Download or read book Studying Early and Silent Cinema written by Keith Withall and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this accessible introduction to early and silent cinema, which is currently enjoying a renaissance, both academically and in the popular imagination thanks to The Artist, Keith Withall provides both a comprehensive chronology of the period until the birth of sound and also a series of detailed case studies on the key films from the period – some well known (including Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, Eisenstein's Strike and Chaplin's The Kid), some perhaps less well familiar (including Murnau's The Last Laugh and Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates). As well as covering in detail the major film-making figures and nations of the period, the author also provides insights into the industry in less well documented areas. Throughout, the films and film-makers are placed in the context of rapid worldwide industrial change. (Please note this book is a revised and expanded version of Early and Silent Cinema: A Teacher's Guide, published by Auteur in 2007.)
Download or read book Music and the Silent Film written by Martin Miller Marks and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people's view of silent film music is of a pianist playing old scores while watching the flickering screen. This title shows that there was much more to silent films and that often it was planned from the start as an integral part of the film. The author argues that film scores are a major and vibrant part of 20th century music.
Download or read book Silent Film Sound written by Rick Altman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silent films were, of course, never silent at all. However, the sound that used to accompany the screen picture in the early days of cinema has been neglected as an area of study. Altman explores the various musical, narrative, and even synchronized sound systems that enriched cinema before Jolson spoke.
Download or read book Silent Cinema an Introduction written by Paolo Cherchi Usai and published by British Film Institute. This book was released on 2000-11-26 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised guide to silent film studies contains two new chapters that present an analysis of color technology and aesthetics. They look at how silent films are saved, restored and made accessible via archives. Aided by new material, this book is a survey of the first 30 years in the history of film.
Download or read book Studying Early and Silent Cinema written by Keith Withall and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-09 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this accessible introduction to early and silent cinema, which is currently enjoying a renaissance, both academically and in the popular imagination thanks to The Artist, Keith Withall provides both a comprehensive chronology of the period until the birth of sound and also a series of detailed case studies on the key films from the period – some well known (including Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, Eisenstein's Strike and Chaplin's The Kid), some perhaps less well familiar (including Murnau's The Last Laugh and Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates). As well as covering in detail the major film-making figures and nations of the period, the author also provides insights into the industry in less well documented areas. Throughout, the films and film-makers are placed in the context of rapid worldwide industrial change. (Please note this book is a revised and expanded version of Early and Silent Cinema: A Teacher's Guide, published by Auteur in 2007.)
Download or read book Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space written by Jennifer M. Bean and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this cross-cultural history of narrative cinema and media from the 1910s to the 1930s, leading and emergent scholars explore the transnational crossings and exchanges that occurred in early cinema between the two world wars. Drawing on film archives from around the world, this volume advances the premise that silent cinema freely crossed national borders and linguistic thresholds in ways that became far less possible after the emergence of sound. These essays address important questions about the uneven forces–geographic, economic, political, psychological, textual, and experiential–that underscore a non-linear approach to film history. The "messiness" of film history, as demonstrated here, opens a new realm of inquiry into unexpected political, social, and aesthetic crossings of silent cinema.
Download or read book Silent Movies written by Peter Kobel and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2009-02-28 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the extraordinary collection of The Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and memorabilia, Peter Kobel has created the definitive visual history of silent film. From its birth in the 1890s, with the earliest narrative shorts, through the brilliant full-length features of the 1920s, Silent Movies captures the greatest directors and actors and their immortal films. Silent Movies also looks at the technology of early film, the use of color photography, and the restoration work being spearheaded by some of Hollywood's most important directors, such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Richly illustrated from the Library of Congress's extensive collection of posters, paper prints, film stills, and memorabilia -- most of which have never been in print -- Silent Movies is an important work of history that will also be a sought-after gift book for all lovers of film.
Download or read book Flickering Empire written by Michael Glover Smith and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flickering Empire tells the fascinating yet little-known story of how Chicago served as the unlikely capital of American film production in the years before the rise of Hollywood (1907–1913). As entertaining as it is informative, Flickering Empire straddles the worlds of academic and popular nonfiction in its vivid illustration of the rise and fall of the major Chicago movie studios in the mid-silent era (principally Essanay and Selig Polyscope). Colorful, larger-than-life historical figures, including Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Micheaux, and Orson Welles, are major players in the narrative—in addition to important though forgotten industry titans, such as "Colonel" William Selig, George Spoor, and Gilbert "Broncho Billy" Anderson.
