Current Ph.D. student Annie Fee has been awarded the Graduate School Chester A. Fritz Fellowship for the 2013-14.
In her dissertation she shows how early French film critics leveraged gender, nationalism and class as tools in the production of French high-brow film culture during the interwar period. In contrast to previous studies, she shows how this process did not go uncontested, but led to discursive struggles in film columns, letter columns of film weeklies and in cinemas themselves. With this three month fellowship stipend, she will be collecting empirical traces of a long-forgotten, heterogeneous counterpublic in film weeklies, newspapers and letters to key figures in the French film industry to show how and why Parisian audiences resisted changes to their cinema-going practices.