Silent Film Research Articles

The othering of women in silent film: Cultural, historical, and literary contexts By Barbara TepaLupack, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024

The othering of women in silent film: Cultural, historical, and literary contexts By Barbara TepaLupack, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024

‘Are you even listening?’ - EEG-based decoding of absolute auditory attention to natural speech

Objective. In this study, we use electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to determine whether a subject is actively listening to a presented speech stimulus. More precisely, we aim to discriminate between an active listening condition, and a distractor condition where subjects focus on an unrelated distractor task while being exposed to a speech stimulus. We refer to this task as absolute auditory attention decoding. Approach. We re-use an existing EEG dataset where the subjects watch a silent movie as a distractor condition, and introduce a new dataset with two distractor conditions (silently reading a text and performing arithmetic exercises). We focus on two EEG features, namely neural envelope tracking (NET) and spectral entropy (SE). Additionally, we investigate whether the detection of such an active listening condition can be combined with a selective auditory attention decoding (sAAD) task, where the goal is to decide to which of multiple competing speakers the subject is attending. The latter is a key task in so-called neuro-steered hearing devices that aim to suppress unattended audio, while preserving the attended speaker. Main results. Contrary to a previous hypothesis of higher SE being related with actively listening rather than passively listening (without any distractors), we find significantly lower SE in the active listening condition compared to the distractor conditions. Nevertheless, the NET is consistently significantly higher when actively listening. Similarly, we show that the accuracy of a sAAD task improves when evaluating the accuracy only on the highest NET segments. However, the reverse is observed when evaluating the accuracy only on the lowest SE segments. Significance. We conclude that the NET is more reliable for decoding absolute auditory attention as it is consistently higher when actively listening, whereas the relation of the SE between actively and passively listening seems to depend on the nature of the distractor.

Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Era by Jason McGrath (review)

Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Era by Jason McGrath (review)

포스트휴먼 시대의 하이퍼텍스트의 미학적 윤리

This paper aims to search for the aesthetical ethics through understanding the multimodal text, Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and to suggest the vital vision for the survival of literature at the digital culture in the posthuman age. As an orphaned boy, Hugo finds the history of silent movie and recovers George Méliès’s identity as the silent movie producer. His investigation into the past turns out to find the newness and to open the vibrant future. As this hybrid graphic novel shows the changes from the written text to digital hypertext, it asserts that new media is constructed on the basis of old previous media, and we should find the solutions in the relationships with past and future. This novel resurrects vibrantly the multimodal form borrowed from the cinematic technique through the printed book. As the genres are mixed at the process of creating the new media, the complex combinations with image and text represent the microsome of media environment. Selznick’s vital multimodal form initiates an innovative storytelling, because it gives the opportunities to find the futuristic way in the excessive digital culture and to achieve the ethical vision through the participatory reading.

Neural Envelope Processing at Low Frequencies Predicts Speech Understanding of Children With Hearing Loss in Noise and Reverberation.

Children with hearing loss experience greater difficulty understanding speech in the presence of noise and reverberation relative to their normal hearing peers despite provision of appropriate amplification. The fidelity of fundamental frequency of voice (f0) encoding-a salient temporal cue for understanding speech in noise-could play a significant role in explaining the variance in abilities among children. However, the nature of deficits in f0 encoding and its relationship with speech understanding are poorly understood. To this end, we evaluated the influence of frequency-specific f0 encoding on speech perception abilities of children with and without hearing loss in the presence of noise and/or reverberation. In 14 school-aged children with sensorineural hearing loss fitted with hearing aids and 29 normal hearing peers, envelope following responses (EFRs) were elicited by the vowel /i/, modified to estimate f0 encoding in low (<1.1 kHz) and higher frequencies simultaneously. EFRs to /i/ were elicited in quiet, in the presence of speech-shaped noise at +5 dB signal to noise ratio, with simulated reverberation time of 0.62 sec, as well as both noise and reverberation. EFRs were recorded using single-channel electroencephalogram between the vertex and the nape while children watched a silent movie with captions. Speech discrimination accuracy was measured using the University of Western Ontario Distinctive Features Differences test in each of the four acoustic conditions. Stimuli for EFR recordings and speech discrimination were presented monaurally. Both groups of children demonstrated a frequency-dependent dichotomy in the disruption of f0 encoding, as reflected in EFR amplitude and phase coherence. Greater disruption (i.e., lower EFR amplitudes and phase coherence) was evident in EFRs elicited by low frequencies due to noise and greater disruption was evident in EFRs elicited by higher frequencies due to reverberation. Relative to normal hearing peers, children with hearing loss demonstrated: (a) greater disruption of f0 encoding at low frequencies, particularly in the presence of reverberation, and (b) a positive relationship between f0 encoding at low frequencies and speech discrimination in the hardest listening condition (i.e., when both noise and reverberation were present). Together, these results provide new evidence for the persistence of suprathreshold temporal processing deficits related to f0 encoding in children despite the provision of appropriate amplification to compensate for hearing loss. These objectively measurable deficits may underlie the greater difficulty experienced by children with hearing loss.

