Um, yeah, so...

Watching

• The Marriage Circle by Ernst Lubitsch
• The Eyes of the Mummy by Ernst Lubitsch
• Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941

Reading

• Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, from Lubitsch to Sturges by James Harvey
• Ernst Lubitsch's American Comedy by William Paul
• Theda Bara: A Biography of the Silent Screen Vamp, with a Filmography by Ronald Genini

...in case you didn't know, I'm a research freak. I only hope that if anybody else in C-ville wants to check books out of the library on E.L. this summer, they can read either French or German.

The Theda Bara is just for fun, though. According to Eve Golden, "she is one of the few stars responsible for a word -- 'vamp' -- being placed both on the dictionary and in everyday use." Unfortunately, nearly all of Bara's films have been lost in the intervening years (Netflix has one), but ever since I first saw the above picture when I was ~15, I've been semi-intoxicated with the idea of her. (It's a still from Cleopatra (1917) - she was the first to portray the Egyptian queen on-screen.)