Download or read book Mary Pickford Queen of the Silent Film Era written by George A. Walker and published by The Porcupine's Quill. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the age of 17, Toronto-born Gladys Louise Smith, known to the world as Mary Pickford, burst onto the silent-film scene. But Pickford was more than just ‘the girl with the curls’. In addition to her acting career—an unequivocal success spanning 52 features—Pickford helped establish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as well as the studio United Artists. The first woman to create her own film corporation, she pioneered the roles of the independent actress, film star, producer and distributor. In Mary Pickford, Queen of the Silent Film Era, wood engraver George A. Walker tells the story of Pickford’s life in a visual, sequential narrative not unlike the silent films of old. Walker’s black-and-white wood engravings recall the monochromatic media of Pickford’s films, and echo the experience of interpreting stories visually. Mary Pickford, Queen of the Silent Film Era originated as a limited edition of 35 copies hand printed in Walker’s studio in Leslieville, Toronto.

Download or read book Mary Pickford written by Kathleen A. Feeley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On screen and off, movie star Mary Pickford personified the 'New Woman' of the early 1900s, a moniker given to women who began to demand more autonomy inside and outside the home. Well educated and career-minded, these women also embraced the new mass culture in which consumption and leisure were seen to play a pivotal role in securing happiness. Mary Pickford: Hollywood and the New Woman examines Pickford's role in the rise of industrial capitalism and consumer culture, and uses her life and unprecedented career as a wildly popular actress and savvy film mogul to illustrate the opportunities and obstacles faced by American women during this time. Following Pickford's life from her childhood on stage to her rise as a powerful studio executive, this book gives an overview of her enduring contribution to American film and mass culture. It also explores her struggles to surpass her confining public film persona as 'America's Sweetheart' with her creative and business achievements, mirroring how women, both then and today, must reconcile domestic life with professional aspirations and work. About the Lives of American Women series: Selected and edited by renowned women's historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a woman's life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a 'good read' featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject's perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.

Download or read book Why Not Try God written by Mary Pickford and published by . This book was released on 2013-05 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famous motion picture actress Mary Pickford wrote her inspirational self-help manual "Why Not Try God?" in 1934, with the aid of her collaborator Adela Rogers St. Johns. For nearly eighty years its thoughtful approach toward spirituality has encouraged and inspired her audience. Pickford's positive approach gives anyone, believer or non-believer, a rationale on which to build faith, and a path to understanding the difficulties we face in life. It contains her most famous quote: ..".this thing that we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down," along with her prescription for how to pull yourself back up again for a new beginning. Pickford starts her story with her own youthful rebellion against a God whom she thought unjust, after the death of a childhood friend. She continues with her own turnabout as an adult, including stories of people who have inspired her and the thoughts of scientists and philosophers in whose statements on religion she has found meaning and understanding. "Why Not Try God?" is ultimately a cheerful work, a short, effective essay on why we should believe, and how such belief can become a positive influence that will help us meet our daily challenges and affect our lives and the lives of those around us for the better. This new edition, simply and elegantly set, contains a new "Afterword" by film scholar and educator Anke Brouwers. Dr. Brouwers reveals the reasons that caused Mary Pickford to write "Why Not Try God?" and gives us a context for understanding her work that will of interest both to fans of the actress and to the general public.

Download or read book American Cinema of the 1920s written by Lucy Fischer and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-15 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1920s, sound revolutionized the motion picture industry and cinema continued as one of the most significant and popular forms of mass entertainment in the world. Film studios were transformed into major corporations, hiring a host of craftsmen and technicians including cinematographers, editors, screenwriters, and set designers. The birth of the star system supported the meteoric rise and celebrity status of actors including Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Rudolph Valentino while black performers (relegated to "race films") appeared infrequently in mainstream movies. The classic Hollywood film style was perfected and significant film genres were established: the melodrama, western, historical epic, and romantic comedy, along with slapstick, science fiction, and fantasy. In ten original essays, American Cinema of the 1920s examines the film industry's continued growth and prosperity while focusing on important themes of the era.

Download or read book Mary Pickford written by Christel Schmidt and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early days of cinema, when actors were unbilled and unmentioned in credits, audiences immediately noticed Mary Pickford. Moviegoers everywhere were riveted by her magnetic talent and appeal as she rose to become cinema's first great star. In this engaging collection, copublished with the Library of Congress, an eminent group of film historians sheds new light on this icon's incredible life and legacy. Pickford emerges from the pages in vivid detail. She is revealed as a gifted actress, a philanthropist, and a savvy industry leader who fought for creative control of her films and ultimately became her own producer. This beautifully designed volume features more than two hundred color and black and white illustrations, including photographs and stills from the collections of the Library of Congress and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Together with the text, they paint a fascinating portrait of a key figure in American cinematic history.