The othering of women in silent film: Cultural, historical, and literary contexts By Barbara TepaLupack, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024. 344 pp. $120.00 (hardcover)

The othering of women in silent film: Cultural, historical, and literary contexts By Barbara TepaLupack, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024. 344 pp. $120.00 (hardcover)

THE PERCEPTION OF BLACK AND WHITE IN ENGLISH AND ARMENIAN IDIOMS

Colour is a silent language with the help of which people can communicate. It is rich in hidden meanings and symbolisms. We think of colour as an independent concept with a part to play in every aspect of our lives. Colour, as we know, does not exist in the outside world, beyond us, like gravity, protons and oxygen do. Instead, colour is created inside our heads. It is the characteristic of human visual perception. The recognition and interpretation of colour are determined by numerous factors: cultural, religious, spiritual, physiological, and psychological. Colour terms are widely used in phraseological units. Among most common ones are the idioms with the two opposite spectra – colours black and white. The present article discusses the perception of black and white in English and Armenian idioms. The current research is an attempt aimed at revealing the similarities and differences in these two languages through comparative-contrastive and descriptive methods of analysis.

Book Review: of Chinese film - Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age

Book Review: of <i>Chinese film - Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age</i>

Genre Features of Professional Screenplays in Russia in 1910s: Theory and Practice

The article explores the genre dominants of Silver Age screenplays. Theoretical concepts of film dramaturgy are applied to the texts of A. A. Khanzhonkov’s “From the World of Mystery” (1915) and A. S. Voznesensky’s “God” (1918). The scientific novelty of the study lies in the comprehensive analysis of these screenplay texts for the first time. The relevance is justified by contemporary philology’s interest in the intermedial aspect of literature. The screenplays exhibit an orientation towards literary models: a wide range of linguistic devices (metaphors, similes, inversions), complex composition, psychological depth, and more. Cinematic expressiveness is realized through a system of modalities (real time, memories, dreams, imagination, altered consciousness, etc.), description of character movements, and “visual sound.” The study suggests that the genre of screenwriting in silent cinema fundamentally differs from subsequent eras and tends towards the epic rather than the dramatic genre. Discrepancies between directorial and literary scripts occurred early in the genre’s formation. A comprehensive examination of original realized screenplays could be key to understanding the reasons for the unsatisfactory results of writer-filmmaker interactions.

Imagining Women’s Archives of Silent Film Music

Although women comprised the majority of American cinema accompanists during the silent film period (c. 1895–1927), few of their music libraries or compositions have survived, whereas collections created by male cinema musicians dominate the silent film music archives. Women musicians suggested, shaped, and helped define the musical tastes of the time; educated listeners; and showed how music could serve as a creative, narrative, and interpretative force in the cinema. I offer an accounting of extant collections by women accompanists and read their contents and contexts from a feminist perspective. Using hints and fragments found in letters, period trade journals, and catalogs, I then speculate on an imaginary archive, one that collects music composed or played by female silent film musicians whose work has been lost to us, but whose influence in the development of film music is unmistakable.

Feminist World-Making with Cinema’s First Nasty Women

Cinema’s First Nasty Women is a ninety-nine-film DVD/Blu-ray set that highlights silent-era comediennes and cross-dressed women. Cocurators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak organized two live Zoom roundtables with members of the team who had created, taught, or contributed to the project, moderated by FMH editor Jennifer Bean. One included cocurator and film historian Laura Horak, Kino producer Bret Wood, cocurator and silent film archivist Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, composers Renée C. Baker and Gonca Feride Varol, Indigenous film historian and booklet contributor Liza Black, and film scholar Kaveh Askari. The other included cocurator and film historian Maggie Hennefeld, silent film festival organizer Enrique Moreno Ceballos, film scholars and commentary contributors Yiman Wang, Aurore Spiers, and Kate Saccone, and film scholar Neta Alexander. Rachel Loewen transcribed the roundtables and Hennefeld and Horak condensed and cut together the conversations to highlight the key themes that emerged.

