About
Briand (Brinni) Gentry’s work is distinguished by an interweaving of cultural history and media theory. Her research employs an approach at once historiographic and theoretical as a framework for analyzing colonial geographies. Brinni received her M.A. in Film Studies from Columbia University where she served as a teaching assistant and as a dedicated research assistant on the Women Film Pioneers Project. Her thesis and continued research interest focuses on deconstructing the generation of United States-based imagery about Hawai‘i as an annexed territory leading up to America’s admission of the seized territory into statehood. Utilizing early motion pictures, narrative film, and ephemera, Brinni focuses on examining how the development of normative colonial cinema with the burgeoning of subaltern cinema serves as a representative model for how the implementation of transnational technologies alters economic systems and, in turn, alters national conceptions of individuality. At the 2017 Women and the Silent Screen conference in Shanghai, Brinni presented her ongoing work on Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu examining how cinema in 1930s Shanghai conflated the commodity of the spectacle with that of a studio system starlet to use a popular actress as both a representative modern girl and a commodity to “sell” increasingly antifeudal and anti-capitalist political sentiments – a research project she had begun with her B.A. at Rice University.
Fields of Study
Film Studies
Cultural Studies
Gender, Race, and Sexuality
Film Theory
Silent Film
Narrative Theory
