Jennifer Forrest

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at Texas State University

This chapter investigates the case of Ocean’s films – Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13 – and its Ocean’s 8 reboot. As in the case of some other new millennial reboots, Ocean’s 8 is a ‘gender reversal’ reboot of (in this case) a typically male-oriented heist genre that reinterprets collaboration to emphasise feminine bonding. In addition to marking out the fil...

The Hildegarde Withers film series, which spanned five years, from 1932 to 1937, and six films, was based on a handful of novels and short stories by Stuart Palmer. The first three films starred Edna May Oliver, who left both the series and RKO for MGM in 1935; the fourth featured Helen Broderick as the prickly and implacable Miss Withers; and in t...

In 1883, Jules Laforgue described his literary expression as clownesque. While this characterization generally suggests the figure of Pierrot to those familiar with the poet's Les Complaintes (1885) and L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (1886), it is clear from his Moralités légendaires (1887) that his poetics had evolved to embrace the circus perf...

It is often assumed that the remake of a foreign film is inferior to the original because of tangible obstacles to transnational retrofitting, two notable impediments being resistant cultural narratives and the stylistic tendencies associated with a given culture's idiosyncratic visual exploration of those narratives. In contrast with film remakes,...

In Jean Richepin’s Braves gens, roman parisien (1886), the composer Yves de Kergouët and his spiritual counterpart, the mime Tombre, strive to put into practice the principles of a revolutionary theory of art they formulated with other members of a cénacle ten years earlier. Their dream of an ‘art absolu’ is threatened first by a capitalist economy...

There have been many scholarly studies on the working classes and leisure time in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (in great part the result of improved working conditions and salaries), and on nineteenth-century social theories and programs that often aimed to improve the physical (and by extension, moral) health of the potentially unrul...

The Goncourt brothers are famous for their pithy misogynistic pronouncements on the subject of women. However, despite their reduction in the novels and the Journal of all feminine types to the one monstrous femme with which dix-neuviémistes are all too familiar, there does exist her opposite. The Goncourt brothers cite the years from the death of...

Parade (1917) was a joint effort production with libretto by Jean Cocteau music by Erik Satie, decor, costumes, and curtain by Pablo Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. It was not only Cocteau's first truly original work, but, as Pierre Gobin contends, Parade is central to an understanding of the structures that would inform all of his su...