Silent Film Research Articles

Retrospective Technological Mythmaking: Media Discourses of Furby and Artificial Intelligence

Recent articles suggesting the late-1990s animatronic children’s toy, Furby, was promoted and perceived as true Artificial Intelligence in 1998-99 are not wholly accurate. In examining 130 North American news stories, Furby is often accurately described as only imitating machine learning. This paper analyses these articles from the perspective of mythmaking in technological culture. In the article, I analyse the media discourses at the time and provide their historical context within North American technological culture, containing events such as the Y2K bug, popular media representations, and the dotcom bubble. I also describe several potent emotional reactions to Furby. However, recent media discourses suggest Furby had been perceived as a panic-inducing new technology, similar to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast and silent cinema train effect, both of which historians have largely discounted. I contribute evidence to the contrary, while acknowledging emotional reactions, which are not necessarily indicators of utopian or dystopian cultural panics, but instead a technological banal. The contemporary mythmaking about Furby is situated as comparable to Foucault’s analysis of myths of Victorian prudishness and silence around sexuality. Retroactive mythmaking risks supporting uncritical perspectives in the present, warranting interrogation of myths about AI as it develops and expands.

Social Changes in America: The Silent Cinema Frontier and Women Pioneers

Silent cinema acted as a bridge between early motion pictures and today’s film industry, playing a transformative role in shaping feminist film history and American society. This article explores pioneering American women in the silent film industry who ventured into technology, film culture, marginalized communities, and social movements. Despite the prevalence of racist and sexist propaganda, American silent films were a frontier for innovation, filmmaking, and exploring the New Women concept. This study examines 23 American silent films that have often been overlooked and rarely studied, whereby film analysis generally aligns with established feminist silent film theories. By shedding light on a previously overlooked film directed by May Tully, this study challenges the widespread belief that there existed “no women directors in 1925”. The examination of databases reaffirms American women directors’ contributions to silent films, especially during the early years of the silent film era. The results modify the previous scholarly notion that “influential women directors’ involvement was over by 1925”. Following an initial surge in their active leadership during the early years, influential women directors’ participation was over after 1922, rather than 1925.

Obecność Victora Sjöströma w twórczości Ingmara Bergmana na przykładzie filmu "Tam, gdzie rosną poziomki"

Ingmar Bergman was a filmmaker deeply immersed in the tradition of both classical and silent cinema. It can be inferred from his comments that Victor Sjöström played a particularly important role in his work. This article attempts to trace Sjöström’s influence on the film Wild Strawberries, on which, according to Bergman, he was to have a considerable impact. The study juxtaposes selected elements of Sjöström’s works with the film in focus and presents a broader cinematic-historical context to show Bergman’s profound connection with the silent film era and the significant role that Sjöström played in his development.

Cortical time-course of evidence accumulation during semantic processing

Our understanding of the surrounding world and communication with other people are tied to mental representations of concepts. In order for the brain to recognize an object, it must determine which concept to access based on information available from sensory inputs. In this study, we combine magnetoencephalography and machine learning to investigate how concepts are represented and accessed in the brain over time. Using brain responses from a silent picture naming task, we track the dynamics of visual and semantic information processing, and show that the brain gradually accumulates information on different levels before eventually reaching a plateau. The timing of this plateau point varies across individuals and feature models, indicating notable temporal variation in visual object recognition and semantic processing.

Staging Shanghai in Love and Duty 戀愛與義務 (1923, 1931)

Abstract This study explores the significance of the various urban locations for representations of gender in Love and Duty—the 1931 silent film from Lianhua Studios, as well as the 1923 illustrated serialized novel by “Luo Chen” (a.k.a. Madame S. Rosen Hoa/Horose). I show that both the novel and the film foregrounded the built environment to express the aspirations and frustrations of the female protagonist, played by Ruan Lingyu; and that the novel effectively served as a previsualization for the film as produced by Luo Mingyou and directed by Bu Wancang with cinematography by Huang Shaofen. Further, drawing on sources relating to the publication and film production, Shanghai and Beijing cultural history, and China’s changing geopolitical circumstances, I suggest that Lianhua strategically “staged,” even allegorized, Shanghai to signal its cosmopolitan ambitions while simultaneously alluding to Chinese filmmakers’ quest for a kind of “cinematic sovereignty” during the early Nanjing decade.

‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small’: A look at Sunset Boulevard through Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media and personalities

Billy Wilder’s 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard has been widely analysed as a portrayal of the demise of Hollywood’s traditional values with the introduction of modern technology. This article revisits the iconic film in a new light to uncover a relationship between its plot and characters and Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media. In the transition period after silent movies’ displacement by talking pictures, two characters get involved in an unsettling story about Old Hollywood, obsession and obsolescence. Their contrasting personalities, heavily influenced by the different environments they come from, can be seen as examples of the hot and cool personalities described by McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. This article demonstrates how analysing classic films in the context of media ecology theories can help us uncover a deeper meaning behind traditional plots and character archetypes.

Anadili Kazakça Olan Lise Öğrencilerine Oyunla Yabancı Dil Olarak Türkçe Kelime Öğretimi

Abstract The aim of this study is to determine the effect of learning through games on Kazakh students' learning Turkish words as a foreign language. It is difficult to learn a second language without vocabulary. In this context, when teaching Turkey Turkish to cognate peoples, the pronunciation of the words should be especially emphasized because there are differences in their pronunciation since they have the same origin. When teaching Turkey Turkish to native Kazakh speakers, attention should be paid to the phonetic features resulting from the pronunciation of words. It is possible to eliminate pronunciation differences while teaching Turkish words to native Kazakh speakers through games. Games are areas where every student adds something emotionally and connects. The subject you want to explain or teach can be achieved very easily, without getting tired, with the help of games. While teaching vocabulary to A1-A2 level students whose native language is Kazakh, the teacher used games related to the subject and tried to measure the memorability of the learned words in this research. In the study, a case study, one of the qualitative research designs, was used and the data was obtained through observation. Data was collected through five different games called Kahoot!, What's That?, Silent Cinema, Select-Match and Hidden Words, which were applied to the students for 4 weeks. According to the findings, it was observed that Kazakh students willingly learned Turkish words faster through games. It was concluded that the use of games is effective in teaching foreign language Turkish vocabulary to Kazakh students. Key words: Turkish as a foreign language, Kazakh, game, word, teaching

Mega-scale movie-fields in the mouse visuo-hippocampal network

Natural visual experience involves a continuous series of related images while the subject is immobile. How does the cortico-hippocampal circuit process a visual episode? The hippocampus is crucial for episodic memory, but most rodent single unit studies require spatial exploration or active engagement. Hence, we investigated neural responses to a silent movie (Allen Brain Observatory) in head-fixed mice without any task or locomotion demands, or rewards. Surprisingly, a third (33%, 3379/10263) of hippocampal –dentate gyrus, CA3, CA1 and subiculum– neurons showed movie-selectivity, with elevated firing in specific movie sub-segments, termed movie-fields, similar to the vast majority of thalamo-cortical (LGN, V1, AM-PM) neurons (97%, 6554/6785). Movie-tuning remained intact in immobile or spontaneously running mice. Visual neurons had >5 movie-fields per cell, but only ~2 in hippocampus. The movie-field durations in all brain regions spanned an unprecedented 1000-fold range: from 0.02s to 20s, termed mega-scale coding. Yet, the total duration of all the movie-fields of a cell was comparable across neurons and brain regions. The hippocampal responses thus showed greater continuous-sequence encoding than visual areas, as evidenced by fewer and broader movie-fields than in visual areas. Consistently, repeated presentation of the movie images in a fixed, but scrambled sequence virtually abolished hippocampal but not visual-cortical selectivity. The preference for continuous, compared to scrambled sequence was eight-fold greater in hippocampal than visual areas, further supporting episodic-sequence encoding. Movies could thus provide a unified way to probe neural mechanisms of episodic information processing and memory, even in immobile subjects, across brain regions, and species.

The Silent Enemy (1930) and n’Daki Menan: Reclaiming Mise-en-Scène as Authorial Expression

Paramount Pictures’ The Silent Enemy, released in 1930, is a fascinating cultural artifact made and released during the transition from silent to sound film. One of the last silent feature films made by the studio, this critically acclaimed film took three years to make and was shot in large part on location on n’Daki Menan, the traditional territory of the Teme Augama Anishnabai in northern Ontario. Like other silent films made in Indigenous communities during this period such as Curtis’ In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) and Myles’ The Daughter of Dawn (1920), The Silent Enemy employed local Indigenous actors and drew on their knowledge and traditions to construct its vision of pre-contact Anishinaabe life. While the exact location and community are never mentioned in The Silent Enemy itself, local Anishinaabe people were hired to act in the film and make the costumes and sets according to pre-contact standards, all elements of the film form that added greatly to the production’s claims of authenticity. This cultural labour went uncredited and unacknowledged. While the film recycles the prominent ethnographic narrative of the dying “Indian” culture, it does feature ironic moments of Indigenous survivance, such as an introductory sequence with Chief Yellow Robe shot in synchronized sound, naturalistic performances, material culture designed by locals that continue to captivate community members, and over-the-top colonial takes on pre-contact life. Until now, most readings of this silent feature focused on the celebrity image of Chief Long Lance and his “outing” as an African American and its use of Native American actors in leading roles, but for far too long, the story of its long-lasting influence as both a personal and a public historical artifact for the Teme Augama Anishnabai has not been told. The authors’ method for telling this story will alternate between oral storytelling and scholarly analysis of the film’s formal and thematic elements. The authors hope that by drawing on oral and traditional storytelling approaches, Indigenous ways of knowing will be foregrounded.

