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Reading The Girl From God's Country: Nell Shipman and the Silent Cinema (picked up via a mention from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) was an interesting experience, because the book is, like, 30% HIGH DRAMA FACTS ABOUT NELL SHIPMAN'S LIFE, 30% interesting sociohistorical background relevant to those high drama facts, and 40% intensely theoretical analysis.
And on the one hand the story of Nell Shipman -- early silent-film-heroine turned amateur zookeeper and aspiring director -- is an extremely dramatic and fascinating if eventually depressing one, and on the other hand I'm really out of practice with reading film theory, so when I hit passages like
a still photo of Wapi in close-up forms the uncharacteristic figurative background to the generic title 'Her Last Hope', dramatically marrying signifier and signified in one image underlying the relation of feminine desire to the animal subject. This rather complex relay of interspecies desire, it must be recalled, is the creation of the woman screenwriter and star. The dog, then, in the expression of its desire, must be seen as the representative of the excessive desire of femininity, a transgressive desire that exceeds the capacity for satisfaction through relations with the woman's human lover/husband
my immediate response is a rather plaintive "but -- can't we just have a dog movie without making the dog uncomfortably sexy?"
Much of the book is like that. On the other hand, much of the book is also like:
Shipman hilariously recalls shooting one of the scenes, in which a pack of wolves was to attack a moose. The moose was played by a black pony equipped with a set of papier-mache horns that wobbled pathetically as the 'moose' was 'wallowing hock-deep in drifted snow ... In hot pursuit yelped the dogs, malamutes doubling as wolves, which would have been good casting except that their bushy tails arched to their neck ruffs and wagged. Props had tried to overcome this by stringing the tails with ribbons of BB-shot but the dogs did not like this addition and were stopping to bite the shot. The moose was doing worse. He'd given up the chase and was lying down'.
So absolutely a worthwhile read, but really what it's done primarily is to convince me is that I need to track down Nell Shipman's memoir. Some facts about Shipman's life:
- shooting on location in a blizzard in Canada during her star-making film turn in Back to God's Country, one of her costars got pneumonia and died! another (her boyfriend) got frostbite and lost several toes! Nell Shipman, who did her own stunts driving a dogsled in fifty-below-zero tempatures, was completely fine
- she was hired at one point to direct a car commercial, and instead made a feature-length film about a hero driving his trusty vehicle through the desert! to rescue Nell Shipman! kidnapped by bandits!!! at which point he gets a blow to the head and spends the rest of the film unconscious while Nell Shipman drives them both home. (The trusty car was exhibited in theaters.)
- after making several films with her trusty animal companions, Nell Shipman packed dogs, bear, wild bobcats, and various other members of the menagerie -- along with her toddler and her frostbitten boyfriend -- up to Idaho and started her own production company, focusing on Heroic Girl And Animal Films
- (which almost immediately went bankrupt)
- (also the book goes into great detail about the fortitude and good humor with which Nell Shipman faced all of her solo stunt work but says very little about the stunt work which, presumably, was also required of the toddler, who appeared in various films as well ...)
- ANYWAY then she wrote several novels -- the book examines both the Very Autobiographical One and The Unfortunately Racist One in great detail -- and also a memoir and spent her twilight years trying to break back into the movie business while staying in hotels just long enough to rack up a bill, then fleeing before she could get caught
- a happy story? perhaps not; a compelling one: EXTREMELY YES
osprey_archer) was an interesting experience, because the book is, like, 30% HIGH DRAMA FACTS ABOUT NELL SHIPMAN'S LIFE, 30% interesting sociohistorical background relevant to those high drama facts, and 40% intensely theoretical analysis. And on the one hand the story of Nell Shipman -- early silent-film-heroine turned amateur zookeeper and aspiring director -- is an extremely dramatic and fascinating if eventually depressing one, and on the other hand I'm really out of practice with reading film theory, so when I hit passages like
a still photo of Wapi in close-up forms the uncharacteristic figurative background to the generic title 'Her Last Hope', dramatically marrying signifier and signified in one image underlying the relation of feminine desire to the animal subject. This rather complex relay of interspecies desire, it must be recalled, is the creation of the woman screenwriter and star. The dog, then, in the expression of its desire, must be seen as the representative of the excessive desire of femininity, a transgressive desire that exceeds the capacity for satisfaction through relations with the woman's human lover/husband
my immediate response is a rather plaintive "but -- can't we just have a dog movie without making the dog uncomfortably sexy?"
Much of the book is like that. On the other hand, much of the book is also like:
Shipman hilariously recalls shooting one of the scenes, in which a pack of wolves was to attack a moose. The moose was played by a black pony equipped with a set of papier-mache horns that wobbled pathetically as the 'moose' was 'wallowing hock-deep in drifted snow ... In hot pursuit yelped the dogs, malamutes doubling as wolves, which would have been good casting except that their bushy tails arched to their neck ruffs and wagged. Props had tried to overcome this by stringing the tails with ribbons of BB-shot but the dogs did not like this addition and were stopping to bite the shot. The moose was doing worse. He'd given up the chase and was lying down'.
So absolutely a worthwhile read, but really what it's done primarily is to convince me is that I need to track down Nell Shipman's memoir. Some facts about Shipman's life:
- shooting on location in a blizzard in Canada during her star-making film turn in Back to God's Country, one of her costars got pneumonia and died! another (her boyfriend) got frostbite and lost several toes! Nell Shipman, who did her own stunts driving a dogsled in fifty-below-zero tempatures, was completely fine
- she was hired at one point to direct a car commercial, and instead made a feature-length film about a hero driving his trusty vehicle through the desert! to rescue Nell Shipman! kidnapped by bandits!!! at which point he gets a blow to the head and spends the rest of the film unconscious while Nell Shipman drives them both home. (The trusty car was exhibited in theaters.)
- after making several films with her trusty animal companions, Nell Shipman packed dogs, bear, wild bobcats, and various other members of the menagerie -- along with her toddler and her frostbitten boyfriend -- up to Idaho and started her own production company, focusing on Heroic Girl And Animal Films
- (which almost immediately went bankrupt)
- (also the book goes into great detail about the fortitude and good humor with which Nell Shipman faced all of her solo stunt work but says very little about the stunt work which, presumably, was also required of the toddler, who appeared in various films as well ...)
- ANYWAY then she wrote several novels -- the book examines both the Very Autobiographical One and The Unfortunately Racist One in great detail -- and also a memoir and spent her twilight years trying to break back into the movie business while staying in hotels just long enough to rack up a bill, then fleeing before she could get caught
- a happy story? perhaps not; a compelling one: EXTREMELY YES
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