Silent Screen Research Articles

Book Review: Gender, Writing, Spectatorships: Evenings at the Theatre, Opera, and Silent Screen in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy and Beyond by Katharine Mitchell

Book Review: <i>Gender, Writing, Spectatorships: Evenings at the Theatre, Opera, and Silent Screen in Late Nineteenth-Century Italy and Beyond</i> by Katharine Mitchell

Russia That We Recover: Russian Names in Theatrical and Musical Culture of South Africa of the 20th Century

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in Russia in the fate of the compatriots who ended up in Africa at different periods in the country’s history. The topic of Russian emigration to South Africa is of interest to both researchers and a wide range of readers who want to expand their knowledge about the country with which Russia is increasingly cooperating within the framework of the international BRICS association. The article is devoted to immigrants from the Russian Empire and from Russia after the revolution of 1917 and the Civil war, who made a significant contribution to the development of the theatrical and musical culture of South Africa in the 20th century. A particular attention is paid to the creative and social activities of the Runitch couple – Russian silent screen star Ossip Runitch and his wife, Russian ballerina Nina Pavlishcheva.It is noted that the Russian community in this African country was less numerous compared to other communities, nevertheless it made a disproportionately large contribution to the development of the country, including the sphere of culture. Far from their homeland, many of our compatriots were able to adapt to a new cultural environment, while preserving Russian language and culture, elements of which they introduced into their work on the distant African continent.

Note from the Editor

Editorial| April 01 2023 Note from the Editor: Producing Film History Jennifer M. Bean Jennifer M. Bean Jennifer M. Bean is the Robert Jolin Osborne Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and adjunct associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her publications include A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke University Press, 2002), Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (Rutgers University Press, 2011), and the award-winning Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana University Press, 2014). She is currently at work on a multimedia collection of essays on queer feminisms, affect, and early US cinema as well as a more traditional book study, Junking Modernity: Early Cinema and the Question of History. On January 1, 2020, she assumed the position of editor in chief of Feminist Media Histories. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2023) 9 (2): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer M. Bean; Note from the Editor: Producing Film History. Feminist Media Histories 1 April 2023; 9 (2): 1–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2023.9.2.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search It is June 2022. I am sitting in the middle row of a plush theater on the campus of Columbia University in New York City, surrounded by curators, collectors, scholars, artists, and educators gathered from diverse corners of the world. It is the final day of archival screenings at Women and the Silent Screen XI (WSSXI), a biannual conference organized under the auspices of Women and Film History International. The pianist flexes his hands while our hosts—Janes Gaines and Hilary Hallett—introduce a three-hour program composed of partially extant martial-art, espionage, and adventure films featuring gutsy female protagonists from Denmark, China, France, and the United States. I glimpse a technician near the edge of the stage helping Chonghwa Chung, lead researcher from the Korean film archive, set up for his presentation to follow the program. In the aisle behind me voices murmur in conversation, something about “queer kisses” in early cinema,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema by Hannah Durkin

