Lecture Cabaret, Vaudeville and the Star System: The Performance History of Hollywood Film is led by Eva Smrekar.

The lecture is part of the intensive program of the collective The Feminalz and is open to the public.

Eva Smrekar’s lecture is also part of the development of the project Archive of Gender, which is being produced by Glej Theatre.

About:
The lecture explores the influence of cabaret, vaudeville, and the star system on the performance history of Hollywood film. It focuses on the relationship between minority performative formats and film during the era of the Hollywood studio system, as well as their echoes in later films such as Cabaret.

Drawing on approaches from so-called star studies, the lecture highlights the film careers of actresses such as Mae West and Marlene Dietrich, who directly incorporated their experiences of cabaret and vaudeville into the shaping of their film roles and public personas. Through these transfers, they opened up space within the dominant film system for queer and feminist readings of their work, while also expanding the boundaries of representation in film.

Eva Smrekar is a junior researcher at the Department of Philosophy (ED – LLCP) and Theatre Studies (EDESTA – Scènes du monde) at Paris VIII University Vincennes–Saint-Denis, where she teaches the analysis of historical and contemporary cabaret practices in connection with gender studies.