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6 - Lubitsch’s May McAvoy Trilogy: Threesomes, Triangles, Allegories
- Edited by Brigitte Peucker, Yale University, Connecticut, Ido Lewit, The Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel Aviv
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- Book:
- New Approaches to Ernst Lubitsch
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 16 April 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 March 2024, pp 123-140
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Summary
Abstract
Lubitsch used triangles as a plot device, but also as the basis for his artistic play with form, especially in his three films featuring May McAvoy. It is most clearly in evidence in Three Women (1924), which makes explicit the principle of threes in its title and plot. This essay explores the principle on a formal level, but expands the idea to suggest that Lubitsch's play with threes extends beyond the films themselves: beneath his playfulness is a tendentious joke directed at Warner Brother executives who were rapacious womanizers. Considering Lady Windermere's Fan (1925) against Three Women reveals a series of remarkable continuities and inversions that extend to the film Lubitsch planned to direct, but did not––The Jazz Singer.
Keywords: May McAvoy, Warner Brothers, silent film, comedy, jokes.
Sabine Hake, whose Passions and Deceptions remains a wonderfully insightful book on the silent films of Ernst Lubitsch, responded to my query about the print sources she used when analyzing Lubitsch's Three Women (Lubitsch, 1924) by remarking: “so interesting that there is this renewed interest in Lubitsch—not sure why.” Certainly, recent Lubitsch biographers have considered Three Women an unlikely starting point for an investigation that might renew our interest: Joseph McBride's 2018 treatment of Lubitsch characterized the film as “shallow melodramatic fare,” and suggested that Lubitsch may have “lacked a feeling of genuine creative involvement.” In his 2020 examination of the transnational Lubitsch, Rick McCormick dismissed the film in a single paragraph. Admittedly, my decision to pursue this topic is embarrassingly idiosyncratic: This is my third essay on Ernst Lubitsch and his films with Warner Brothers in the mid-1920s. Returning to this group of six films––one of which (Kiss Me Again, 1925) is lost and another of which (The Jazz Singer, Alan Crosland, 1927) was directed by someone else, my attention was drawn to the newly available restoration of Three Women, Lubitsch's second film for Warner Brothers. There was a certain coincidental charm between my “three essays” and Lubitsch's Three Women, but it was also the first of three Lubitsch films to star May McAvoy.
The Stereopticon and Cinema: Media Form or Platform?
- Edited by Maria Tortajada, François Albera
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- Book:
- Cine-Dispositives
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 10 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 08 January 2015, pp 129-160
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Today, many academics working in the Humanities and Social Sciences are pursuing a broad interest in media studies. At least at Yale University, where we have created an interdisciplinary seminar in this area, what we mean by media studies – our actual focuses and concerns – differ substantially. In the English Department, for instance, Media Studies foregrounds the study of the book and the move from the scroll or codex. In the more contemporary context, Michael Warner and Jessica Pressman are clearly interested in the way the digital media and the Internet are impacting the book and print culture more generally. Part of this re-orientation de-centers poetry and literature and embraces the study of low and quotidian forms of culture for which aesthetic concerns are far from primary: the sermon, the newspaper, the broadside or even the form (typically a document with spaces for the writer to fill in information).
History of Art has sometimes moved in similar directions, as Oliver Grau and others have investigated the history of the image. However, as Thomas Elsaesser suggests, the field has also explored the ways in which new media forms have entered and often transformed artistic practices as presented in the museum and art gallery through installation art. These approaches are connected only in a highly attenuated way with notions of “the media” in political science and sociology. The media refers to the press: the newspaper, the telegraph, then radio, television and now the Internet – in short, the mass media. In this conception of media studies, film is barely acknowledged. When talking about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century dissemination of the news, newsreels and film more generally are typically never mentioned.
Film Studies, which perhaps started to fill a gap between History of Art and Literature/Language departments, expanded to embrace television and then, in a peripheral way, radio. Walter Benjamin, with his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” soon became a touchstone, which allows for a more fully developed media studies that includes photography and the phonograph. And now, it has expanded again to include digital media, the Internet and an array of screens – on cell phones and in airline terminals. Although there are divisions in Film Studies at Yale, Francesco Casetti and Thomas Elsaesser are among those pushing Film Studies in a Media Studies direction.