Callie Garnett is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Iowa where she is working on a study of pastoralism in new fiction and poetry. She also studies and teaches the interplay of American literary modernism and Hollywood film.
Callie Garnett
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Writing on Public Books
Blue Peter: On Peter Gizzi
Brice Marden used beeswax to kill the reflective luster of his triptych color panels. Ad Reinhardt leeched the gloss out of his chromatic blacks. Jasper Johns accreted his white flags with matte paper and cotton. Such works defend the big Nothing of minimalist experimentation with the eloquence of rich monochromes that are apparently porous, surfaces […]
Forgotten Woman
When we think of the ’30s film musical, we tend to picture Fred and Ginger gliding through the polished worlds of Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937). Earlier in the decade, however, Warner Brothers produced a spate of song and dance films that were less willing to deny Depression […]
Wait Cursor
A girl, bundled against the cold, holds up her hand as though requesting pause or distance—freeze, stop, stay back. Perfectly centered in the space of her bright palm is a Mac loading wheel frozen in mid-spin, its moon-burst rays making a value scale of the photograph’s various grays. Roland Barthes had a phrase—“prophecy in reverse”—for […]
Rotten Love
In the mid-1940s Fritz Lang made two films in quick succession, both starring the same trio of actors: Edward G. Robinson, Dan Duryea, and Joan Bennett. The first of these works has the more notable pedigree; The Woman in the Window (1944) was among the crop of Hollywood exports to France that would, along with […]