Reviewed by: Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema by Hannah Durkin Joanna Dee Das Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema. By Hannah Durkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. pp. xiii + 256. $99.00 cloth, $27.95 paper, $14.95 e-book. Hannah Durkin's Josephine Baker and Katherine Dunham: Dances in Literature and Cinema pairs two of the twentieth century's most famous dancers to address [End Page 173] questions of Black women's authorship in a transatlantic context. Scholars have paid much more attention to Baker and Dunham's live stage performances than to their written or cinematic work, and this book aims to fill that gap. Though the two women had distinct career trajectories, Durkin compellingly argues for examining them together, given that "both women adopt self-reflexive narrative voices and explore dance to communicate radical narratives of Black female subjectivity" in a mid-century context (13). Durkin shows how both women intervened in racist structures to insist on the authority of their own voices. The first two chapters focus on literary works. Chapter 1, "The Dancer in Translation: Baker's Coauthored Narratives," takes Baker's memoirs seriously as sources of understanding Baker's negotiation of racism on multiple continents. Durkin asserts that despite the fact that these early memoirs were coauthored by white men, Baker's voice comes through and she still is able to challenge primitivist and exoticizing narrative tropes that framed her. Importantly, Durkin analyzes untranslated memoirs written in French, for the most part overlooked by scholars writing in English. Chapter 2, "The Dancer as Translator: Dunham's Ethnographic Memoirs," examines Katherine Dunham's Journey to Accompong (1946) and Island Possessed (1969) as literary works that have been overlooked because of how they blur genre categories. Dunham's memoirs offer a penetrating look at the subjective nature of anthropological research, as she constantly questions the ethnographer's "perceived position of authority" (57). They also, as Durkin writes, offer "an important literary account of Dunham's intellectual development and debt to Caribbean artistry" (69). Chapter 3, "Performing within Primitivism: Baker on the French Silent Screen" applies a well-rehearsed argument to new materials: that through dance, Black subjects carve out space for agency within oppressive structures. This argument has also been made with reference to Baker before by scholars such as Mae Henderson and Michael Borshuk, as "ambivalence" (93) and "ambiguity" (97) are terms frequently associated with Baker. While Durkin's argument is therefore not groundbreaking, her analysis of two silent French films, La Revue des revues (1927) and Sirène des tropiques (1929), adds important documentation of Baker's dancing to the existing literature. Refreshingly, Durkin specifies the African American vaudeville tradition from which Baker derived her material, describing specific dance steps (Pecking, the Itch, the Mess Around, etc.) as she analyzes the films. Contextualizing the reception of Sirène among Black cinema-goers in the United States was also helpful to read. Chapter 4, "Cinematic Stardom: Baker and the 1930s French Musical Film" continues in the same vein: Durkin reiterates the argument that Baker's films Zouzou (1934) and Princesse Tam-Tam (1935) "reinforce her image as an exotic [End Page 174] Other" but also "grant Baker some control over her dance scenes, enabling her to articulate a self-referential screen image that intervenes in and disrupts racial binaries" (106). Durkin emphasizes the difference between the French film industry, which framed Baker as a glamorous star, and Hollywood, which excluded Black women from ideas of glamor, beauty, or stardom. In particular, the French films featured Baker as a glamorous icon who could sing in the delicate chanson style; Durkin notes that when Baker replicated such a performance for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 on Broadway, white American theatre critics judged her harshly for straying outside of the bounds of acceptable Black performance. Unlike Baker, Dunham did have to take on Hollywood racial codes. Durkin's goal in chapter 5 echoes that of the previous four chapters: to "investigate the ambiguities resulting from Dunham's attempts to resist screen stereotypes" (136) and to conclude that "Dunham worked within such limitations to present an artistically and aesthetically...

«Преступление и наказание» в зарубежных киноверсиях: трансформации хронотопа

The paper analyses the only preserved foreign silent screen version and twelve foreign sound film versions and adaptations of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, produced in Europe, Asia, both Americas, and Australia from 1923 to 2016 — and defined as “faithful”, “based on”, “associated with”, “with reference to” etc. Specific objects of the analysis are the basic attitudes of cinema makers towards literary sources (originals) and the artistic potentials of the common motto of film directors: “This is how I see it”, applied to the process of translating a book into a film. The contents and quality of various screen versions of Crime and Punishment are here explored from the point of view of the transformations of the chronotope. To what time and place is the plot of the novel transferred, when it does not remain in its original ones? What happens with the plot, the characters, and the meaning of the novel, if the events are transferred to another cultural milieu and/or to another historical period? How is the novel’s epilogue (the perspective of Raskolnikov’s renewal and rebirth in the time after the novel) interpreted? An analysis of the screen versions shows that the fate of Raskolnikov remains a painful moment for the cinema worldwide: the central character of the novel is too deeply connected with the last century, he rhymes too much with its tragic fate.

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

How the Other Half Laughs: The Comic Sensibility in American Culture, 1895-1920

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Come‐hither looks: the Hollywood vamp and the function of cinema

Animation ed. by Scott Curtis (review)

