This page provides a few details about my major publications.
Please visit my CV for a complete list of my published articles.

The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity. Durham NC: Duke University Press (2008).

Listing at Duke University Press

One of the most prolific and respected directors of Japanese cinema, Naruse Mikio (1905–69) made eighty-nine films between 1930 and 1967. Little, however, has been written about Naruse in English, and much of the writing about him in Japanese has not been translated into English. With The Cinema of Naruse Mikio, Catherine Russell brings deserved critical attention to this under-appreciated director. Besides illuminating Naruse’s contributions to Japanese and world cinema, Russell’s in-depth study of the director sheds new light on the Japanese film industry between the 1930s and the 1960s.

Naruse was a studio-based director, a company man renowned for bringing films in on budget and on time. During his long career, he directed movies in different styles of melodrama while displaying a remarkable continuity of tone. His films were based on a variety of Japanese literary sources and original scripts; almost all of them were set in contemporary Japan. Many were “women’s films.” They had female protagonists, and they depicted women’s passions, disappointments, routines, and living conditions. While neither Naruse or his audiences identified themselves as “feminist,” his films repeatedly foreground, if not challenge, the rigid gender norms of Japanese society. Given the complex historical and critical issues surrounding Naruse’s cinema, a comprehensive study of the director demands an innovative and interdisciplinary approach. Russell draws on the critical reception of Naruse in Japan in addition to the cultural theories of Harry Harootunian, Miriam Hansen, and Walter Benjamin. She shows that Naruse’s movies were key texts of Japanese modernity, both in the ways that they portrayed the changing roles of Japanese women in the public sphere and in their depiction of an urban, industrialized, mass-media-saturated society.

New Women of the Silent Screen: China, Japan, Hollywood

Special Issue Editor. Camera Obscura 60. Fall 2005.

• Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Carleton University, Imaging Modern Girls in Japanese Silent Cinema
  
• Chika Kinoshita, University of Chicago, Actresses in the Transition to Sound in Japanese Cinema
  
• Catherine Russell, Concordia University, “Naruse Mikio’s Silent Films: Gender and The Discourse of Everyday Life in Interwar Japan”
  
• Sara Ross, University of Hartford, The Americanization of Tsuru Aoki
  
• Yiman Wang, Haverford College, Who Is Afraid of Anna May Wong? And What Can Be Said About a Dragon Lady?
  
• Weihong Bao, University of Chicago, From Pearl White to the White Hibiscus: The Vernacular Translation of the Serial Queen Thriller in Chinese Silent Cinema, 1920s

Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

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Experimental film and ethnographic film have long been considered separate, autonomous practices on the margins of mainstream cinema. By exploring the interplay between the two forms, Catherine Russell throws new light on both the avant-garde and visual anthropology. Russell provides detailed analyses of more than thirty-five films and videos from the 1890s to the 1990s and discusses a wide range of film and videomakers, including Georges Méliès, Maya Deren, Peter Kubelka, Ray Birdwhistell, Jean Rouch, Su Friedrich, Bill Viola, Kidlat Tahimik, Margaret Mead, Tracey Moffatt, and Chantal Akerman. Arguing that video enables us to see film differently—not as a vanishing culture but as bodies inscripted in technology, Russell maps the slow fade from modernism to postmodern practices. Combining cultural critique with aesthetic analysis, she explores the dynamics of historical interruption, recovery, and reevaluation. As disciplinary boundaries dissolve, Russell contends, ethnography is a means of renewing the avant-gardism of “experimental” film, of mobilizing its play with language and form for historical ends. “Ethnography” likewise becomes an expansive term in which culture is represented from many different and fragmented perspectives.Original in both its choice of subject and its theoretical and methodological approaches, Experimental Ethnography will appeal to visual anthropologists, as well as film scholars interested in experimental and documentary practices.

Table of Contents

Preface (1)

• Section 1: Introduction (9)
  
• Another Look (9)
  
• Surrealist Ethnography (31)

Section 2: Documentary Before Documentary (51)

• Ch. 3: The Body as the Main Attraction (51)
  
• Ch. 4: Ethnotopias of Early Cinema (73)
  
• Ch. 5: Playing Primitive (92)

Section 3: The Un-Disciplined Gaze (108)

• Ch. 6: Zoology, Pornography, Ethnography (108)
  
• Ch. 7: Framing People: Structural Film Revisited (140)

Section 4: Other Realities (170)

• Ch. 8: Ecstatic Ethnography: Filming Possession Rituals (170)
  
• Ch. 9: Archival Apocalypse: Found Footage as Ethnography (212)
  
• Ch. 10: Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self (242)

Conclusion (242)


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Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure and New Wave Cinemas, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

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What seems like closure might be something more, as Catherine Russell illustrates in this book about death in narrative cinema since the 1950s. Analyzing the structural importance of death in narrative endings, as well as the thematics of loss and redemption, Russell identifies mortality as a valuable critical tool for understanding the cinema of the second half of the twentieth century. Her work includes close textual readings of films by Fritz-Lang, Wim Wenders, Oshima Nagisa, Jean-Luc Godard, and Robert Altman, among others.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Narrative Mortality (1)
Beyond Pleasure: Lang and Mortificatiion (31)
Wim Wenders: Film as Death at Work (67)
Oshima Nagisa: The Limits of Nationhood (105)
Jean-Luc Godard: Allegory of the Body (137)
American Apocalpticism: The Sight of the Crisis (173)
Conclusion: The Senselessness of Ending (209)


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David Rimmer: Films & Tapes 1967-1993 (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1993).

This is a catalogue that was produced by the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1993 to accompany an exhibition of David Rimmer's work in the same year. My essay was commisioned as a critical overview of Rimmer's career up until 1993.

Table of Contents

Preface (Jim Shedden) (9)
Chronology (13)
Selected Exhibitions and Screenings (14)
Twilight in the Image Bank (Catherine Russell) (17)
Filmography (61)
Videography (63)
A Guide to the Film Literature (Kathryn Elder) (65)
Index to the Guide (91)