Elisabetta Girelli

Biography

My next project was a study of Rudolph Valentino’s erotic identity before his ‘Sheik’ persona, and centres on a close reading of his screen performance; it rests on a theoretical framework including the work of Leo Bersani and Sigmund Freud. I am continuing to expand my interest in the creation of meaning in silent film performance; one of my latest published articles focuses on John Gilbert in The Merry Widow (1925), exploring the ways he performatively negotiates his dominance of the film text. My latest publication is on director/actor Erich von Stroheim in two of his silent films, Blind Husbands (1919) and Foolish Wives (1922). I’m currently finishing a project on the film Hotel Imperial (Mauritz Stiller, 1927) and on the function of its star, Pola Negri, in the film’s anxiety-ridden WWI narrative. At the same time, I have started to work on the Russian/French star Ivan Mozzhukhin in The Late Mathias Pascal (Marcel L’Herbier, 1926). My past work has centred on the representation of Italianness in British film history; on transnational and orientalist issues in the work of the Turkish/Italian director Ferzan Özpetek; on spatial relationships and their relation to place in Czechoslovak and Estonian film; and on cinematic renditions of the Cambridge Spies, especially of Guy Burgess.

Research Interest

My research focuses on stardom, performance, cultural analysis and discourses, sexuality and gender in film, subversion and difference. My current sphere of interest is silent cinema. Prior to this development, I concentrated on the creation of identity on screen, and its link to cultural analysis. I especially worked on queer theory and theories of representation; on queer stardom and cinema; on screen constructions of normativity, and the demarcation of the ‘normal’ and abject body. A thread throughout all my research, past and present, is the interest in textual analysis, and in revisionist readings of filmic texts, to identify conflicting strands of available meaning and/or the formation of oppositional configurations.