Download or read book Silent Stars written by Jeanine Basinger and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-10-17 with total page 799 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of America's most renowned film scholars: a revelatory, perceptive, and highly readable look at the greatest silent film stars -- not those few who are fully appreciated and understood, like Chaplin, Keaton, Gish, and Garbo, but those who have been misperceived, unfairly dismissed, or forgotten. Here is Valentino, "the Sheik," who was hardly the effeminate lounge lizard he's been branded as; Mary Pickford, who couldn't have been further from the adorable little creature with golden ringlets that was her film persona; Marion Davies, unfairly pilloried in Citizen Kane; the original "Phantom" and "Hunchback," Lon Chaney; the beautiful Talmadge sisters, Norma and Constance. Here are the great divas, Pola Negri and Gloria Swanson; the great flappers, Colleen Moore and Clara Bow; the great cowboys, William S. Hart and Tom Mix; and the great lover, John Gilbert. Here, too, is the quintessential slapstick comedienne, Mabel Normand, with her Keystone Kops; the quintessential all-American hero, Douglas Fairbanks; and, of course, the quintessential all-American dog, Rin-Tin-Tin. This is the first book to anatomize the major silent players, reconstruct their careers, and give us a sense of what those films, those stars, and that Hollywood were all about. An absolutely essential text for anyone seriously interested in movies, and, with more than three hundred photographs, as much a treat to look at as it is to read.

Download or read book Show People written by Michael Newton and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Show People offers a comprehensive history of the idea of the film star from Mary Pickford to Andy Serkis, traversing more than one hundred years and drawing on examples from America, Britain, Europe, and Asia. Renowned film writer Michael Newton explores our enduring love affair with fame, glamour, and the cinematic image. Newton builds up an expansive picture of movie stardom through explorations of striking and diverse figures such as Ingrid Bergman and John Wayne, Anna Karina and Sidney Poitier, Maggie Cheung, and Raj Kapoor. He celebrates the great performers of the past, and he looks forward to developments in the future, while also illuminating the inner workings of the movie industry and what moves us in a film and in an actor’s performance. An encyclopedic, illustrated history of film idols ready for their close-ups, Show People is ultimately a book about cinephilia, the love of cinema, and our complex connection to that celebrated and beleaguered figure, the movie star.

Download or read book Douglas Fairbanks and the American Century written by John C. Tibbetts and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Douglas Fairbanks and the American Century brings to life the most popular movie star of his day, the personification of the Golden Age of Hollywood. At his peak, in the teens and 1920s, the swashbuckling adventurer embodied the new American century of speed, opportunity, and aggressive optimism. The essays and interviews in this volume bring fresh perspectives to his life and work, including analyses of films never before examined. Also published here for the first time in English is a first-hand production account of the making of Fairbanks's last silent film, The Iron Mask. Fairbanks (1883–1939) was the most vivid and strenuous exponent of the American Century, whose dominant mode after 1900 was the mass marketing of a burgeoning democratic optimism, at home and abroad. During those first decades of the twentieth century, his satiric comedy adventures shadow-boxed with the illusions of class and custom. His characters managed to combine the American easterner's experience and pretension and the westerner's promise and expansion. As the masculine personification of the Old World aristocrat and the New World self-made man—tied to tradition yet emancipated from history—he constructed a uniquely American aristocrat striding into a new age and sensibility. This is the most complete account yet written of the film career of Douglas Fairbanks, one of the first great stars of the silent American cinema and one of the original United Artists (comprising Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and D. W. Griffith). John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh's text is especially rich in its coverage of the early years of the star's career from 1915 to 1920 and covers in detail several films previously considered lost.

Download or read book American Cinema of the 1910s written by Charlie Keil and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was during the teens that filmmaking truly came into its own. Notably, the migration of studios to the West Coast established a connection between moviemaking and the exoticism of Hollywood. The essays in American Cinema of the 1910s explore the rapid developments of the decade that began with D. W. Griffith's unrivaled one-reelers. By mid-decade, multi-reel feature films were profoundly reshaping the industry and deluxe theaters were built to attract the broadest possible audience. Stars like Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks became vitally important and companies began writing high-profile contracts to secure them. With the outbreak of World War I, the political, economic, and industrial groundwork was laid for American cinema's global dominance. By the end of the decade, filmmaking had become a true industry, complete with vertical integration, efficient specialization and standardization of practices, and self-regulatory agencies.