The Music for Salon Orchestra and its Use in Silent Films

English Abstract: Recently, the study of music in silent film has brought attention to a musical repertoire that had enormous growth between the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century: salon music. This repertoire has not yet been fully investigated, although it has an evident historical importance in the development of cinematographic music and it represents a fundamental link between the nineteenth-century musical tradition of highbrow origin and the explosion of popular music genres at the beginning of the twentieth century. The main core of this repertoire is based on three typologies of pieces: transcriptions from the operatic and symphonic repertoire, original pieces in Romantic style, and dances and songs. The analytical study of this repertoire aims to bring its historical importance back into perspective, transforming it into an object of investigation with its own autonomy, rather than a phenomenon simply derived from the classical repertoire, devoid of its own interest and, therefore, negligible. The clarification of the peculiar characteristics of its musical language is fundamental to begin to outline an aesthetic of musical compilation in the silent film era. Studies of music in silent films has in fact concentrated more on the phenomenon of original scores, quantitatively marginal, while neglecting the study of compiled musical accompaniment, which was the most diffused form of accompaniment. This study, in addition to filling the historiographical gap that still exists, provides information fundamental to understanding the subsequent developments of early sound films. French Abstract: Récemment, l'étude de la musique du cinéma muet a fait émerger un répertoire musical qui a connu un essor considérable entre la fin du XIXe siècle et les premières décennies du XXe siècle : la musique de salon. Ce répertoire n'a pas encore fait l'objet d'une étude approfondie, bien que son importance historique dans le développement de la musique cinématographique soit évidente et qu'il représente un lien fondamental entre la tradition musicale du dix-neuvième siècle issue de la haute société et l'explosion des genres musicaux populaires au début du vingtième siècle. Le noyau principal de ce répertoire repose sur trois types de pièces : des transcriptions du répertoire opératique et symphonique, des pièces originales dans le style romantique, ainsi que des danses et des chansons. L'étude analytique de ce répertoire vise à remettre en perspective son importance historique, en le transformant en un objet d'étude autonome, plutôt qu'en un phénomène simplement dérivé du répertoire classique, dépourvu d'intérêt intrinsèque et, par conséquent, négligeable. Clarifier les caractéristiques particulières de son langage musical est fondamental pour commencer à esquisser une esthétique de la compilation musicale à l'époque du film muet. Les études sur la musique dans les films muets se sont en effet davantage concentrées sur le phénomène des partitions originales, marginales d'un point de vue quantitatif, au détriment de l'étude de l'accompagnement musical sous forme de compilation, qui était pourtant la forme d'accompagnement la plus répandue. Cette étude, tout en comblant le fossé historiographique qui subsiste, fournit des informations fondamentales pour comprendre les développements ultérieurs des premiers films sonores. German Abstract: In jüngster Zeit hat die Untersuchung von Stummfilmmusik die Aufmerksamkeit auf ein musikalisches Erbe gelenkt, das zwischen dem Ende des 19. und den ersten Jahrzehnten des 20. Jahrhunderts ein enormes Wachstum erlebte: die Salonmusik. Dieses Repertoire ist noch nicht vollständig erforscht, obwohl es eine herausragende historische Bedeutung für die Entwicklung der Filmmusik hat und eine grundlegende Verbindung zwischen der hochkulturellen Musiktradition des 19. Jahrhunderts und der explosionsartigen Ausbreitung populärer Musikgenres zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts darstellt. Der Kern dieses Repertoires basiert auf drei Werktypologien: auf Transkriptionen aus dem Opern- und Symphonierepertoire, Originalwerken im romantischen Stil sowie Tänzen und Liedern. Die analytische Untersuchung dieses Repertoires zielt darauf ab, seine historische Bedeutung wieder in den Blick zu nehmen und es in ein eigenständiges Untersuchungsobjekt zu verwandeln. Somit vermeidet man, daraus ein nicht zu hinterfragendes Randphänomen zu machen, das einfach aus dem klassischen Repertoire abgeleitet wird, und daher vernachlässigbar ist. Die Klärung der besonderen Merkmale der musikalischen Sprache dieses Repertoires ist von grundlegender Bedeutung, um eine Ästhetik der musikalischen Zusammenstellungen im Stummfilmzeitalter zu skizzieren. Studien zur Musik in Stummfilmen haben sich bisher mehr auf das quantitativ marginale Phänomen der Originalpartituren konzentriert, während sie die Untersuchung von zusammengestellten Musikbegleitungen vernachlässigten, die die am weitesten verbreitete Form der Begleitung darstellen. Diese Studie füllt nicht nur die noch bestehende historiografische Lücke, sondern liefert auch grundlegende Informationen für das Verständnis der weiteren Entwicklung des frühen Tonfilms.

