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Early American Cinema in Transition
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.
Documenting the Documentary
Documenting the Documentary features essays by 27 film scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives. Each essay focuses on one or two important documentaries, engaging in questions surrounding ethics, ideology, politics, power, race, gender, and representation-but always in terms of how they arise out of or are involved in the reading of specific documentaries as particular textual constructions. By closely reading documentaries as rich visual works, this anthology fills a void in the critical writing on documentaries, which tends to privilege production over aesthetic pleasure. As we increasingly perceive and comprehend the world through visual media, understanding the textual strategies by which individual documentaries are organized has become critically important. Documenting the Documentary offers clear, serious, and insightful analyses of documentary films, and is a welcome balance between theory and criticism, abstract conceptualization and concrete analysis.
Americanizing the Movies and Movie-Mad Audiences, 1910-1914
This engaging, deeply researched study provides the richest and most nuanced picture we have to date of cinema—both movies and movie-going—in the early 1910s. At the same time, it makes clear the profound relationship between early cinema and the construction of a national identity in this important transitional period in the United States. Richard Abel looks closely at sensational melodramas, including westerns (cowboy, cowboy-girl, and Indian pictures), Civil War films (especially girl-spy films), detective films, and animal pictures—all popular genres of the day that have received little critical attention. He simultaneously analyzes film distribution and exhibition practices in ord...
A Companion to D. W. Griffith
The most comprehensive volume on one of the most controversial directors in American film history A Companion to D.W. Griffith offers an exhaustive look at the first acknowledged auteur of the cinema and provides an authoritative account of the director’s life, work, and lasting filmic legacy. The text explores how Griffith’s style and status advanced along with cinema’s own development during the years when narrative became the dominant mode, when the short gave way to the feature, and when film became the pre-eminent form of mass entertainment. Griffith was at the centre of each of these changes: though a contested figure, he remains vital to any understanding of how cinema moved fro...
American Cinema’s Transitional Era
This 'transitional era' covered the years 1908-1917 & witnessed profound changes in the structure of the motion picture industry in the US, involving film genre, film form, filmmaking practices & the emergence of the studio system. The pattern which emerged dominated the industry for decades to come.
Editing and Special/Visual Effects
The expert contributors together trace how the arts of editingand effects have evolved in tandem, starting with the 'trick films'of the early silent era, which astounded audiences by splicingin or editing out key frames, all the way to today's cutting-edgeeffects technologies. Multiple filmmaking techniques are exploredthroughout, from classic Hollywood's rear projection and matteshots to the fast cuts and wall-to-wall CGI of the contemporaryblockbuster. The book introduces readers to the analog and digitaltools used in these crafts, showing the impact of changes in the filmindustry itself.
A Philosophy of the Screenplay
Recently, scholars in a variety of disciplines—including philosophy, film and media studies, and literary studies—have become interested in the aesthetics, definition, and ontology of the screenplay. To this end, this volume addresses the fundamental philosophical questions about the nature of the screenplay: What is a screenplay? Is the screenplay art—more specifically, literature? What kind of a thing is a screenplay? Nannicelli argues that the screenplay is a kind of artefact; as such, its boundaries are determined collectively by screenwriters, and its ontological nature is determined collectively by both writers and readers of screenplays. Any plausible philosophical account of the screenplay must be strictly constrained by our collective creative and appreciative practices, and must recognize that those practices indicate that at least some screenplays are artworks.
Thinking Community Music
Thinking Community Music explores critical questions concerning community music practice and theory with emphasis on intervention, hospitality, pedagogy, social justice, inclusion, cultural democracy, music, research, and future possibilities. The book encourages questioning, reflection, and dialogue. Shaped as provocations and presented as eight stand-alone essays, each 'think piece' comprises of critical questions, concrete illustrations of practice, theoretical explorations, and reflective discussion. Flanked by a historical map and a closing statement, the book provides a springboard for conceptual interrogation about participatory music-making. Supported by the lineage of poststructural philosophy, ideas emulating from Derrida and Deleuze frames conceptual interrogation about community music practices and the broader parameters of social-cultural music-making and music teaching and learning. As a vital part of the music ecology, community music is a distinctive field and a critical lens to view other musical practices and the various political and cultural policies that frame them.
Seeing Double
The poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) has been labeled the very icon of modernity, the scribe of the modern city, and an observer of an emerging capitalist culture. Seeing Double reconsiders this iconic literary figure and his fraught relationship with the nineteenth-century world by examining the way in which he viewed the increasing dominance of modern life. In doing so, it revises some of our most common assumptions about the unresolved tensions that emerged in Baudelaire’s writing during a time of political and social upheaval. Françoise Meltzer argues that Baudelaire did not simply describe the contradictions of modernity; instead, his work embodied and recorded them, leaving the...
Birth of an Industry
In Birth of an Industry, Nicholas Sammond describes how popular early American cartoon characters were derived from blackface minstrelsy. He charts the industrialization of animation in the early twentieth century, its representation in the cartoons themselves, and how important blackface minstrels were to that performance, standing in for the frustrations of animation workers. Cherished cartoon characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, were conceived and developed using blackface minstrelsy's visual and performative conventions: these characters are not like minstrels; they are minstrels. They play out the social, cultural, political, and racial anxieties and desires that link rac...
