Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth
Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth
Oxford University Press, USA | May 3, 2001 | ISBN-10: 019514094X | 234 pages | PDF | 14.79 MB
Oxford University Press, USA | May 3, 2001 | ISBN-10: 019514094X | 234 pages | PDF | 14.79 MB
Veteran cultural critic Cohen (Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism) explores the advent of the silent film, asserting that the early 20th-century medium represented what American society at the time both embraced (e.g., authentic expression and self-determinism) and rejected (e.g., antiquated European notions and societal stasis). The author considers the "raw materials" of film the body, the landscape, and the face and these components' respective 19th-century antecedents in vaudeville, panoramic displays, and portrait photography. She also discusses their corollaries in genre (comedy, the Western, and melodrama) and their film "vocabulary" (the cut, the long shot, and the close-up). Her contention that the medium is reflexive is not new, yet her seamless integration of seemingly disparate facts is refreshing and convincing.