“Wrath, Witches, and Wondrous Women”

Responding to the widespread material loss of silent films today, this article constitutes a playful exercise in curating a selection of nonextant films directed, written, and produced by early women filmmakers. After an introduction to the exercise, which sets up the feminist and film curatorial stakes of such an endeavor, I present my thematically organized film program (curatorial statement and program notes) to the reader. Drawing together films by women who worked in Peru, Croatia, Egypt, China, Mexico, Poland, and the United States, I argue that curating lost films not only makes space for a more inclusive picture of women’s contributions to cinema history; this exercise is also a call for more imaginative approaches to feminist film and media curatorial practices.

Cardiorespiratory rhythm-contingent trace eyeblink conditioning in elderly adults.

Learning outcome is modified by the degree to which the subject responds and pays attention to specific stimuli. Our recent research suggests that presenting stimuli in contingency with a specific phase of the cardiorespiratory rhythm might expedite learning. Specifically, expiration-diastole (EXP-DIA) is beneficial for learning trace eyeblink conditioning (TEBC) compared with inspiration-systole (INS-SYS) in healthy young adults. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the same holds true in healthy elderly adults (n = 50, aged >70 yr). Participants were instructed to watch a silent nature film while TEBC trials were presented at either INS-SYS or EXP-DIA (separate groups). Learned responses were determined as eyeblinks occurring after the tone conditioned stimulus (CS), immediately preceding the air puff unconditioned stimulus (US). Participants were classified as learners if they made at least five conditioned responses (CRs). Brain responses to the stimuli were measured by electroencephalogram (EEG). Memory for the film and awareness of the CS-US contingency were evaluated with a questionnaire. As a result, participants showed robust brain responses to the CS, acquired CRs, and reported awareness of the CS-US relationship to a variable degree. There was no difference between the INS-SYS and EXP-DIA groups in any of the above. However, when only participants who learned were considered, those trained at EXP-DIA (n = 11) made more CRs than those trained at INS-SYS (n = 13). Thus, learned performance could be facilitated in those elderly who learned. However, training at a specific phase of cardiorespiratory rhythm did not increase the proportion of participants who learned.NEW & NOTEWORTHY We trained healthy elderly individuals in trace eyeblink conditioning, either at inspiration-systole or at expiration-diastole. Those who learned exhibited more conditioned responses when trained at expiration-diastole rather than inspiration-systole. However, there was no difference between the experimental groups in the proportion of individuals who learned or did not learn.

Circuits of mobility in Love and Duty

When the 1931 Shanghai film Love and Duty was rediscovered in 1993, it garnered attention as a masterpiece of film melodrama and the earliest extant work starring Ruan Lingyu. Yet nearly a century after it was made, questions remain about how this silent film wound up among rare Chinese books and artifacts in Uruguay and eventually Taiwan. This article investigates the origins, production, circulation, and preservation of Love and Duty by examining the lives and work of crucial figures whose involvement has long been overlooked, including Madame S. Rosen-Hoa (a.k.a. Hua Luochen, Luo Chen, or Horose), Polish author of the source novel, and Li Shizeng, elder statesman of the Republic of China who included the film in the ‘Sino-International Library’ he established in Geneva during the 1930s before moving to Montevideo in 1950. I track their surprisingly parallel ‘circuits of mobility’ across writing, translation, film, and multiple continents, including their respective studies abroad, assorted engagements with Esperanto, cosmopolitanism, nationalist revolution, women’s liberation, and various activities in the May Fourth Movement and the League of Nations. Analyzing publications, films, interviews, and archival materials in eight languages, this research reveals unexpected intersections between politics, the arts, education, and business that shaped early Chinese cinema.

