Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America by Alison Griffiths (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America by Alison Griffiths Carolyn Jacobs Griffiths, Alison. Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 472pages. ISBN: 9780231541565. Even if you have never stepped foot inside a prison, you probably have some image of what life is like within its walls. Iconic films including Escape from Alcatraz (Don Siegel, 1979), The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994), and Dead Man Walking (Tim Robbins, 1995), and recent television shows such as HBO’s Oz and The Night Of, Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, and Fox’s Prison Break have shaped the way we think about prisons and those who are incarcerated within them. Alison Griffiths’ Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America delves into the complex and inextricable relationship between prisons and popular media. In this thoroughly researched, methodologically interdisciplinary book, Griffiths traces the relationship between screens and prisons to the early twentieth century, a moment when the emerging medium of film took on an important role in representing and shaping the American penal system. Carceral Fantasies explores how early twentieth-century American cinema both represented prison to the outside world, constructing cultural notions of life behind bars, and brought the outside world into prisons, profoundly altering prisoners’ senses and perceptions of carceral space. Griffiths does not attempt to construct a neat, linear narrative, but rather focuses on distinct points where prisons and cinema intersected between the emergence of the media and the mid-1930s. Organized into three broad sections, titled “The Carceral Imaginary,” “The Carceral Spectator” and “The Carceral Reformer,” Griffiths examines the relationship between prison and screen-based media from three unique angles. In the first, she outlines the role popular media have played in constructing cultural understandings of carceral spaces. Next, she turns to the prison as an exhibition space, examining how cinema found a home within prison walls. Finally, Griffiths details the role cinema played in prison reform movements in the early twentieth century. Organizing Carceral Fantasies in this way allows Griffiths to cover a broad range of topics and make use of diverse archival sources, including prison records, reports, and newsletters, newspapers and trade publications, and the correspondence of prisoners, wardens, and reformers. In an approach she labels “methodologically ambidextrous,” Griffiths relies upon not only archival research, but also close textual analysis, theories of film spectatorship and reception, gender, space and the built environment, and foundational texts in prison studies. In this way, Carceral Fantasies, like much of Griffiths’ previous work, is a truly interdisciplinary piece of scholarship. Griffiths’ willingness to step out of disciplinary bounds pays off throughout the book. For instance, the opening chapter looks at the history of the execution film not only in relationship to visual representations of capital punishment from woodcuts and sketches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through smartphone recordings of Saddam Hussein’s execution, but also in terms of the cultural significance of electricity and the Phantasmagoria in the early twentieth-century. Looking at early execution films in this context allows us to understand cinematic representations of capital punishment, found on screen from the earliest years of filmmaking through today, as indicative of cultural anxieties and obsessions related to death, punishment, and modern technology. [End Page 57] In its focus on separate, yet interrelated, moments of intersection between cinema and prison, Carceral Fantasies resists a sense of closure. Instead, the book’s structure invites further investigation into this complex, ongoing relationship. Griffiths leaves the door open, for instance, for a more thorough investigation of the role race plays in the production of carceral space and in media representations of prison, providing productive archival leads and theoretical frameworks through which to pursue such a study. Additionally, while Carceral Fantasies is centered in the early twentieth century, frequent references to contemporary images of prisons in popular culture, as well current uses of cinema, television, radio, and other media in penitentiaries today remind the reader that the relationship between audiovisual media and prison is not merely a relic of the past. On the contrary, Griffiths stresses the continuity of this intersection over time, suggesting that this historical...