Design in Motion: Film Experiments at the BauhausDesigning Russian Cinema: The Production Artist and the Material Environment in Silent Era Film

Design in Motion: Film Experiments at the BauhausDesigning Russian Cinema: The Production Artist and the Material Environment in Silent Era Film

A speaking silence: “universal language” and multilingualism in The Shape of Water

Framed by Guillermo del Toro as “a love letter to the cinema,” the academy award-winning feature The Shape of Water (2017) speaks to one of the core debates in film studies: film’s status as a “universal language.” Paradoxically both propagating and critiquing this idea of universality, a vast knowledge of film history, cinematic techniques, and a desire to create what the director calls a “cinematic Esperanto”—or a globally legible film tradition—informs a film that celebrates the multiplicity of “languages” possible in film as a medium. Reading The Shape of Water as a series of films-within-films—fantasy within realism, black-and-white within color, and a silent film within a “talkie”—I reveal the myriad communicative forms accessible within cinema as a visual, temporal, and mobile medium. The foregrounding of “a speaking silence” in the interactions between the mute Elisa and the Amphibian Man, a pre-linguistic, but communicative, sea creature, acts as a set piece—a silent film within the larger film proper—that celebrates the universal language of gesture, while the situation of this nested narrative within a larger film tradition of “talkies” speaks to the ultimate displacement of the fantasy of universality by the adoption of the voice in film. Through a close attention to film stills, the formal composition of scenes, and the sparse, multilingual dialogue, I examine The Shape of Water’s critique of a monolingual “universal” filmic language and celebration of the radical multilingualism possible in the cinema.

Secularism and Silent Films

Secularism and Silent Films

Quakerisme Dalam Film Dan Teater Amerika: The Triumphs Of Love (1795), The Quack Quakers (1916), Dan High Noon (1952)

Considering that Quakers have been used as important characters in American performance culture, this essay provides numerous examples of Quakers as represented in American theater and film: John Murdock’s play The Triumphs of Love (1795), Harry F. Millarde’s lost silent film The Quack Quakers (1916), and the Academy Award winning film High Noon (1952). In a paradoxical manner, in each of these productions ranging from farce to serious drama, Friends are shown as either claiming or as striving for unattainable moral and religious human ideals, but also as an exemplary community of individuals against which other Americans might and should be measured.

Russian Literature in Japanese Film: Cross-cultural Adaptations in the Silent Era

Since the beginning of the film industry in Japan, many short films and movies based on Western literary works were made, especially during the 1910s and 1920s. Several of those films were based on fashionable Russian literary works that had been staged in Shingeki (new drama) theaters. This study examines the adaptations of Russian literature produced from the early 1910s until the end of the silent-film era in the 1930s, focusing specifically on films based on Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection, the drama The Living Corpse, and Gorky’s play The Lower Depths. It is shown that the early adaptations, filmed in the 1910s, aimed to closely adhere to the original literary works by maintaining key plot events and recreating the cultural milieu through sets, costumes, and staging. However, starting from the 1920s, adaptations followed intercultural and intertextual processes, freely modifying the works to suit the Japanese cultural context. This shift in the approach to adapting Western literary works was influenced by the social, political, and cultural changes experienced by the country during those decades.

Material Culture as an Index of Modernity in Spain’s Silent Film Era

Abstract This essay examines the display of technological objects, consumer goods, and other materials within the earliest Spanish realist cinema, as well as the manipulation of things in pioneering fantasy films, to reveal how Spanish filmmakers projected the modernity of Spain and thereby addressed foreign objectification of their nation as exotic or different. Through an analysis of several actualities, point-of-view rail films, and factory films produced in Barcelona between 1900 and 1930, as well some key Segundo de Chomón trick films shot in the city, this article shows how this early Barcelona film culture deployed material forms to mark the agency and cosmopolitanism of turn-of-the-century Spain and to contest the “cabinet of curiosities vision” that French actuality filmmakers in particular had once imposed on the nation.

