Damsels and Divas: European Stardom in Silent Hollywood

by Agata Frymus

Overview

2020 Best Early Career Research Monograph, Monash University Malaysia

Damsels and Divas investigates the meanings of Europeanness in Hollywood during the 1920s by charting professional trajectories of three movie stars: Pola Negri, Vilma Bánky and Jetta Goudal. It combines the investigation of American fan magazines with the analysis of studio documents, and the examination of the narratives of their films, to develop a thorough understanding of the ways in which Negri, Bánky and Goudal were understood within the realm of their contemporary American culture. This discussion places their star personae in the context of whiteness, femininity and Americanization. Every age has its heroines, and they reveal a lot about prevailing attitudes towards women in their respective eras. In the United States, where the stories of rags-to-riches were especially potent, stars could offer models of successful cultural integration.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781978806085
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	04/17/2020
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Agata Frymus is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Ghent, Belgium. Agata’s research concentrates on the relationship between race and silent film. Her work has been published in Early Popular Visual Culture, Celebrity Studies and Cinema Journal.
 

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 Pola Negri and Romance: "Ah Love! It's Not for Me" 10

2 Pola Negri as the Vamp: "Temptations Pola Assailed Picture Citadel by Storm" 31

3 Vilma Bánky and Whitenss: "The Almost Perfect Anglo-Saxon Type, More English Than the English" 64

4 Vilma Bánky as the Leading Lady: "Bedecked in Flowing Gowns … as Layers of Pearls and Jewels" 81

5 Vilma Bánky and Marriage: "My Mother Brought Me Up to Be a Wife" 102

6 Jetta Goudal and Exoticism: "She Looks Like a Beautiful Cossack. She Looks Like an Oriental Princess" 122

7 Jetta Goudal and Mystery: "A Riddle in the City of Eager Autobiographies" 142

8 Jetta Goudal and Temperament: "The Most Temperamental Actress" 158

Conclusion 179

Acknowledgments 187

Notes 189

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

"Damsels and Divas ranks with the work of Richard Dyer and Jeanine Basinger as a valuable star study. Highly recommended."

Choice

Lights, Camera, Author! podcast interview with Agata Frymus
https://anchor.fm/the-junot-files/episodes/Lights—Camera—Author—26—-Agata-Frymus-ecvpra

Lights

"An engaging writing style [and a] varied and highly accessible choice of artefacts for analysis."

Early Popular Visual Culture

"Damsels and Divas carves out a space next to Paula Marantz Cohen’s Silent Stars and the Triumph of the American Myth (2001) in regard to silent era stardom and its relationship to the national imaginary."

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

"The immense amount of archival research Frymus has undertaken is evident throughout, along with the wonderful accompanying images, such as film stills, postcards, magazine articles and full-page colour photographs of magazine covers. Moreover, the vast range of notes supplementing each chapter is also impressive. A fascinating review study of similar but different European stars who worked during Hollywood’s early years and is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding work on film stars and extrafilmic material."

Radio and Television Historical Journal of Film

"An excellent piece of film history, brilliantly researched and eloquently narrated, Damsels and Divas Sheds new light on well-known figures, while bringing less familiar stars back into the spotlight. It engages with some of the most exciting scholarship about 1920s American cinema, the study of celebrity and representations of the female body, ethnicity and Europeanness."  
 

co-editor of Film Europe and Film America - Andrew Higson

"Written with engaging clarity and scholarly vigour and founded on first-class archival research, Damsels and Divas is a hugely welcome addition to scholarship on Hollywood stardom in the 1920s. The book shines much-needed light on the extraordinary careers of European female stars Pola Negri, Vilma Bánky and Jetta Goudal as well as the discourses of ethnicity, gender and class that shaped the firmament in which they, as Frymus puts it, ‘shone briefly, but very brightly’."
 

author of Film Stardom and the Ancient Past - Michael Williams