Download or read book Annual Report Institute of Historical Research written by University of London. Institute of Historical Research and published by . This book was released on 1923 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Flickers of Desire written by Jennifer M. Bean and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, we are so accustomed to consuming the amplified lives of film stars that the origins of the phenomenon may seem inevitable in retrospect. But the conjunction of the terms "movie" and "star" was inconceivable prior to the 1910s. Flickers of Desire explores the emergence of this mass cultural phenomenon, asking how and why a cinema that did not even run screen credits developed so quickly into a venue in which performers became the American film industry's most lucrative mode of product individuation. Contributors chart the rise of American cinema's first galaxy of stars through a variety of archival sources--newspaper columns, popular journals, fan magazines, cartoons, dolls, postcards, scrapbooks, personal letters, limericks, and dances. The iconic status of Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, Mary Pickford's golden curls, Pearl White's daring stunts, or Sessue Hayakawa's expressionless mask reflect the wild diversity of a public's desired ideals, while Theda Bara's seductive turn as the embodiment of feminine evil, George Beban's performance as a sympathetic Italian immigrant, or G. M. Anderson's creation of the heroic cowboy/outlaw character transformed the fantasies that shaped American filmmaking and its vital role in society.

Download or read book Mary Pickford written by Kathleen Feeley and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a brief biography that exploresMary Pickford'slife. This book is a part of Westview s On the World Stage series, edited by Bonnie Smith. Each title in the series features brief biographies of figures whose lives serve as a lens onto a major trend, event, movement, or crisis of their eras, and whose stories will be the entry point for a deeper understanding of a particular historical time."

Download or read book Pickford written by Eileen Whitfield and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2007-08-31 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive biography of film's first star traces her rise to fame with the growth of the medium, her influence as a partner in United Artists, her relationship with Douglas Fairbanks, and her struggles later in life. UP.

Download or read book Memoirs of an Obscure Professor written by Paul F. Boller and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the heyday of McCarthyism, the Chicago Tribune, offended by something he had written, contemptuously dismissed Paul Boller as "an obscure professor" - he was then teaching at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Some forty-five years later, reflecting on the incident, Boller wrote an essay on what it was like to be an obscure professor at one of America's less publicized campuses in a conservative community during the late 1950s and early 1960s. That essay became the foundation for this collection of autobiographical selections reflecting the interests and pursuits of a man who gained national recognition, both inside the academic community and beyond, but still values his obscurity. Whether it is a study of the much-maligned Calvin Coolidge or an account of his Navy service as a translator of Japanese during World War II, Boller brings to his writing a fresh approach and a lively and wry wit.

Download or read book Go West Young Women written by Hilary Hallett and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early part of the twentieth century, migrants made their way from rural homes to cities in record numbers and many traveled west. Los Angeles became a destination. Women flocked to the growing town to join the film industry as workers and spectators, creating a "New Woman." Their efforts transformed filmmaking from a marginal business to a cosmopolitan, glamorous, and bohemian one. By 1920, Los Angeles had become the only western city where women outnumbered men. In Go West, Young Women, Hilary A. Hallett explores these relatively unknown new western women and their role in the development of Los Angeles and the nascent film industry. From Mary Pickford’s rise to become perhaps the most powerful woman of her age, to the racist moral panics of the post–World War I years that culminated in Hollywood’s first sex scandal, Hallett describes how the path through early Hollywood presaged the struggles over modern gender roles that animated the century to come.

Download or read book Precocious Charms written by Gaylyn Studlar and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Precocious Charms, Gaylyn Studlar examines how Hollywood presented female stars as young girls or girls on the verge of becoming women. Child stars are part of this study but so too are adult actresses who created motion picture masquerades of youthfulness. Studlar details how Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones, and Audrey Hepburn performed girlhood in their films. She charts the multifaceted processes that linked their juvenated star personas to a wide variety of cultural influences, ranging from Victorian sentimental art to New Look fashion, from nineteenth-century children’s literature to post-World War II sexology, and from grand opera to 1930s radio comedy. By moving beyond the general category of "woman," Precocious Charms leads to a new understanding of the complex pleasures Hollywood created for its audience during the half century when film stars were a major influence on America’s cultural imagination.

Download or read book Graduate Programs in the Humanities Arts Social Sciences 2014 Grad 2 written by Peterson's and published by Peterson's. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 7128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peterson's Graduate Programs in the Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences 2014 contains comprehensive profiles of more than 11,000 graduate programs in disciplines such as, applied arts & design, area & cultural studies, art & art history, conflict resolution & mediation/peace studies, criminology & forensics, language & literature, psychology & counseling, religious studies, sociology, anthropology, archaeology and more. Up-to-date data, collected through Peterson's Annual Survey of Graduate and Professional Institutions, provides valuable information on degree offerings, professional accreditation, jointly offered degrees, part-time and evening/weekend programs, postbaccalaureate distance degrees, faculty, students, requirements, expenses, financial support, faculty research, and unit head and application contact information. There are helpful links to in-depth descriptions about a specific graduate program or department, faculty members and their research, and more. There are also valuable articles on financial assistance, the graduate admissions process, advice for international and minority students, and facts about accreditation, with a current list of accrediting agencies.