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Featured Guest: Ana Salzberg has recently been appointed Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Her research, writing, publishing, and teaching focus on the areas of film studies, visual culture, stardom, spectatorship, golden-age cinema, embodied visuality, psychoanalysis, and feminist film theory. She completed her undergraduate studies at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania then her Ph.D. work at Edinburgh. She previously taught at the University of Stirling as well as the University of Dundee before returning to her graduate alma mater. We talked to her about her two books: Beyond the Looking Glass: Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood (Berghahn Books, 2014) and Produced by Irving Thalberg: Theory of Studio-Era Filmmaking (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
I have been extraordinarily fortunate in my Film Studies teachers and mentors over the years, beginning in undergraduate studies with Professor Homay King at Bryn Mawr College. I was interested in going abroad after graduation, and the University of Edinburgh’s film program is internationally esteemed – I was especially drawn to Edinburgh’s emphasis on film theory. Working with Professors Martine Beugnet and John Orr was a privilege. Martine’s expertise in embodied visuality totally emboldened my approach to spectatorship and stardom; this was a turning point for my research into classic Hollywood. And John inspired me to always put the films first, to trust them. That’s what you see in his writing. I always return to his book Hitchcock and Twentieth-Century Cinema when I need to find that inspiration again.
The UK academic job market is a bit different from the States; I found that you really need the book before you get the job. That Twilight Zone between the doctorate and the lectureship allowed me to focus on refining Beyond the Looking Glass, expanding the scope from my Ph.D. thesis and pushing the ideas even further. The opportunity with the University of Dundee opened up in 2014, and I was delighted to find a home in a program with such a commitment to visual culture – Film Studies, Comics Studies. I had attended two conferences there as a graduate student, but now I’m back at Edinburgh, so this very much feels like coming full circle.
Narcissism is everywhere in psychoanalytic models of identification, inasmuch as we can think about the performer as a reflection writ-large of the audience – the "looking glass" of the title. But what really interested me was something beyond that: the female star's own relationship to the idealized self, whether that was explored in film roles or through the creation of an off-screen persona.
I hope that readers keep reflecting on the notion of the cinematic ideal – what makes a "legend" or an "icon"? – rather than take it for granted. Classic Hollywood is so embedded in popular culture that we feel we always already know all it has to offer. You can sometimes pick up that feeling in Film Studies itself – which is fair enough, considering how Hollywood dominated the field at the start. So what drove me was the desire to do justice to these films and stars. There is, of course, brilliant work in star studies and film history that really does keep the classic era alive, so I’m in good company.
As the book took shape, I realized that this was as much a story about Hollywood itself as it was about the specific stars and their roles. Changes in the industry, the landscape, and the overall Hollywood "state of mind" (as Hortense Powdermaker called it in 1951) – you could chart all of these in relation to the evolving figure of the narcissistic woman.
I had always known of Thalberg as a revered figure in studio history, but I first fully worked "with" him through his wife, Norma Shearer. I was researching a possible article on her performance in Marie Antoinette (W.S. Van Dyke, 1938), and Thalberg played a huge role in the preproduction of the film before his death. The more I read about him, the more I wanted to learn; when a friend read a draft of the Marie Antoinette article and said it sounded more like a chapter in a book on Thalberg, I knew that was my next project. From the start, it was Thalberg’s voice that hooked me. His creative ambition and the clarity of his insights were so formidable; this was the intellectual foundation for all of the "boy wonder" mythology. Accordingly, I wanted to bring together film history and film theory to show how Thalberg's concepts of production are at the heart of how we think about not only the classical era but narrative filmmaking more broadly. What makes an epic film? How should sound be integrated into a diegetic world? Or more to the point, as Thalberg summed it up: "What can we do to make the picture better?" Thalberg's contemporaries always said he had a magnetic quality, and I won't deny I felt its pull on me.
Though it’s not an anecdote per se, I was riveted by the transcript of a 1930 meeting of the Association of Motion Picture Producers. Here, Daniel J. Lord, one of the authors of the Production Code, goes on at great (great!) length discussing the tenets of the Code and why they are so necessary; even when figures like Jesse Lasky and Paul Bern manage to interject their comments, Thalberg remains silent. Until, that is, Lord basically demands a response from him – at which point Thalberg prefaces his observations with a subdued, "I am not […] so clear and concise a thinker as you are, Father Lord, [but] it occurred to me that [the Code] was a little too far reaching." From there, Thalberg breaks down and analyses the document with forensic precision. I love this moment because it captures in real time the kind of insight and sardonic detachment that colleagues always ascribed to him. Lord had dominated the meeting up to that point, but there was no way to get past Thalberg.
I think the book signposts the next era of Thalberg scholarship, in which we move from strictly historical/biographical approaches to directly engaging with him as a thinker. There is such an impressive "genealogy" of Thalberg studies, with works by Bosley Crowther (1957), Samuel Marx (1975), and Bob Thomas (1969) paving the way for Mark A. Vieira's definitive biography Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince (2010). Each of these works records facets of Thalberg's observations on filmmaking, with some degree of variation. I built on these accounts – along with Thalberg's own articles, interviews, speeches – to consolidate and analyse his contributions to film theory. There is still so much more to learn from and about him.
This is a great question – it reminds me of Samuel Marx’s book Mayer and Thalberg: The Make-Believe Saints. It is, admittedly, make-believe to think of anyone as perfect; but by and large, I was far more disappointed in the circumstances in which Thalberg found himself – particularly in Mayer's 1933 restructuring of MGM – than I ever was with him. I will say, though, that I was saddened by the way Thalberg's working relationship with John Gilbert ended. Gilbert was a joyous, quicksilver performer who embodied the dynamism of early MGM; his talent thrived under Thalberg's guidance. Like every Gilbert fan, I wish that Thalberg could have done more to help him through that difficult transition to sound.
Thalberg is ubiquitous in representations of Hollywood's golden age. He will forever be the "boy wonder" and "the last tycoon" as memorialized by F. Scott Fitzgerald. So the challenge in teaching Thalberg is to acknowledge this mythology – itself an object of study – while moving beyond it to detail what his extraordinary contributions to cinema really were. So in that sense, I think the primary takeaway for students is that, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, there is a "whole equation" to Thalberg: legend, history, and theory.
Spring 2022 Leslie Kreiner Wilson, Interviewer and Editor https://americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2022/salzberg.htm
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