Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

Undergraduate Discipline

Film History

AB, Princeton University. MA, PhD, Certificates in European Cultural Studies and Visual Art, Yale University. Hirschfeld-Kroen works on 19th- to 20th-century US and European film, literature, media, and culture, with specializations in classical Hollywood, feminist film theory and history, media archaeology, and cinematic allegories of media labor and technology. She has taught courses at Yale and Sarah Lawrence on the movie musical, Hollywood from the margins, feminist film history, 19th-century foundations of film, machines of modern gender from the spindle to Siri, and the working girl around the world in film. Hirschfeld-Kroen is currently adapting her dissertation into a book. Rise of the Modern Mediatrix: The Feminization of Media and Mediating Labor, 1865-1945 assembles a vast archive of fictional telegraph, telephone, and typewriter girls to illustrate how the feminization of low-level information labor shaped modern media. Through readings of newsreels, ads, novels, plays and films from four national contexts (US, France, Germany, England), she offers a new take on the relationship between film and media studies, showing how old cultural conceptions of feminine mediation and new feminized media infrastructures like the switchboard and typing pool shaped film form. An article based on this work, “Weavers of Film: The Girl Operator Mends the Cut,” won the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Gender and Feminisms Caucus Graduate Student Writing Prize and was published in Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal (summer 2021). Hirschfeld-Kroen’s research interests include media archaeology (modern discourse networks, female information workers, cyborgs, androids, ties between communications and entertainment media); Classical Hollywood and European film history (especially through gender/race/ethnicity, intermediality/intertextuality, sound/voice studies, star studies, fan/spectator studies, studio authorship, apparatus theory, the history of film editing and other gendered forms of technical mediating labor); French and US silent and sound film comedy (especially slapstick, screwball, romantic); critical theory (psychoanalysis, Marxism, Frankfurt school, feminist literary/film/media theory and techno-science), feminized genres/forms (esp. domestic novel, sentimental fiction, melodrama, “women’s films,” and the musical); modernism/modernity studies (new cultural illnesses, allegories of alienated machine labor, proto-cinematic media, cosmological imaginaries/mass media from Edisonades to planetaria and geodesic domes); disability studies (especially deaf and blind studies); and cultural histories of ventriloquism, childhood, play, and semiotics of popular culture/everyday life. Her research interests are intertwined with an abiding interest in film curation and preservation. While pursuing her PhD at Yale, she was a frequent speaker at screenings and programmed film series for the Graduate Film Colloquium, Films at the Whitney, and Yale’s annual European film conference. She also interned in film programming at the Museum of the Moving Image. From years of inspecting and repairing 8mm and 16mm reels in the Yale Film Archive, she learned a material approach to film and media history, which she brings to the classroom. SLC, 2023–

Undergraduate Courses 2023-2024

Film History

Feminist Film History

Open, Seminar—Fall

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? Why are there so few female voiceovers and so many plucky secretaries in classical Hollywood films? Should dead starlets be revived as feminist icons? Can dominant aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” or feminist filmmaking techniques? How do you uncover invisible or suppressed histories? This seminar offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film studies by retracing film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. While our focus will be on US and European films and scholarship from the Silent Era to the end of the 20th century, students are encouraged to pursue conference projects on feminist movements, films, and film theory from any era or any part of the world. Screenings will highlight a mixture of obscure and canonical films, and readings will cover a multidisciplinary range of feminist film scholarship—from psychoanalytic film theory to media archaeology and cyberfeminism. Topics to be discussed include women at the origins of film, women’s work onscreen and on the studio lot, the male gaze and spectacular female stars of classical cinema, fan culture and gendered genres, second-wave feminism and the French New Wave, race and Technicolor, lesbian representability, and feminist authorship as political practice.

