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Directed by the actor/filmmaker 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, able only to reveal the truth of his duplicity to us, the film audience, 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 and co-starred his current wife, Joan Fontaine, as bride number one. The last of six 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 independent Hollywood, at a time when the studio system was beginning to dissolve, and as a commentary on the fraught institution of marriage. She also considers The Bigamist in relation to Lupino’s personal and professional history. Lupino was one of only two women members of the Directors’ Guild of America in the classical Hollywood era, and The Bigamist, Hastie argues, reveals multiple traces of Lupino’s experiences of working as both director and actress in the movie business. ...
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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....
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