrates why feminist questions of spectatorship, stardom, and film form are central to the writing (and rewriting) of film history."

Ohio State University, author of Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture - Judith Mayne

Callahan offers a new reading of Louis Feuillade's famous crime series and serials (1913–1920) as a single text in which the threat of criminality is mapped as a disturbing form of profound uncertainty, or 'dislocation,' that produces shifting (yet related) 'zones of anxiety' from Fantômas to Barrabas. Although that anxiety shifts over time-first linked to the modern city and the bourgeois family, then to the female body and psyche, and finally to the male body and psyche-the greatest threat is embodied, in Les vampires and Judex, in the elusive, ever-changing figure of Musidora."

University of Michigan, author of The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914 - Richard Abel

With nuanced understanding of the field-defining concepts of intertextuality, Callahan interweaves numerous discursive strands around a conceptual 'moment' in the history of representations. The result is a truly interdisciplinary work, as wide-ranging as the encyclopedia scholarship of the eighteenth century, as focused as the most scrupulous histories of a particular time and place, and, what's more, as pleasurable as the most imaginative of surrealist texts, with its unexpected insights lurking just around every page, and its suggestive resonances for the reader of any interest."

Rutgers University, author of To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema - Sandy Flitterman-Lewis