Streisand

The Mirror of Difference

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by Garrett Stewart

Type

Studies

Subject

Actress > Barbra Streisand

Keywords

Barbra Streisand, queer

Publishing date

2022

Publisher

Wayne State University Press

Collection

Queer Screens

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 252 pages
6 x 9 ¼ inches (15.5 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN

978-0-8143-4908-3

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Book Presentation:
A blend of film reading with vocal analysis in appreciation of Barbra Streisand’s unmatched contribution to lyric drama on screen.

At every stage of her career, Barbra Streisand's genius finds its fullest measure in screen song, first in Emmy-winning TV specials, then in Hollywood blockbusters from Funny Girl to Funny Lady. She goes on, as emerging auteur, to direct her own "musical concepts" in A Star Is Born—before reconceiving the big-screen musical altogether in the writing as well as directing of her own starring role in Yentl ("A Film with Music"). In this intensive reading of the "actress-who-sings," Garrett Stewart notes the gender and ethnic stereotypes that Streisand shattered as the first openly Jewish superstar, while concentrating not just on the cultural difference she made but on the internal differentials of her unholy vocal gift—whose kinetic volatility shapes a kind of cinematic terrain all its own. Down through her filmed return to the concert stage, Stewart elicits the sinuous phonetic text of Streisand's on-screen musical delivery in a keenly attentive mode of audition that puts into fresh perspective the indelible aura of her stardom.

About the Author:
Garrett Stewart, a professor of literature and cinema, is the author of many books, including four on film, most recently Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method.

Press Reviews:
Stewart's style has a quality that most critical styles utterly lack: it's thoroughly vocalizable. To appreciate its rhythms and sonorities, you practically have to speak it aloud. That is why his voice has just the right pitch for writers, such as Dickens and Poe, whose prose has a likewise audible relation to language. One uncanny surprise in Streisand: The Mirror of Difference is that Stewart's voice proves so rich an instrument for rendering the voice of a singer. He listens to the great voice of Barbra Streisand like no one else.
-D. A. Miller, Author of Hidden Hitchcock and Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical

See the publisher website: Wayne State University Press

See the complete filmography of Barbra Streisand on the website: IMDB ...