Download or read book Italian Silent Cinema written by Giorgio Bertellini and published by JOHN LIBBEY PUBLISHING. This book was released on 2013 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the wealth of studies of silent cinema in the English language, knowledge of the medium's first decades has remained attached to a canon in which Italian silent cinema appears deceptively familiar but largely absent. With 30 essays written by leading scholars in the field, 'Italian Silent Cinema' illuminates this understudied area of film history. Featuring over 100 illustrations, the reader brings into focus individual film companies, stars and genres and seeks to place the Italian production of dramas, comedies, serials, newsreels, and avant-garde works in dialogue with international film culture.
Download or read book Early American Cinema in Transition written by Charlie Keil and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2001-12-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period 1907–1913 marks a crucial transitional moment in American cinema. As moving picture shows changed from mere novelty to an increasingly popular entertainment, fledgling studios responded with longer running times and more complex storytelling. A growing trade press and changing production procedures also influenced filmmaking. In Early American Cinema in Transition, Charlie Keil looks at a broad cross-section of fiction films to examine the formal changes in cinema of this period and the ways that filmmakers developed narrative techniques to suit the fifteen-minute, one-reel format. Keil outlines the kinds of narratives that proved most suitable for a single reel’s duration, the particular demands that time and space exerted on this early form of film narration, and the ways filmmakers employed the unique features of a primarily visual medium to craft stories that would appeal to an audience numbering in the millions. He underscores his analysis with a detailed look at six films: The Boy Detective; The Forgotten Watch; Rose O’Salem-Town; Cupid’s Monkey Wrench; Belle Boyd, A Confederate Spy; and Suspense.
Download or read book New Silent Cinema written by Katherine Groo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the success of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011) and Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (2011) nothing seems more contemporary in recent film than the styles, forms, and histories of early and silent cinemas. This collection considers the latest return to silent film alongside the larger historical field of visual repetitions and affective currents that wind their way through 20th and 21st century visual cultures. Contributors bring together several fields of research, including early and silent cinema studies, experimental and new media, historiography and archive theory, and studies of media ontology and epistemology. Chapters link the methods, concerns, and concepts of early and silent film studies as they have flourished over the last quarter century to the most recent developments in digital culture—from YouTube to 3D—recasting this contemporary phenomenon in popular culture and new media against key debates and concepts in silent film scholarship. An interview with acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin closes out the collection.
Download or read book Seduction written by Karina Longworth and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The host of the podcast You Must Remember This explores Hollywood’s golden age via the cinematic life of Howard Hughes and the women who encountered him. Howard Hughes’s reputation as a director and producer of films unusually defined by sex dovetails with his image as one of the most prolific womanizers of the twentieth century. The promoter of bombshell actresses such as Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, Hughes supposedly included among his off-screen conquests many of the most famous actresses of the era, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Ginger Rogers, and Lana Turner. Some of the women in Hughes’s life were or became stars and others would stall out at a variety of points within the Hollywood hierarchy, but all found their professional lives marked by Hughes’s presence. In Seduction, Karina Longworth draws upon her own unparalleled expertise and an unpreceded trove of archival sources, diaries, and documents to produce a landmark—and wonderfully effervescent and gossipy—work of Hollywood history. It’s the story of what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood during the industry’s golden age, through the tales of actresses involved with Howard Hughes. This was the era not only of the actresses Hughes sought to dominate, but male stars such as Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, and Robert Mitchum; directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges; and studio chiefs like Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck, and David O. Selznick—many of whom were complicit in the bedroom and boardroom exploitation that stifled and disappointed so many of the women who came to Los Angeles with hopes of celluloid triumph. In his films, Howard Hughes commodified male desire more blatantly than any mainstream filmmaker of his time and in turn helped produce an incredibly influential, sexualized image of womanhood that has impacted American culture ever since. As a result, the story of him and the women he encountered is about not only the murkier shades of golden-age Hollywood, but also the ripples that still slither across today’s entertainment industry and our culture in general. Praise for Seduction “Guaranteed to engross anyone with any interest at all in Hollywood, in movies, in #MeToo and in the never-ending story of men with power and women without.” —New York Times Book Review “The stories Longworth uncovers—about Katharine Hepburn and Jane Russell, yes, but also Ida Lupino and Faith Domergue and Anita Loos—are so rich, so compelling, that they urge you to question how much else in history has been lost within the swirling vortex of Great Men.” —Atlantic “A compelling and relevant must-read.” —Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book The Call of the Heart written by Bruce Babington and published by John Libbey Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-07 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The profusion of research on film history means that there are now few Hollywood filmmakers in the category of Neglected Master; John M Stahl (1886–1950) has been stuck in it for far too long. His strong association with melodrama and the womans film is a key to this neglect; those mainstays of popular cinema are no longer the object of critical scorn or indifference, but Stahl has until now hardly benefited from this welcome change in attitude. His remarkable silent melodramas were either lost, or buried in archives, while his major sound films such as Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession, equally successful in their time, have been overshadowed by the glamour of the 1950s remakes by Douglas Sirk. Sirk is a far from neglected figure; Stahls much longer Hollywood career deserves attention and celebration in its own right, as this book definitively shows. Drawing on a wide range of film and document archives, scholars from three continents come together to cover Stahls work, as director and also producer, from its beginnings during World War I to his death, as a still active filmmaker, in 1950. Between them they make a strong case for Stahl as an important figure in cinema history, and as author of many films that still have the power to move their audiences.
