The New Woman in Film

a conversation between Saul Robbins and Vanessa Rocco

Saturday, September 29, 4-6 pm
Free admission. Seating is very limited.

Please join Saul Robbins, CCNY Board Member Emeritus, and Vanessa Rocco, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester and co-editor of The New Woman International, Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (The University of Michigan Press, 2011), as they discuss The New Woman in Film, presenting excerpts from such classics as Blue Angel (Marlene Dietrich) Pandora’s Box (Louise Brooks) Metropolis(Brigette Helm), the mythology of Mulan, while also discussing the environment in which Amelia Earhart made best use of newsreel technology to promote herself and her aeronautics adventures.

Images of flappers, garçonnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, and trampky—all embodiments of the dashing New Woman—symbolized an expanded public role for women from the suffragist era through the dawn of 1960s feminism. Chronicling nearly a century of global challenges to gender norms, The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s is the first book to examine modern femininity’s ongoing relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ most influential new media: photography and film. This volume of original essays examines the ways in which novel ideas about women’s roles in society and politics were disseminated through new media technologies, probing the significance of radical changes in female fashion, appearance, and sexual identity. Additionally, these essays explore the manner in which New Women artists used photography and film to respond creatively to gendered stereotypes and to re-conceive of ways of being a woman in a rapidly modernizing world.

For more information on The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, co-edited by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, and published by The University of Michigan Press (2011) visit here.

Visit The New Woman International on Facebook.

Speaker Bios

Vanessa Rocco is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. She co-edited The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s to the 1960s, with Elizabeth Otto, released in hardcover in March 2011 and as a paperback edition in March 2012. The book has been accompanied by a myriad of panels, conferences, and symposia, including at the prestigious Barnard Center for Research on Women in Spring 2011. Rocco organized numerous exhibitions and publications as an Assistant and then Associate Curator at the ICP in New York, including Louise Brooks and the “New Woman” in Weimar Cinema (2007), andExpanding Vision: Moholy-Nagy’s Experiments of the 1920s (2004). Her reviews and articles about photography and exhibitions have also appeared in History of Photography, SF Camerawork andAfterimage.

Saul Robbins is Board Member Emeritus at The Camera Club of New York, where he continues to serve on the Auction, Darkroom Residency, and Fundraising Committees. His work has been widely exhibited and published, including Blue Sky Gallery, Deutsche Haus, NYU, MICA, Museum of Fine Arts – Houston, New Orleans Photo Alliance, Ost Gallery, Moscow, Portland Art Museum, Berlin Tagesspiegel, CPW Quarterly, More, The New York Times, Real Simple, and Wired. Grants and awards include The Covenant Foundation, Sony World Photography Awards (Finalist), AJPA Rockower, Gunk Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. Curatorial projects include Projecting Freedom: Cinematic Interpretations of the Haggadah (2010), Regarding Intimacy (2007), and No Live Girls, Peep Show 28 (2002). Robbins received his MFA from Hunter College (CUNY) in 1999 and teaches photography at the International Center of Photography and Pratt Institute in New York City, as well as Master Workshops in Europe.