UNFOLDING THE VISUAL ABBREVIATIONS: A SEMIOTIC READING OF ACADEMY AWARD- WINNING FILM PARASITE DIRECTED BY BONG JOON-HO

The film has a strong relationship with language as both are means of communication. Film’s affinity to language is also because both carry ideas in the form of signs. When language uses graphic and phonemic signs for signification, films use visual signs. From a poststructuralist perspective, the signs in a visual narrative make multiple readings possible as in written and spoken language, and make film a visual art that gives its viewers an aesthetic experience. The transition of film from the silent era to the digital age as a result of the revolutionary developments in cinematographic techniques has increased the possibilities for multiple interpretations. This paper attempts a semiotic analysis of the Academy Award-winning film Parasite by applying the concepts of theorists like Christian Metz and Roland Barthes. The paper begins with the major arguments put forth by Christian Metz regarding the sign and its application in film and proceeds to explain the five codes in semiotics proposed by Roland Barthes. The paper concludes with the application of these concepts in analyzing the visual signifiers in the film Parasite to justify that semiotics have educated the audience in analyzing film to explore its connotative meanings.

Digital technology and Nollywood film industry

Film also known as the 7th Art is a medium for education, information and entertainment which has over the years undergone a series of technological innovations. This paper examines the evolution of cinema from the ‘silent era’ to the ‘new age era’ characterized by a trajectory of innovations and improvements due to technological developments. The paper adapts the Diffusion of Innovations Theory (DIT) propounded by Everett Rogers in 1962 to assess the extent to which innovations in digital technology have altered the old traditional film production landscape. The paper seeks, among others, to determine and highlight the significant areas technology has impacted on the development of motion pictures globally with particular emphasis on the Nigerian film industry popularly known as Nollywood. Our major point of interest is on the roles, impacts, challenges and prospects of digital technology in the areas of production, distribution, marketing and exhibition of films. By using the assumptions of DIT which seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread. The paper further reviews relevant literature and some empirical results from scholars to justify its claims. We are able to establish in our findings that digital technology is the driving force of film development which has contributed enormously to world cinema. Furthermore, the rapid development and emergence of Nollywood film industry as the second largest producer of films in the world next to Bollywood of India is attributable to the emergence of digital technology.

Beyond the silence of the voice: Leos Carax’s Annette and silent cinema

ABSTRACT Cinema’s relationship with the voice is passionate and enduring – perhaps nowhere more so than in silent cinema. This article takes the Lara Feigel’s experience of being supervised by Laura Marcus for a PhD on silent cinema as the basis for an exploration of sound and silence in film. Using Mladen Dolar’s theory of the voice, it reads Leos Carax’s Annette as a film fascinated by the tropes of silent cinema and specifically by its play with the presence and absence of the voice. If for Dolar the voice is a desired object, then in this case it’s an object that can literally be transferred from character to character. In the end, Carax’s promise is that the voice can be a vehicle of subjectivity after all.

A narrative of women and war: The Finnish silent era film ‘On the warpath’

This article discusses the film Sotapolulla (‘On the warpath’) (1922), a pioneering work in the early years of Finnish cinema. By highlighting the role that women played during the Finnish Civil War (1918), scriptwriter and director Teuvo Pakkala, a well-known conservative writer, created a model of femininity for the post-war period. The construction of the female characters accords with the standards of femininity in Hollywood silent film, which featured strong, assertive women committed to the social order. Thus Pakkala’s film in significant ways follows the classical model that Noël Burch identifies as an institutional mode of representation.

Technostress Phenomenon as a Silent Impact of ICT Era: Case Study Indonesian Female Civil Servants

The transition of work systems from traditional systems to information, communication and technology (ICT)-based work systems after Covid 19 has had certain impacts on employees in all government offices in the world. The implementation of the work from home (WFH) policy established by a number of government offices in Indonesia is a reasonable decision to anticipate the spread of Covid 19 and implement a new normal work system. The transition from traditional work systems to new ICT-based and online work systems has had a direct and indirect impact on human life, especially civil servants in government offices in Indonesia. There are silent actors who are most affected, suchus women or mothers employee, because they have dual roles, household work and office work. This research was conducted to analyze the factors that driving technostress in female civil servants when working ICT-based or online. The study aims to carry out advocacy and provide recommendations for solutions to related parties. This research method uses a qualitative approach. The research analysis show that there are several factors that trigger technostress in female civil servants in Indonesia, such as unlimited working hours, when children or family members are sick, have to caring babies or toddlers while working virtually, technological capabilities issue, signal and network issue, limited facilities during WFH, unavailability of household assistants/caregivers, and so on. Based on the results of research and data analysis, this research recommends that even though WFO or WFH with working ICT -base system are implemented, the Indonesian Government must continue to make policy regulations regarding maximum working time hours for civil servants, especially female researchers in Indonesia. This is to avoid excessive and inefficient working time which can result in technostress. The ICT work system teaches us to change our lifestyle by prioritizing health and a balanced work system.