Silent Era Fan Magazines and British Cinema Culture: Mediating Women’s Cinemagoing and Storytelling

Film fan magazines were an important element of British silent cinema culture, and a significant platform for mediating between the film industry and its female spectators. Film periodicals–magazines dedicated to movies and film culture–were read by both men and women. Across the teens and into the 1920s they increasingly targeted a female readership as women came to constitute a larger part of the British audience, and stars became a primary commodity for communicating with female consumers. Popular British magazines like Picturegoer and Girls’ Cinema addressed women as consumers of film culture beyond the picture palace by offering up-to-date compilations of star gossip, behind-the-scenes information, and glamorous illustrations. Fan magazines were repositories not just of film content, but of linking commercial “intertexts,” acting as intermdiaries between film and a broader consumer culture. They featured star-endorsed advertising, and commentary on women’s fashion, cosmetics, and domestic labour. As such, fan magazines worked to make cinemagoing and knowledge of gendered cinema culture an important aspect of British women’s everyday experience of modernity

"So oft to the movies they've been": British fan writing and female audiences in the silent cinema

This article aims to address the ways in which working-class and lower-middle- class British women used silent-era fan magazines as a space for articulating their role within the development of a female film culture. The article focuses on letter pages that formed a key site for female contribution to British fan magazines across the silent era. In contributing to these pages, women found a space to debate and discuss the appeal and significance of particular female representations within film culture. Using detailed archival research tracing the content of a specific magazine, Picturegoer, across a 15-year period (1913–28), the article will show the dominance of particular types of female representation in both fan and "official" magazine discourses, analyzing the ways in which British women used these images to work through national tensions regarding modern femininity and traditional ideas of female propriety and restraint

'The emotional wardrobe': a fashion perspective on the integration of technology and clothing

Since the Industrial Revolution, fashion and technology have been linked through the textile and manufacturing industries, a relationship that has propelled technical innovation and aesthetic and social change. Today a new alliance is emerging through the integration of electronic technology and smart materials on the body. However, it is not fashion designers who are exploiting this emerging area but interaction design, performance art and electronic and computing technologists. 'The Emotional Wardrobe' is a practice-based research project that seeks to address this imbalance by integrating technology with clothing from a fashion perspective. It aims to enhance fashion's expressive and responsive potential by investigating clothing that can both represent and stimulate an emotional response through the interface of technology. Precedents can be found in the work of other practitioners who merge clothing design with responsive material technology to explore social interaction, social commentary and body responsive technology. Influence is also sought from designers who investigate the notion of paradoxical emotions. A survey of emotion science, emotional design, and affective computing is mapped onto a fashion design structure to assess if this fusion can create new 'poetic' paradigms for the interaction of fashion and technology. These models are explored through the production of 'worn' and 'unworn' case studies which are visualised through responsive garment prototypes and multimedia representations. The marriage of fashion and technology is tested through a series of material experiments that aim to create a new aesthetic vocabulary that is responsive and emotional. They integrate traditional fashion fabrics with material technology to enhance the definition of fashion. The study shows that the merger of fashion and technology can offer a more personal and provocative definition of self, one which actively involves the wearer in a mutable aesthetic identity, replacing the fixed physicality of fashion with a constant flux of self-expression and playful psychological experience. The contribution of the research consists of: the integration of technology to alter communication in fashion, a recontextualisation of fashion within a wider arena of emotion and technology, the use of technologies from other disciplines to materialize ideas and broaden the application of those technologies, and the articulation of a fashion design methodology

