Silent Films And The Triumph Of The American Myth
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| Author | : Paula Marantz Cohen |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press |
| Total Pages | : 1286 |
| Release | : 2001-05-03 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 9780195343885 |
Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth connects the rise of film and the rise of America as a cultural center and twentieth-century world power. Silent film, Paula Cohen reveals, allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and answer the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. When film finally began to talk in 1927, the medium had already done its work. It had helped translate representation into a dynamic visual form and had "Americanized" the world. Cohen explores the way film emerged as an American medium through its synthesis of three basic elements: the body, the landscape, and the face. Nineteenth-century American culture had already charged these elements with meaning--the body through vaudeville and burlesque, landscape through landscape painting and moving panoramas, and the face through portrait photography. Integrating these popular forms, silent film also developed genres that showcased each of its basic elements: the body in comedy, the landscape in the western, and the face in melodrama. At the same time, it helped produce a new idea of character, embodied in the American movie star. Cohen's book offers a fascinating new perspective on American cultural history. It shows how nineteenth-century literature can be said to anticipate twentieth-century film--how Douglas Fairbanks was, in a sense, successor to Walt Whitman. And rather than condemning the culture of celebrity and consumption that early Hollywood helped inspire, the book highlights the creative and democratic features of the silent-film ethos. Just as notable, Cohen champions the concept of the "American myth" in the wake of recent attempts to discredit it. She maintains that American silent film helped consolidate and promote a myth of possibility and self-making that continues to dominate the public imagination and stands behind the best impulses of our contemporary world.
| Author | : Paula Marantz Cohen |
| Publisher | : Oxford University Press, USA |
| Total Pages | : 235 |
| Release | : 2001 |
| Genre | : Electronic books |
| ISBN | : 019514094X |
Cohen argues that silent film allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and develop an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. She connects the rise of film and the rise of America as a cultural center and 20th century world power.
| Author | : Helena Carvalhão Buescu |
| Publisher | : Rodopi |
| Total Pages | : 336 |
| Release | : 2007 |
| Genre | : Biography & Autobiography |
| ISBN | : 9042023287 |
In contemporary societies privatization has long ceased to be just an economic concept; rather, it must increasingly be made to refer to the ongoing shrinking of the public space under the impact of the representation of individual lives and images, which cuts across all discourses, genres and media to become one of the primary means of production of culture. This volume is intended to cover such an historical, social and intellectual ground, where self-representation comes to the fore. Targeting mostly an academic readership but certainly also of interest to the general educated public, it collects a wide range of essays dealing with diverse modes of life writing and portraying from a variety of perspectives and focusing on different historical periods and media. It thus offers itself as a major contribution to a better understanding of the world we live in: its past legacy and present configuration.ContentsIntroduction: Signposts of the Self in Modernity Part I. The Representational Dilemma Christopher PRENDERGAST: The Self as a Work of Art: Proust's ScepticismPaulo DE MEDEIROS: (Re-)Constructing, (Re-)Membering Postcolonial Selves Aleksandra PODSIADLIK: `Doing Identity? in Fiction: Identity Construction as a Dialogue between Individuals and Cultural Narratives Clara ROWLAND: Self-Representation and Temporality: `Parabasis? in Guimar'es Rosa's Grande Sert'o: Veredas Daniel ROVERS: New Man: Marie Kessels? Inner Portrait of a Writing Self Gaston FRANSSEN: Good Intentions, Ethical Commitment, and Impersonal Poetry:The Work of Gerrit Kouwenaar Jan RUPP: `For-Getting? Plural Selves: Narrative and Identity in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore Lars BERNAERTS: The Straitjacket of Normality. The Interaction with the Psychiatrist in Maurits Dekker's Waarom ik niet krankzinnig benLars DALUM GRANILD: The Self's Struggle for Recognition: August Strindberg and the Other Marinela FREITAS: Unshaded Shadows: Performances of Gender in Emily Dickinson and Luiza Neto Jorge Part II. Signalling Identity Peter BROOKS: The Identity Paradigm Roland GREENE: The Global I Davy VAN OERS: Staining the Past with Ink in Lorenzo Da Ponte's Memorie (1830): The Fallacies of Autobiographical `Writing? Eli PARK SORENSEN: Between Autobiography and Fiction: Narrating the Self in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Vivir para contarla Mirjam TRUWANT: The Passion of Lena Christ: From Fictionalized Autobiography to Biographical Novel Ricardo GIL SOEIRO: Dreams in the Mirror: George Steiner by George Steiner Part III. Images of the Self Across the Arts Timothy MATHEWS: Reading W. G. Sebald with Alberto Giacometti Paula MOR?O: The Impossible Self-Portrait Anna Viola SBORGI: Between Literature and the Visual Arts: Portraits of the Self in William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Fernando Pessoa Jakob STOUGAARD-NIELSEN: Photography and Shadow-Writing: Henry James's Revisions of the Self in the New York Edition Patrick VAN ROSSEM: Consumed by the Audience. Inhibition, Fear, and Anxiety in the Oeuvre of Bruce Nauman Anke BROUWERS: There Was Something about Mary: Mary Pickford's Perfect `Little American? Verena-Susanna NUNGESSER: Paint it Red: Death Artistry as a Portrait of the Self
| Author | : |
| Publisher | : Penn State Press |
| Total Pages | : 292 |
| Release | : 2006 |
| Genre | : Art and literature |
| ISBN | : 9780271047805 |
| Author | : Marina L. Levitina |
| Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Total Pages | : 432 |
| Release | : 2015-09-29 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0857729691 |
Certain aspects of American popular culture had a formative influence on early Soviet identity and aspirations. Traditionally, Soviet Russia and the United States between the 1920s and the 1940s are regarded as polar opposites on nearly every front. Yet American films and translated adventure fiction were warmly received in 1920s Russia and partly shaped ideals of the New Soviet Person into the 1940s. Cinema was crucial in propagating this new social hero. While open admiration of American film stars and heroes of literary fiction in the Soviet press was restricted from the late 1920s onwards, many positive heroes of Soviet Socialist Realist films in the 1930s and 1940s were partially a product of Soviet Americanism of the previous decade. Some of the new Soviet heroes in films of the 1930s and 1940s possessed traits noticeably evocative of the previously popular American film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks, Pearl White and Mary Pickford. Others cinematically represented the contemporary trope of the 'Russian American,' an ideal worker exemplifying the Stalinist marriage of 'Russian revolutionary sweep' with 'American efficiency. 'Russian Americans' in Soviet Film analyses the content, reception and underlying influences of over 60 Soviet and American films, the book explores new territory in Soviet cinema and Soviet-American cultural relations. It presents groundbreaking archival research encompassing Soviet audience surveys, Soviet film journals and reviews, memoirs and articles by Soviet filmmakers, and scripts, among other sources. The book reveals that values of optimism, technological skill, efficiency and self-reliance - perceived as quintessentially American - were incorporated into new Soviet ideals through channels of cross-cultural dissemination, resulting in cultural synthesis.
| Author | : Benjamin Crace |
| Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
| Total Pages | : 296 |
| Release | : 2022-10-18 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : |
Providing an indispensable resource for students and general readers, this book serves as an entry point for a conversation on America's favorite pastime, focusing in on generational differences and the evolution of American identity. In an age marked by tension and division, Americans of all ages and backgrounds have turned to film to escape the pressures of everyday life. Yet, beyond escapism, popular cinema is both a mirror and microscope for our collective psyche. Examining the films that have made billions of dollars through a new lens reveals that popular culture is a vital source for understanding what it means to be an American. This book is divided into four sections, each associated with a different generation. Featuring such era-defining hits as Jaws, Back to the Future, Avatar, and The Avengers, each section presents detailed film analyses that showcase the consistency of certain American values throughout generations as well as the constant renegotiation of others. Ideal for any cinephile, The American Blockbuster demonstrates how complex and meaningful even the summer blockbuster can be.
