In/Significant Gestures— Elaine May, Screen Performance, and Embodied Collaboration

In Elaine May’s professional biography, her role as actor tends to traditionally fall somewhere in line after the fields for which she is most immediately recognized – comic, screenwriter, director. Yet across a range of feature films in particular, May demonstrated a clearly highly developed skill for performing a range of different roles to camera. For a figure whose achievements are associated so readily with language, what becomes apparent when watching May act on film is how much she relies on the unspoken for lasting effect: gestures, facial expressions and movement inform her characterizations often just as much as dialogue and script. This chapter considers not only May’s performance in perhaps her most well-known screen role as Henrietta in her directorial debut A New Leaf, but more also in her numerous collaborations with a range of acclaimed directors where her role was solely as actor.

Female stardom in contemporary Romanian new wave cinema

This article analyses film roles, red-carpet appearances and nonfilmic performances of three of the most well-known and admired actresses of the Romanian New Wave (Luminița Gheorghiu, Maria Popistașu and Anamaria Marinca). Their unglamorous female stardom is paradoxical if considered from the standpoint of mainstream/dominant cinema and the tradition described by Jackie Stacey as “[t]he ‘visual pleasure’ offered by the glamour and sexual appeal of Hollywood stars” (159). Aspects such as the major contradiction between screen role and screen persona, or the lack of ideal(istic) images offered to the audience are theorised on the basis of Christine Gledhill’s and Richard Dyer’s models, Anne Morey’s term of “the elegiac female grotesque” and Ana Salzberg’s concept of narcissistic Hollywood female stardom and embodied experience (107). The coherence of unglamorous female stardom as a real-life discursive construct emerges in the article through the consideration of Romanian New Wave cinema–similarly to 1970s-1980s New Indian Cinema in which unglamorous female stars existed (Gandhy-Thomas)–as a peripheral cinematic formation defined by a specific relation to glamour and consumption (Dyer, Gundle). Furthermore, the article suggests that this coherence is dependent on considering the production context of the Romanian New Wave in the framework of small national European cinemas (Hjort and Petrie, Soila), while emphasising the lack of integrated studio background (Haskell) and the fact that its female stars have been conditioned by postcommunist possibilities to articulate female public identities (Pasca Harsanyi, Roman).

Spectroscopic scale protection factor (SSPF) of solar ultraviolet radiation molecular screens. II. Substituent effect on salicylideneaniline

Salicylideneanilines present a broad absorption band and a high molar absorption coefficient in the UV-A and UV-B regions. In addition, they are photostable compounds to the solar radiation exposition. Therefore, we have recently established their potential use as a solar ultraviolet radiation molecular screens.In the present work we have determined the dependence of the Spectroscopic Scale Protection Factor (SSPF) values with the substituent effect on the aniline ring of the salicylidene, when the substituent is an electron-acceptor group (–CN, –COCH3, –NO2) and we have compared this effect with and without an electron-donor group (–OCH3) atparaposition in the salicylidene ring.In order to determine and compare these SSPF values versus the usual Sun Protection Factor (SPF) values, a relative scale of biological nature, we have determined the electronic absorption spectra of these substituted salicylideneaniline compounds, and we have compared these spectroscopic data with homosalate, as an SPF standard compound. Our results are conclusive respect to determine the salicylideneanilines as a new family of molecular species highly efficient in the molecular screen role.