Download or read book Silent Film A Very Short Introduction written by Donna Kornhaber and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Encompassing the thirty-five year span between the initial development of film technology in the mid-1890s and the adoption of synchronized sound in the late 1920s, the cinema's silent era is both one of the most important epochs of film history and one of the most misunderstood within the popular imagination. In this brief and readable account, these formative decades come vividly to life. Covering the full scope of the silent era-from the invention of motion pictures to the rise of the Hollywood studios-and touching on films and filmmakers from every corner of the globe, Silent Film: A Very Short Introduction offers a window into film's first years as a worldwide entertainment phenomenon. From groundbreaking early shorts to the masterpieces of the cinema's classical era, from street-corner nickelodeons to grand movie palaces, from slapstick to the avant-garde, the silent era's artistic abundance and global variety are here put on full display. In the story of silent film, we see not just the origins of a new culture industry but also a legacy of imagination and innovation that continues to profoundly influence the cinema even to this day. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book Silent Features written by Prof. Steve Neale and published by University of Exeter Press. This book was released on 2019-02-13 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays on fifteen feature-length silent films and two silent serial features. The aims of the collection are threefold: to provide detailed accounts of a wide array of films produced between the early 1910s and the early 1930s; to focus principally on films that may be well-known but that have rarely been discussed in detail; and hence to appeal to those interested in film style and its history. Outstanding group of contributors – see details on Author Biography page – all are acknowledged and well-regarded scholars in the field, many of whom have established international reputations for their work in this area and a world-renowned editor.
Download or read book Sessue Hayakawa written by Daisuke Miyao and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2007-03-28 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVCritical biography of Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who became a popular silent film star in the U.S., that looks at how Hollywood treated issues of race and nationality in the early twentieth century./div
Download or read book Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes written by Maggie Hennefeld and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women explode out of chimneys and melt when sprayed with soda water. Feminist activists play practical jokes to lobby for voting rights, while overworked kitchen maids dismember their limbs to finish their chores on time. In early slapstick films with titles such as Saucy Sue, Mary Jane’s Mishap, Jane on Strike, and The Consequences of Feminism, comediennes exhibit the tensions between joyful laughter and gendered violence. Slapstick comedy often celebrates the exaggeration of make-believe injury. Unlike male clowns, however, these comic actresses use slapstick antics as forms of feminist protest. They spontaneously combust while doing housework, disappear and reappear when sexually assaulted, or transform into men by eating magic seeds—and their absurd metamorphoses evoke the real-life predicaments of female identity in a changing modern world. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes reveals the gender politics of comedy and the comedic potentials of feminism through close consideration of hundreds of silent films. As Maggie Hennefeld argues, comedienne catastrophes provide disturbing but suggestive images for comprehending gendered social upheavals in the early twentieth century. At the same time, slapstick comediennes were crucial to the emergence of film language. Women’s flexible physicality offered filmmakers blank slates for experimenting with the visual and social potentials of cinema. Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes poses major challenges to the foundations of our ideas about slapstick comedy and film history, showing how this combustible genre blows open age-old debates about laughter, society, and gender politics.