| Author | : Kelly Boyer Sagert |
| Publisher | : Bloomsbury Publishing USA |
| Total Pages | : 196 |
| Release | : 2009-12-21 |
| Genre | : Social Science |
| ISBN | : |
This book offers an examination of the Roaring Twenties in the United States, focusing on the vibrant icon of the newly liberated woman—the flapper—that came to embody the Jazz Age. Flappers takes readers back to the time of speakeasies, gangsters, dance bands, and silent film stars, offering a fresh look at the Jazz Age by focusing on the women who came to symbolize it. Flappers captures the full scope of the hedonistic subculture that made the Roaring Twenties roar, a group that reacted to Prohibition and other attempts to impose a stricter morality on the nation. Topics include the transition from silent films to talkies, the arrival of American Jazz as the country's first truly indigenous musical form, the evolution of the United States from a rural to an urban nation, the fashion and slang of the times, and more. It is an exhilarating portrait of a brief outburst of liberation that would last until the Great Depression came crashing down.
| Author | : J.E. Smyth |
| Publisher | : University Press of Kentucky |
| Total Pages | : 464 |
| Release | : 2006-10-27 |
| Genre | : History |
| ISBN | : 0813137284 |
In Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane, J. E. Smyth dramatically departs from the traditional understanding of the relationship between film and history. By looking at production records, scripts, and contemporary reviews, Smyth argues that certain classical Hollywood filmmakers were actively engaged in a self-conscious and often critical filmic writing of national history. Her volume is a major reassessment of American historiography and cinematic historians from the advent of sound to the beginning of wartime film production in 1942. Focusing on key films such as Cimarron (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), Ramona (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), Jezebel (1938), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Stagecoach (1939), and Citizen Kane (1941), Smyth explores historical cinema's connections to popular and academic historigraphy, historical fiction, and journalism, providing a rich context for the industry's commitment to American history. Rather than emphasizing the divide between American historical cinema and historical writing, Smyth explores the continuities between Hollywood films and history written during the first four decades of the twentieth century, from Carl Becker's famous "Everyman His Own Historian" to Howard Hughes's Scarface to Margaret Mitchell and David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind. Hollywood's popular and often controversial cycle of historical films from 1931 to 1942 confronted issues as diverse as frontier racism and women's experiences in the nineteenth-century South, the decline of American society following the First World War, the rise of Al Capone, and the tragic history of Hollywood's silent era. Looking at rarely discussed archival material, Smyth focuses on classical Hollywood filmmakers' adaptation and scripting of traditional historical discourse and their critical revision of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema uncovers Hollywood's diverse and conflicted attitudes toward American history. This text is a fundamental challenge the prevailing scholarship in film, history, and cultural studies.
| Author | : David Roche |
| Publisher | : McFarland |
| Total Pages | : 245 |
| Release | : 2014-10-03 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 0786479248 |
Though intimacy has been a wide concern in the humanities, it has received little critical attention in film studies. This collection of new essays investigates both the potential intimacy of cinema as a medium and the possibility of a cinema of intimacy where it is least expected. As a notion defined by binaries--inside and outside, surface and depth, public and private, self and other--intimacy, because it implies sharing, calls into question the boundaries between these extremes, and the border separating mainstream cinema and independent or auteur cinema. Following on Thomas Elsaesser's theories of the relationship between the intimacy of cinema and the cinema of intimacy, the essays explore intimacy in silent and classic Hollywood movies, underground, documentary and animation films; and contemporary Hollywood, British, Canadian and Australian cinema from a variety of approaches.
| Author | : M. Tolini Finamore |
| Publisher | : Springer |
| Total Pages | : 260 |
| Release | : 2013-01-28 |
| Genre | : Performing Arts |
| ISBN | : 023038949X |
This exploration of fashion in American silent film offers fresh perspectives on the era preceding the studio system, and the evolution of Hollywood's distinctive brand of glamour. By the 1910s, the moving image was an integral part of everyday life and communicated fascinating, but as yet un-investigated, ideas and ideals about fashionable dress.
