You reached this page through the archive. Click here to return to the archive.

Note: This article is over a year old and information contained in it may no longer be accurate. Please use the contact information in the lower-left corner to verify any information in this article.

Film expert, archivist to speak at St. Olaf

By Sarah Meyer '08
February 28, 2008

Those who heard film expert and archivist Jeanine Basinger speak at St. Olaf College several years ago know that audience members at her upcoming appearance on the Hill are in for a wealth of up-close-and-personal anecdotes about Hollywood.

BasingerBook
Basinger, currently the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University, will speak at St. Olaf on Thursday, March 6, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Viking Theater in Buntrock Commons. The lecture, sponsored by the Boldt Teaching Chair in the Humanities, is free and open to the public.

Basinger's life work has been the preservation of the papers of film stars such as Frank Capra, Ingrid Bergman, Elia Kazan, Gene Tierney, Martin Scorsese, and Federico Fellini. She will talk about her recently published book titled The Star Machine, which examines how, at the height of the studio system from the 1930s to the 1950s, the studios worked to manufacture star actors and actresses.

She'll also likely talk about her brushes with Hollywood stars. St. Olaf Boldt Teaching Professor in the Humanities Diana Postlethwaite says that when she spoke on the phone with Basinger recently, the film expert was rushing off to her Wesleyan class to greet that day's visitor, John Malkovich. Clint Eastwood, Basinger had explained, had talked the somewhat reclusive Malkovich into coming to her class.

Postlethwaite says Basinger is "not only a film scholar, she's an unabashed film fan." She has frequently appeared as a "talking head" in documentaries about movie stars ranging from Mary Pickford to Cary Grant to Elizabeth Taylor. She is a trustee of the American Film Institute, a member of the Steering Committee of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation, and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers.

Basinger has written 10 books, including The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre, Silent Stars, and American Cinema: 100 Years of Filmmaking, the companion book for a 10-part PBS television series that aired in January 1995. Following her talk at St. Olaf, Basinger will be available to autograph copies of The Star Machine.

According to a review of The Star Machine by William Grimes in the New York Times, Basinger "ingeniously picks apart the gears and levers of the machine, analyzing the careers of a handful of stars whose ups and downs illustrate the studio system at its smooth-functioning best, or reveal its hidden inefficiencies."

Contact Kari VanDerVeen at 507-786-3970 or vanderve@stolaf.edu.