Kristen Whissel . Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and the Silent Cinema . Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press . 2008 . Pp. xi, 272. Cloth $79.95, paper $22.95.

Abstract

Kristen Whissel uses the theme of traffic to examine the relationship among early cinema, modernity, and American nationalism. Starting with a theoretical foundation laid by Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Michel Foucault, and others, her study attempts to look “beyond the urban settings familiar in early film studies and outward toward systems and networks of traffic” (p. 10). What sets this book apart from previous work on this topic, she argues, is detailed attention paid to “the national specificity of the experience of American modernity” (p. 11). Whissel first considers the connection between cinema and empire in an opening chapter that looks at the ways early silent films covered American involvement in the Spanish-American and the Philippine-American wars. She then devotes a chapter to live battle re-enactments such as William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody's Wild West show and “how the cinema borrowed the reality effects of the live reenactment to place its own spectators on the simulated ‘scene’ of history” (p. 15). A third chapter deals with the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and sets early film and modern traffic into the larger context of the spread of electrification. Chapter four examines the way early twentieth-century films sensationalized the white slave trade and helped to fuel a moral panic. A concluding chapter covers, all too briefly, cinema on the eve of the American entry into World War I.