The Decline of Sentiment seeks to characterize the radical shifts in taste that transformed American film in the jazz age. Based upon extensive reading of trade papers and the popular press of the ...day, Lea Jacobs documents the films and film genres that were considered old-fashioned, as well as those dubbed innovative and up-to-date, and looks closely at the works of filmmakers such as Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, and Monta Bell, among many others. Her analysis--focusing on the influence of literary naturalism on the cinema, the emergence of sophisticated comedy, and the progressive alteration of the male adventure story and the seduction plot--is a comprehensive account of the modernization of classical Hollywood film style and narrative form.
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.
Phillip Maciak examines filmic depictions of Jesus to argue that cinema developed as a model technology of secularism, training viewers for belief in a secular age. Cinematic depictions of an ...appearing and disappearing Christ became a powerful vehicle for Americans to navigate a rapidly modernizing society.
Richard Abel's magisterial new book radically rewrites the history
of French cinema between 1896 and 1914, particularly during the
years when Pathé-Frères, the first major corporation in the new
...industry, led the world in film production and distribution. Based
on extensive investigation of rare archival films and documents,
and drawing on recent social and cultural histories of
turn-of-the-century France and the United States, his book provides
new insights into the earliest history of the cinema. Abel tells
how early French film entertainment changed from a cinema of
attractions to the narrative format that Hollywood would so
successfully exploit. He describes the popular genres of the
era-comic chases, trick films and féeries , historical and
biblical stories, family melodramas and grand guignol tales, crime
and detective films-and shows the shift from short subjects to
feature-length films. Cinema venues evolved along with the films as
live music, color effects, and other new exhibiting techniques and
practices drew larger and larger audiences. Abel explores the ways
these early films mapped significant differences in French social
life, helping to produce thoroughly bourgeois citizens for Third
Republic France. The Ciné Goes to Town recovers early
French cinema's unique contribution to the development of the mass
culture industry. As the one-hundredth anniversary of cinema
approaches, this compelling demonstration of film's role in the
formation of social and national identity will attract a wide
audience of film scholars, social and cultural historians, and film
enthusiasts.
Existing methods for studying individual differences in adults' mindreading often lack good psychometric characteristics. Moreover, it remains unclear, even in theory, how mindreading varies in ...adults who already possess an understanding of mental states. In this pre-registered study, it was hypothesised that adults vary in their motivation for mindreading and in the degree to which their answers on mindreading tasks are appropriate (context-sensitive). These factors are confounded in existing measures as they do not differentiate between the frequency of mental state terms (MST), indicative of motivation, and the quality of an explanation. Using an innovative scoring system, the current study examined whether individual differences in adult undergraduate psychology students' (N = 128) answer quality and / or quantity of explicit references to others' mental states on two open-ended response mindreading tasks were separable constructs, accounted for by mindreading motivation, and related differentially to measures previously linked with mindreading (e.g., religiosity, loneliness, social network size). A two-factor and one-factor model both provided acceptable fit. Neither model showed significant associations with mindreading motivation. However, a two-factor model (with MST and response appropriateness loading onto separate factors) provided greater explanatory power. Specifically, MST was positively associated with religiosity and response appropriateness was negatively associated with religiosity, whilst the one-factor solution did not predict any socially relevant outcomes. This provides some indication that mindreading quantity and mindreading quality may be distinguishable constructs in the structure of individual differences in mindreading.
This magisterial book offers comprehensive accounts of the professional itineraries of three women in the silent film in the Netherlands, France and North America. Annette Förster presents a careful ...assessment of the long career of Dutch stage and film actress Adriënne Solser; an exploration of the stage and screen careers of French actress and filmmaker Musidora and Canadian-born actress and filmmaker Nell Shipman; an analysis of the interaction between the popular stage and the silent cinema from the perspective of women at work in both realms; fresh insights into Dutch stage and screen comedy, the French revue and the American Northwest drama of the 1910s; and much more, all grounded in a wealth of archival research.
In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special ...Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their pivotal role in cinema's emergence as a full-fledged art. Special effects not only shaped the look of iconic films like Nosferatu (1922) or Metropolis (1927), but they are central to a comprehensive understanding of German silent film culture writ large. This book examines special effects as the embodiment of a techno-romantic paradigm that seeks to harness technology-the epitome of modern materialism-as a means for accessing a spiritual realm. Employed to visualize ideas and emotions in a medium-specific way, special effects thus paved the way for film art.
Between the advent of motion pictures in the 1890s and the close of the 'silent' era at the end of the 1920s, many of the longest, most expensive and most watched films on both sides of the Atlantic ...drew upon biblical traditions. David J. Shepherd traces the evolution of the biblical film through the silent era, asking why the Bible attracted early film makers, how biblical films were indebted to other interpretive traditions, and how these films were received. Drawing upon rarely seen archival footage and early landmark films of directors such as Louis Feuillade, D. W. Griffith, Michael Curtis and Cecil B. DeMille, this history treats well-known biblical subjects including Joseph, Moses, David and Jesus, along with lesser-known biblical stars such as Jael, Judith and Jephthah's daughter. This book will be of great interest to students of Biblical studies, Jewish studies and film studies.
