Silent Film

by Richard Able

Overview

Silent Film offers some of the best recent essays on silent cinema, essays that cross disciplinary boundaries and break new ground in a variety of ways. Some focus on the "materiality" of early cinema: the color processes used in printing nitrate film stocks, the choreographic styles of film acting, and the wide range of sound accompaniment. Others focus on questions of periodicity and nationality: on the shift from a "cinema of attractions" to a "classical narrative cinema," on the relationship between changes in production and those in exhibition, and on the historical specificity of national cinemas. Still others focus on early cinema's intertextual relations with various forms of mass culture (from magazine stories or sensational melodramas in the United States to the tango craze in Russia), and on reception in silent cinema (from black audiences in Chicago to women's fan magazines of the 1920s). Taken together, the contributors to this volume suggest provocative parallels between silent cinema at the turn of the last century and "postmodern" cinema at the end of our own. This book is an important contribution to the study of silent film and a key addition to this new series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813522265
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	12/01/1995
Series:	Rutgers Depth of Field Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

RICHARD ABEL is a National Endowment Professor of the Humanities at Drake University. His books include French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929; French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology; and The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914. 

Table of Contents

Introduction
The Materiality of Silent Cinema
The Color of Nitrate: Some Factual Observations on Tinting and Toning Manuals for Silent Films
The Sound of Silents
Kuleshov's Experiments and the New Anthropology of the Actor
The Periodicity and Nationality of Silent Cinema
"Now You See It, Now You Don't": The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions
Pre-Classical American Cinema: Its Changing Modes of Film Production
Booming the Film Business: The Historical Specificity of Early French Cinema
Cinema as Anti-Theater: Actresses and Female Audiences in Wilhelmianian Germany
Theorizing a Cultural History of Silent Cinema
Dickens, Griffith, and Film Theory Today
Female Power in the Serial-Queen Melodrama: The Etiology of an Anomaly
Russia, 1913: Cinema in the CUltural Landscape
Intertextuality and Reception in Silent Cinema
Dante's Inferno and Caesar's Ghost: Intertextuality and Condiitons of Reception in Early American Cinema
"The Finest Outside the Loop": Motion Picture Exhibition in Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1905-1928
The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine Discourse as Women's Commodified Culture in the 1920s
Selected Bibliography
Contributors
Index