Analysis of Cohesion and Coherence of Written Products by Reading Performance and Developmental Levels

Introduction: Reading and writing are academic skills that should be given importance to the acquisition and development of students from the first step of their education life. It is stated in the literature that reading and writing contain similar processes, cognitive skills and contexts, and therefore reading skills have a positive relationship with writing skills. In this study, the cohesion and coherence of students' written products were examined depending on their reading performance and grade level. Method: The research was carried out with a comparative descriptive model, one of the quantitative research methods. In the study, the frequency of using cohesion items and the text coherence scores of 183 poor readers (fourth grade 50, sixth grade 71 and eighth grade 62) and 192 good readers (fourth grade 55, sixth grade 74 and eighth grade 63) in written products were examined by comparison. Informal Reading Inventory, a video prepared to remind the story structure and a silent movie were used to collect the data. In the analysis of the data, Mann Whitney U Tests were used for pairwise comparisons and Kruskal Wallis Tests were used for triple comparisons. Findings: Looking at the cohesion items, it is seen that poor readers in the fourth and eighth grades get lower scores than their peers who are good readers in reading skills. In addition, from the fourth to the eighth grade, it was observed that there was an improvement in the written products of the students with good reading skills in terms of cohesion items, while there was no significant improvement in the poor readers. Considering the coherence scores, it was seen that poor readers got lower scores than good readers at all grade levels, and students in both groups improved in terms of coherence scores in their written products from fourth to eighth grade. Discussion: It is seen that the problems of students with poor readers in using cohesion tools and their inability to create coherence texts may be due to the inadequacy of the students' language skills, that the students prefer to use short sentences in their writing exercises, they do not need to connect sentences, and the level of use of cohesion tools increases with the progress of their grade levels. It can be said that it is a research that has findings consistent with the findings of the studies in the literature.

Sissies and lost pardners: Issues of masculinity and male queerness in the early Western

During the silent and early sound era, the Western became one of the most popular genres, making stars of actors like William S. Hart and Tom Mix. The genre ranged from epic Westerns such as The Covered Wagon (1923) and The Iron Horse (1924) through to quickly made B-movies, and even on to short parodies. The Western emerged from the silent era with a maturity not present in other genres, and its appeal only grew during the pre-code talkie era. At the same time, American film was exploring male sexuality and gender norms in a way that it would not be able to do again for several decades. This article traces the relationship between images of male queerness and intimacy within the Western during the first four decades of American filmmaking, from the early short films of 1894 through to the introduction of the Production Code in 1934.

Films “of Eastern Life” of the 1920s in the Light of Intercultural Communication among the Peoples of the USSR

The article explores various films “about Eastern life” of the 1920s, conducting a historical and anthropological analysis of the content of these films and their reviews from the perspective of intercultural communication. The research methodology is grounded in the semiotic tradition and the communicative model proposed by Yu. M. Lotman. Printed media texts and visual sources (films) were used in the composition of this article. The aim of this piece is to expose the communicative functions of cinematography as a medium for information exchange and to ascertain the cognitive possibilities of silent cinema for the communicative interaction of the peoples of our country.
 Films “from Eastern life” had to conform to certain criteria, taking into account the idiosyncrasies of the national mentality of the inhabitants of the eastern outskirts. The study revealed that legends were employed in scriptwriting as a phenomenon of folk spiritual culture. Films inspired by folklore depict architectural masterpieces and the diverse nature of different regions. The harem theme popular in Western Europe found its way into Soviet films “about Eastern life”, but the quest for the “false exotic of the East” often resulted in communication breakdowns. The “inauthentic” portrayal of the East did not resonate with viewers and film critics.
 Nevertheless, silent films of the 1920s introduced the ethno-confessional characteristics of peoples, their history, traditional way of life, mores, and customs. These films contributed to the broadening of the national worldview, thereby confirming the high cognitive potential and significance of cinema in the intercultural communication within the multi-ethnic landscape of the USSR.

Review: Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age, by Jason McGrath

Review: <i>Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age</i>, by Jason McGrath

Atmosphere: Mexican Extras and the Production of Race in Silent Hollywood

abstract: This essay focuses on Mexican extras in silent era Hollywood. Rather than attempting to write an authoritative history of their work, I use accounts of Mexican extra work to explore how silent era Hollywood's production practices made race. Mexican extras, I explain, were perceived as another amenity offered by the industry's new home in Southern California, important for producing certain types of narratives but materially and discursively relegated to the margins of the industry. Their presence, on-screen and in the trade press, however, was central to the production of racial difference in on-screen narratives and in social life.