That's Entertainment

Abstract

Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism By Joshua Yumibe Rutgers University Press, 2012 230 pp./$72.00 (hb), $29.95 (sb) Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity By Lauren Rabinovitz Columbia University Press, 2012 256 pp./$82.50 (hb), $27.50 (sb) Oftentimes the study of earl silent cinema is more akin to archeology than it IS to traditional modes of cinema studies. Most (roughly eighty percent) of the films of the era are gone; many primary records have long been destroyed. What remains for researchers are fragments, traces, and gleanings from other media. It is not surprising, then that historians and cultural critics have still only scratched the surface of both the cinema and other popular entertainments of the turn of the last century: a lot of deep digging and careful piece work is required. Two new books, Mating Color: Early Film, Mass. Culture, Modernism and Electric. Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity, are vital contributions to our understanding or the American cultural landscape a century ago. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At first glance, they are concerned with disparate subjects the use of color in early silent film and the relationship between early cinema and amusement parks but, both are ultimately about the complex connections between silent film, popular culture, technology., and questions of modernity. Joshua Yumibe's Moving Color explores the use of applied color techniques hand coloring, stenciling, tinting, and toning) in silent film. Yumibe frames his subject with considerations of changes in color theory and beliefs about the nature of visual perception in the nineteenth century and with a broader look at the increasing prevalence of color in daily life in advertising, postcards, wallpaper, etc.) Thanks to technological and chemical improvements. He positions color cinema as part of a larger popular assimilation of color in society cinema, and especially color cinema, was an acclimatizing agent to the rapid transformations wrought on society by modernism, whether it be a new sense of urban spaces, growing understandings of the body as a gendered and sexual site, or new moral and behavioral codes. Yurnibe intertwines these social and cultural consequences of color cinema and other concomitant popular entertainments.) With impressive research into the history and technology of these varied color processes. He explores not only how they were used, but why they were used--again, drawing upon newly developed nineteenth-century ideas about color theory, psychological and therapeutic uses of color, and color as a tool for moral uplift. …