Iulia Necșulescu

“Someone might ask, if the dynamic of innovation consists of schema and revision, where does true originality come from? Is there no single work we can point to as the ultimate source of this or that new storrytelling strategy? I'm inclined to say there is no such source. Artists working in mass art forms find originality by revising schemas in circulation, or by revising ones that have fallen into disuse.”
― David Bordwell, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling

“So Marxism, for all its plurality, has been marked by the interplay of theoretical and political preoccupations. It has also been punctuated by widely perceived moments of internal crisis – starting in the late 1890s with the publication of Eduard Bernstein’s Preconditions of Socialism, but again during the First World War, in the 1930s, and at the end of the 1970s. Indeed, one of us has written, “Marxism is constitutively, from Marx’s contribution onwards, . . . crisis theory” (Kouvelakis 2005, 25). Perhaps there are two main reasons for this succession of crises. First, Marxism is inherently tied to capitalism, at once the object of the critique of political economy and an enemy to be vanquished. But since, as Marx and Engels showed in the Communist Manifesto, it is also a dynamic system constantly transforming itself, Marxism constantly falls victim to the anxiety that it is not adequate to its Protean antagonist, that it must run to keep up with the metamorphoses of bourgeois society. This is then connected to a second source of anxiety, namely that capitalism continues to exist, and that therefore the communist project remains unrealized, two centuries now after Marx’s birth.”
― Alex Callinicos Stathis Kouvelakis Lucia Pradella

“...they had us working days and nights on end" Judy complained in McCall's. "They'd give us pep-up pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they'd take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills- Mickey sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then after four hours they'd wake us up and give us the pep-up pills again so we could work another seventy-two hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but it became a way of life for us.”
― Anne Edwards, Judy Garland

“Though
the actresses who played female boys were of all ages and performed in a vari-
ety of acting styles, they were generally small, thin, white, and photogenic, and
their performances combined boldness and vulnerability. Their femaleness al-
lowed them to convey fragility and androgynous beauty. These performances
demonstrate that cross-gender casting, which may seem like an inherently
transgressive practice to twenty-first-century scholars, can also uphold conser-
vative gender, class, and racial regimes. At the same time, the performances
cannot be dismissed as reactionary or antifeminist, because they embodied
middle-class women’s sentimental politics and created a space in which wom-
en’s bodies had an important role in producing an idealized masculinity.”
― Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934