The Importance of Rock Mass Damage in the Kinematics of Landslides

The stability and kinematics of rock slopes are widely considered to be functions of lithological, structural, and environmental features. Conversely, slope damage features are often overlooked and considered as byproducts of slope deformation. This paper analyzes and discusses the potential role of slope damage, its time-dependent nature, and its control on both the stability of rock slopes and their kinematics. The analysis of several major landslides and unstable slopes, combined with a literature survey, shows that slope damage can play an important role in controlling short- and long-term slope stability. Seasonal and continuously active events cause permanent deformation within the slope due to the accumulation of slope damage features, including rock mass dilation and intact rock fracturing. Rock mass quality, lithology, and scale control the characteristics and complexity of slope damage, as well as the failure mechanism. The authors propose that the role of slope damage in slope kinematics should always be considered in slope stability analysis, and that an integrated characterization–monitoring–numerical modelling approach can enhance our understanding of slope damage, its evolution, and the controlling factors. Finally, it is emphasized that there is currently a lack of guidelines or frameworks for the quantitative assessment and classification of slope damage, which requires a multidisciplinary approach combining rock mechanics, geomorphology, engineering geology, remote sensing, and geophysics

Audiences from the Film Archive:Women’s Writing and Silent Cinema

The article draws on the wide range of extra-textual material available in film ephemera archives like the Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter to address the formation of spectatorship and the response of specific gendered audiences in British silent film culture between 1918 and 1928

Fan Culture and Female Spectatorship in the British Silent Cinema

This study of female fan audiences across the period 1918 to 1928 seeks to engage and readdress conceptions of spectatorship and consumption in silent cinema specific to the British female experience. In focusing upon the film fan magazine���¢��������s ability to offer a platform for the voice of female fans, I explore how fan discourses relate to the struggle between dominant representation and self-representation in the cultural construction of modern British femininity and female spectatorship, progressing towards a exploration of women���¢��������s interaction with female star images as fundamentally entwined with notions of ���¢��������new woman���¢�������� and female consumption

Women’s Writing and British Female Film Culture in the Silent Era

This thesis explores women’s writing and its place in the formation of female film culture in the British silent cinema era. The project focuses upon women’s literary engagement with silent cinema as generative of a female film culture, looking at materials such as fan letters, fan magazines, popular novels, short story papers, novelizations, critical journals and newspaper criticism. Exploring this diverse range of women’s cinema writing, the thesis seeks to make an original contribution to feminist film historiography. Focusing upon the mediations between different kinds of women’s cinema writing, the thesis poses key questions about how the feminist film historian weights original sources in the reclamation of silent female film culture, relative to the varying degrees of cultural authority with which different women commentated upon, reflected upon, and creatively responded to film culture. The thesis moves away from conceptualization of cinema audiences and reception practices based upon textual readings. Instead, the thesis focuses upon evidence of women’s original accounts of their cinemagoing practices (fan letters) and their critical (newspaper and journal criticism) and creative (fiction writers) responses to cinema’s place in women’s everyday lives. Balancing original archival research with multiple overarching methodological frameworks—drawing upon fan theory, feminist reception theory, audience studies, social history and cultural studies—the thesis is attentive to the diversity of women’s experiences of cinema culture, and the literary conduits through which they channeled these experiences. Shifting the recent focus in feminist silent film historiography away from the reclamation of lost filmmaking female pioneers and towards lost female audiences, the thesis thus constructs a nationally specific account of British women’s silent era cinema culture.AHR

The English Village in Emma: An Empirical Study of Heritage Dramas, Location Filming and Host Communities

This article considers location filming for heritage dramas in rural England, focusing on the experiences of the communities that “host” television crews during production. The article specifically examines the filming of the 2009 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, for which the historic Kent village, Chilham, doubled as the fictional Highbury. In doing so, it interrogates two central aspects. First, it illuminates some of the practical issues and economic and cultural impact of location filming for heritage dramas within rural areas. Second, it reflects upon how a community experiences and responds to its status as the host of such a series, considering the impact this has upon questions of identity and heritage. The article draws upon original empirical research, oral history interviews and community archive building conducted within the Chilham community and with Kent Film Office. It explores the memories and experiences of the local population involved in the television location filming process, as both spectators and participants. We thus consider the significance of location from the point of view of those who solicit, resist, profit from, and are caused problems by the temporary transformation of their local space into a television drama shooting space, forging new connections between production practices, location shooting and heritage series and national television/cinema