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Cinema and the invention of modern life / edited by Leo Charney, Vanessa R. Schwartz Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1995.
Call No: 403 CINAuthor: Charney, Leo ; Schwartz, Vanessa R. Source: USPlace: Berkeley, CaliforniaPublisher: University of California PressPubDate: 1995PhysDes: vii, 409 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmSubject: BENJAMIN, WALTER ; KRACAUER, SIEGFRIED ; LUMIERE, AUGUSTE & LOUIS ; PATHE Summary: "Casting aside the traditional conception of film as an outgrowth of photography, theater, and the novel, the essays in this volume reasses the relationship between the emergence of film and the broader culture of modernity. The cultural developments and historical transformations that became known as "modernity" were themselves cinematic, according to these leading scholars in film and cultural studies.They link the popularity of cinema in the later nineteenth century to emerging cultural phenomena such as window shopping, mail-order catalogs, and wax museums and show how film was uniquely prepared to reflect the new ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing." -- taken from back coverNotes: Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN: 0520201124Contents: Introduction / Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz -- 1. Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, and Early Cinema / Tom Gunning -- 2. Unbinding Vision: Manet and the Attentive Observer in the Late Nineteenth Century / Jonathan Crary -- 3. Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism / Ben Singer -- 4. The Poster in Fin-de-Siecle Paris: "That Mobile and Degenerate Art" / Marcus Verhagen -- 5. "A New Era of Shopping": The Promotion of Women's Pleasure in London's West End, 1909-1914 / Erika D. Rappaport -- 6. Disseminations of Modernity: Representation and Consumer Desire in Early Mail-Order Catalogs / Alexandra Keller -- 7. The Perils of Pathe, or the Americanization of the American Cinema / Richard Abel -- 8. Panoramic Literature and the Invention of Everyday Genres / Margaret Cohen -- 9. Moving Pictures: Photography, Narrative, and the Paris Commune of 1871 / Jeannene M. Przyblyski. -- 10. In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity / Leo Charney -- 11. Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siecle Paris / Vanessa R. Schwartz -- 12. Effigy and Narrative: Looking into the Nineteenth-Century Folk Museum / Mark B. Sandberg -- 13. America, Paris, the Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity / Miriam Bratu Hansen. -- Contributors -- Index
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journal article
The life and films of Stanley Stadler Crick in Lumiere (March, 1973) iss.21 p.22-26
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book
Life to those shadows / by Noe¨l Burch ; translated and edited by Ben Brewster Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
Call No: 62 BURAuthor: Burch, Noe¨l ; Brewster, Ben Source: USPlace: BerkeleyPublisher: University of California PressPubDate: 1990PhysDes: 317 pages : illustrations ; 23 cmSubject: THEORY ; BURCH, NOEL ; HISTORY OF CINEMA. SILENT PERIOD ; BIOGRAPH ; LUMIERE, LOUIS ; DEMILLE, CECIL B. ; DREYER, CARL TH. ; DOCUMENTARIES ; DICKSON, W. K. L. ; EDISON, THOMAS ALVA ; GANCE, ABEL ; GORKY, MAXIM ; GRIFFITH, DAVID WARK ; GUY-BLACHE, ALICE ; HEPWORTH, CECIL ; PATHE ; PORTER, EDWIN S. ; VITAGRAPH ; ZECCA, FERDINAND Summary: "Noel Burch's new book is a critique of the assumptions underlying 'classical' approaches to film history: the assumption that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being; and the assumption that this language was a unversal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself. His major thesis is that, on the contrary, film language has a social and economic history, that it evolved in the way it did because of when and where it was constructed - in the capitalist and imperialist west between 1892 and 1929. The book examines the chronology of the emergence of what it defines as cinema's Institutional Mode of Representation and the socio-historical circumstances in which this took place. It examines the principles of visualisation - camera placement and movement, lighting, editing, mise-en-scene - that film-makers and audiences came to internalize over the first three decades. Special emphasis is laid on the all-important change that occurred in the imaginary placing of the spectator, from a position of exteriority to the film image, implicit in both film-form and viewing conditions during the primitive era (pre-1909), to the imaginary centering of the spectator-subject, completed only with the generalisation of lip-synch sound after 1929. It is the contention of this book that this imaginary centering of a sensorily isolated spectator is the keystone of the cinematic illustion of reality, still achieved today by the same means as it was sixty years ago." - taken from back coverNotes: Revised versions of papers written 1976-1981, some of which have appeared in English and French magazines -- Includes bibliographical references (p. 274-283) and index -- Filmography: p. 284-305.ISBN: 0520071441Contents: Introduction -- Charles Baudelaire versus Doctor Frankenstein -- Life to Those Shadows -- The Wrong Side of the Tracks -- Those Gentlemen of the Lantern and the Parade -- Business is Business: An Invisible Audience -- Passions and Chases-A Certain Linearisation -- Building a Haptic Space -- A Primitive Mode of Representation? -- The Motionless Voyage: Constitution of The Ubiquitous Subject -- Beyond the Peephole, the Logos -- Narrative, Diegesis: Thresholds, Limits -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Filmography -- Index
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subject clippings file
PATHE
Call No: SUBJECT CLIPPINGS FILEPhysDes: ClippingsSubject: PATHE
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book
Screening Europe in Australasia : transnational silent film before and after the rise of Hollywood / Julie K. Allen Exeter: University of Exeter Press,
Call No: 302(94) ALLAuthor: Allen, Julie K. Edition: 2022Place: ExeterPublisher: University of Exeter PressPhysDes: xx, 476 pages : illustrated ; 25 cmSeries: Exeter studies in film historySubject: DISTRIBUTION. AUSTRALIA ; EXHIBITION. AUSTRALIA ; DISTRIBUTION. NEW ZEALAND ; EXHIBITION. NEW ZEALAND ; PATHE ; ITALIAN CINEMA ; SCANDINAVIAN COUNTRIES ; GERMANY ; UFA Summary: Through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century, this book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as having always dominated global film culture.
Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history—and its implications for cross-cultural exchange—was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, bringing it all vividly to life.
Making ground-breaking use of digitized Australian and New Zealand newspapers, the author reconstructs the distribution and exhibition of European silent films in the Antipodes, along the way incorporating compelling biographical sketches of the ambitious pioneers of the Australasian cinema industry. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions.
This book’s treatment of the extensive circulation of European silent features and stars in Australasia reveals the vibrant transnationalism of silent film before the rise of Hollywood, and frames the emergence of art house cinema in the 1920s. -- publisher's web siteISBN: 9781905816873Contents: List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Part I: Film Distribution and Exhibition in Australasia before World War I -- 1. "A Window of the World": Distribution and Exhibition of Early Film in Settler-Colonial Australasia -- 2. The Anglo-American Fathers of the Australian Combine: Cosens Spencer, T. J. West, and J. D. Williams -- 3. Trans-Tasman Cinema Traffic: Film Distribution and Exhibition in New Zealand Through World War I -- Part II: European Films on Australasian Screens Through 1917 -- 4. "THEIR WORK STANDS SUPREME": Pathé Frères, Sarah Bernhardt, and French Art Films -- 5. "The most important event in the annals of the biograph in Australia": The Triumph of Italian Historical Epics -- 6. "Like the hallmark on silver": The Unquestioned Quality of Nordic Films -- 7. The Female Faces of German Film Abroad: Asta Nielsen, Henny Porten, and Madame Saharet -- 8. "We Fear No Combine": Clement Mason's European Film Imports in 1913 -- Part III: Competing with Hollywood on Quality -- 9. "Films as Foreign Offices:" Mason Super Films' Promotion of Swedish and Italian Art Film in Australasia, 1919-25 -- 10. The Rise of UFA, Cinema Art Films, and Anglo-German Solidarity against Hollywood -- Works Cited -- Appendix: Film List.
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Specters of slapstick & silent film comediennes / Maggie Hennefeld New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
Call No: 732.1-02 HENAuthor: Hennefeld, Maggie Edition: 2018Place: New YorkPublisher: Columbia University PressPubDate: 2018PhysDes: xvii, 364 pages : illustrated ; 23 cmSeries: Film and cultureSubject: HISTORY OF CINEMA. SILENT PERIOD ; WOMEN AND THE CINEMA ; GRIFFITH, DAVID WARK ; DRESSLER, MARIE ; FEMINISM AND THE CINEMA ; GENDER AND THE CINEMA ; GISH, LILLIAN ; NORMAND, MABEL ; PATHE ; SENNETT, MACK ; TURNER, FLORENCE ; VITAGRAPH Summary: 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. -- publisher's web siteISBN: 9780231179478Donation: Senses of CinemaContents: List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I. Early Film Combustion -- 1. Early Cinema and the Comedy of Female Catastrophe -- 2. Female Combustion and Feminist Film Historiography -- Part II. Transitional Film Metamorphosis -- 3. Slapstick Comediennes in Transitional Cinema: Between Body and Medium -- 4. The Geopolitics of Transitional Film Comedy: American Vitagraph Versus French Pathé-Freres -- 5. D. W. Griffith’s Slapstick Comediennes: Female Corporeality and Narrative Film Storytelling -- Part III. Feminist Slapstick Politics -- 6. Film Comedy Aesthetics and Suffragette Social Politics -- 7. Radical Militancy and Slapstick Political Violence -- Postscript: Haunted Laughter at Late Comediennes -- Annotated Filmography -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
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