Faculty

First-Year Studies: Hollywood From the Margins

FYS—Year

In the last 10 years, a wave of online movements, sexual harassment cases, and studio worker strikes have exposed the systemic forces of exclusion and exploitation that shaped and still shape the US film industry. But how do we grapple critically with the ongoing material impact of Hollywood’s aura? What do we do with leftover myths and “beloved,” but horrifying, classics? Do we suppress them? Contextualize and critique them? Or disrupt their coherence and dismantle their authors by reappropriating them for art and other uses? This FYS seminar pairs 1930s-60s Hollywood films with novels, memoirs, essays, and experimental films about Hollywood to interrogate dominant narratives of film history and explore alternative modes to critique and reactivate classical Hollywood cinema. Course sessions will include a highly interdisciplinary introduction to the tools of film analysis, academic writing, and research, drawing on scholarship from across the humanities and a range of media—from films and texts to studio maps and fan magazines. During the first semester, we will reframe the history of the dream factory by deflating the romance of the male auteur and highlighting the role of marginalized labor on the studio lot. Starting with singular individuals with exceptional careers— like Dorothy Arzner, the studio system’s lone female director, and Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star—we will move on to culturally invisible studio workers: cutter girls, leader ladies, secretaries, extras, stunt doubles, custodians, and voice actors. During the second semester, our focus will shift from workers to spectator perspectives and experiences marginalized by the film industry, highlighting film criticism and experimental films by female, POC, and queer scholars and artists that propose subversive tools to change how we view and interpret classical Hollywood films. Topics to be discussed during the second semester include fan studies, gossip as film history, segregated storytelling, queer Hollywood “dream texts,” and “oppositional” Black looks. During the fall semester, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alternating with small group conferences dedicated to writing, hands-on research, and fieldwork: We will learn how to use the library, analyze media ephemera, explore SLC’s 16mm film collection, and take field trips to local film archives and museums. In the spring, conferences will continue to take place biweekly without the alternating group conferences.

Faculty

The Movie Musical

Open, Lecture—Spring

Long dismissed as shallow mass entertainment, the movie musical remains an understudied genre despite its century-long popularity, global scope, and recurring role in film history. This lecture course offers a layered cultural history of the movie musical from the 1920s to the present, approaching it as a uniquely intermedial, transnational perspective from which to study film. Students will learn to read movie musicals through a mixture of formal analysis and material history. We will read canonical scholars, as well as more recent multidisciplinary work on the movie musical as a site for ideological contestation; performance politics; and aesthetic, narrative, and technological experimentation. In particular, we will highlight the genre’s power for hiding labor behind spectacles of seemingly spontaneous mass performance and rehearsing modern social conflicts through heterosexual couple-driven, dual-focus plots (Jets vs. Sharks, town vs. city, etc.). Other topics include: the roots of the movie musical in vaudeville, minstrelsy, opera, and ballet; the musical’s relationship to new cinematic technologies, labor forms, and industrial practices; the musical’s relationship to questions of gender, sexuality, and race; and the musical as a globally circulating and mutating “mass” cultural form. While much of our focus will be on classical Hollywood (1920s-1960s), we will also watch films from France, the Soviet Union, England, East Germany, Mexico, India, and Australia.

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Previous Courses

Film History

Arcades, Trains, and Hysterics: 19th-Century Foundations of Film

Open, Seminar—Fall

This seminar will examine film history and analysis through a proto-cinematic lens inspired by the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s montage-style compendium of Parisian modernization. With this canonical academic experiment as catalyst, we will excavate the 19th-century technocultural foundations of film, placing a particular emphasis on the train, department store, factory, metropolis, and mental life. How did these modern developments shape the materiality and content of early films? And what do they have to tell us about film today? Alongside weekly screenings, we will read classic texts of critical theory (Marx, Freud, Simmel, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno); modern/modernist fiction (Poe, Baudelaire, Zola, Pirandello, Keun, Du Bois); and new cultural history on hysterical performance, shell shock cinema, human motors, spectacular realities, and slapstick modernism. We will also watch films directed by Charlie Chaplin, René Clair, Jacques Tati, Chantal Akerman, Boots Riley, and Bong Joon-ho. In this class, students will get an overview of European modernity studies and learn to read films media-archaeologically, tying them to the major industrial shifts, perceptual transformations, and hybrid forms from which cinema emerged as a dominant mass medium.

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The Working Girl Around the World

Open, Lecture—Spring

Since the Lumière brothers filmed their female employees leaving the factory in 1895, the "working girl" has become a fixture of global cinema. This lecture course approaches this archetypal modern character as a foundational figure for film history and an important vernacular link for national film industries competing with Hollywood. We begin by asking: What is a working girl? How has the category changed over the course of the 20th century, as the category has circulated around the globe? And how, despite its fraught ideological construction, can we turn the category into a tool for intersectional feminist film history? With these questions in mind, we launch our investigation in the United States and Europe—and then move onto the Soviet Union, Japan, China, India, South Korea, Mexico, Senegal, and Cameroon—by reading classic film theory, short fiction, and local histories of film culture and gendered labor alongside films about shopgirls, dancing girls, telephone girls, factory girls, office girls, laundresses, and maids. Topics to be discussed include working girls as moviegoers, cultural imperialism and vernacular modernism, migration and mass reproduction, sex work, workplace romance, and contradictions of capital and care. In this class, students will conduct comparative, multimedia analyses of film texts and read global film history through the globalization of modern gendered labor.

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