In 1939, at the height of her stardom, the actress Shanta Apte went on a spectacular hunger strike in protest against her employers at Prabhat Studios in Poona, India. The following year, Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the extractive nature of the film industry. In Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I Join the Movies?, 1940), she highlighted the durational depletion of the human body that is specific to acting work. This article interrogates these two unprecedented cultural events—a strike and a book—opening them up toward a history of embodiment as production experience. It embeds Apte's emphasis on exhaustion within contemporaneous debates on female stardom, industrial fatigue, and the status of cinema as work. Reading Apte's remarkable activism as theory from the South helps us rethink the meanings of embodiment, labor, materiality, inequality, resistance, and human-object relations in cinema.

“‘The Mystery Woman of Hollywood’: Greta Garbo, Feminism, and Stardom” analyzes feminism as manifested in Greta Garbo's life and career. It focuses on her European background; the media discourse on her; feminism in her films and in the United States in the 1920s; and Garbo's rebellion against Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, the heads of her studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). It also deals with her dress reform stance, her masculine femininity, the nature of her fans (especially the “Garbomaniacs”), and her friendships with the screenwriters Salka Viertel and Mercedes de Acosta. It concludes with an analysis of the 1933 film Queen Christina , characterizing it as the culmination of Garbo's feminism.

The Hollywood star system developed in the early decades of the twentieth century, and with it came notions of celebrity and tales of how performers rose to fame. In the same period, several American films self-reflexively devised narratives concerning young women venturing to “filmland” to break into the movies—echoing the real-life situation of the epoch's “movie-struck girls.” Taking a gendered approach, this text examines Mabel's Dramatic Career (1913), A Girl's Folly (1917), The Extra Girl (1923), Souls for Sale (1923), Ella Cinders (1926), and Show People (1928), interrogating the films’ portrayal of the female ingenue and focusing on such dichotomies as talent versus luck, career versus marriage, scandal versus propriety, city versus country, beauty versus plainness, and more. It investigates movie magazines and press of the era, highlighting how they presented the actresses in these films—Mabel Normand, Marion Davies, Eleanor Boardman, Colleen Moore, and Doris Kenyon—to the public, making connections to similar issues in the movies.