Reviewed by: Animation ed. by Scott Curtis Rebecca Weeks Scott Curtis, ed. Animation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019. Animation, edited by Scott Curtis, is a concise introduction to the history of American animation. In considering all three major modes of production—artisanal, collaborative and industrial, each of which is clearly explained in the introduction—the book provides a well-rounded discussion of animation that will be sure to offer something for scholars, students and those with a passion for the art form. The most recent addition to the Behind the Silver Screen series, Animation gives due attention to an aspect of filmmaking that is often overlooked in similar film studies series. The collection is organised chronologically with the six body chapters providing an overview of animation from the lightning artists of the early twentieth century, through the establishment of cartoons on the small screen, up to the digital transformation of today. The introductory chapter by Curtis provides a succinct survey of the technological, social and industrial history of animation. The author treats well-known studios along with lesser-known independent artists and studios, an important feature which continues across the subsequent chapters. ‘The Silent Screen, 1895–1928’ and ‘Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946’ establish the origin and growth of animation up until the end of World War II. Curtis’s chapter introduces the American artists at the forefront of the new medium and outlines the rapid technological advancements and changes to managerial practices during animation’s first three decades. Next, Susan Ohmer demonstrates the interconnected nature of the animation studios, charting the movements of a number of central figures across various studios. The chapter highlights how studios such as Terrytoons, Fleisher, Disney, and many more were driven by differing concerns, and consequently developed different processes and styles. While the animation studios experienced growth in this period and found creative ways to contribute to the war effort, Ohmer outlines the continuous struggle not only to produce cartoons but to exhibit them in cinemas during the studio era. The next two chapters explore industrial and artisanal development in the period 1947–1989. Kevin Sandler’s chapter on ‘Limited Animation’ looks at how the studios adapted to the changing landscape after World War II by shifting from full to limited animation and made a home for cartoons on Saturday mornings. Sandler provides clear explanations and descriptions of both how and why limited animation was produced by various studios. Indeed, a strength of the chapter is the detailed descriptions of particular scenes to explain how limited animation worked and what the finished product looked like. A reader may easily complement this with a quick online search to see the animation in action. Sandler acknowledges the industrial factors that led to “cheap, substandard and indistinguishable” limited animation during the 1970s, but continues to highlight the creative achievements of artists during this period and the crucial legacy of limited animation for the animated shows that emerged in the 1990s and beyond (99). Alla Gadassik’s ‘Independent Artists and the Artisanal Mode’ offers an alternative view of the same period, focusing on artists who struggled to make ends meet outside of the studio system, but who nonetheless developed unique and innovative styles of animation. As in Sandler’s chapter, specific examples are provided throughout to illustrate the varied techniques and approaches that developed alongside the studio system. Andrew Johnston and Bob Rehak’s final two chapters map the shift from 2D to 3D animation. While necessarily more jargon-heavy than other sections of the book, Johnston’s chapter is a clear and understandable introduction to computer-generated imagery (CGI). Johnston outlines the collaborative effort amongst artists, computer scientists, and engineers to develop the technology before showing how it was employed in blockbuster films of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In ‘Ubiquitous Animation’ [End Page 99] Rehak argues that digital technologies have led to a “resurgence of artisanal spirit,” even as large studio animation has developed a ‘ubiquitous’ style (155). First, Rehak explores the transformation of the animation industry approaching the turn of the century and the impact this had on the labour force. Traditional hand-drawn animation was supplemented with digital technology as early as the...

Doing women’s film and television history: the Women’s Film and Television History Network UK/Ireland

The Women’s Film and Television History Network UK/Ireland (WFTHN) has grown substantially over the last twelve years, establishing itself within academic scholarship and a wider public context, and connecting those interested in learning about or researching the role of women in film and television. This has not been a linear process but one of organic growth. Key to the Network’s success have been the various activities promoted by its members. It has assisted in the creation of a network of researchers, practitioners, feminists and activists through funded projects, conferences, events, workshops, publications, a website, blog and social media, all relating to women’s film and television history. The Network emerged from the 2006 Women and Silent Britain event, held at the National Film Theatre. Initiated by Christine Gledhill, facilitated by Nicky North at BFI Education, and supported by film historians, curators and feminist scholars, this event was inspired by the international Women and the Silent Screen conferences1 and the subsequent Women Film Pioneers Project, launched by Jane Gaines and now curated at Columbia University, New York.2 It gave rise to a successful funding bid, supported by the University of Sunderland, to the Art and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This enabled the Network’s first three years of activities, culminating in an inaugural conference in 2011, Doing Women’s Film History, out of which a book was published.3 This established both the Network’s international impact and its historical reach, as its focus expanded to include sound film as well as television.4

‘Boswellized From Mere Persons to Personages’: Arthur Stringer, Mary Pickford, and the Trouble with Celebrity Profile(r)s

ABSTRACTIn 1918, MacLean’s magazine published an extensive profile of Canadian-born silent screen superstar, Mary Pickford. Spanning three issues and inclusive of twenty-seven photographs, ‘Our Mary’ was one of the most substantial profiles of a public figure ever published by the magazine, and it was written by no less a personality than the eminently respected, popular Canadian writer Arthur Stringer. Yet Stringer does not seem entirely at ease with celebrity journalism, and ‘Our Mary’ not only gives us some insight into the practices of celebrity profiling as a particular species of celebrity life writing, but also a language for its critique. From Stringer’s conflicted engagement with the genre emerges a portrait of the troubled and troubling celebrity profiler: an individual not only tasked with serving many masters and having to negotiate what might be perceived as loathsome generic conventions, but having to adopt a particular kind of persona in order to do so. Thus, while Stringer explicitly and repeatedly seeks to separate himself and his work from that genre of journalism that will ‘Boswelliz[e celebrities] from mere persons to personages’, ‘Our Mary’ also tacitly acknowledges the role he must play in this game.

Sister Acts: Victorian Porn, Lesbian Drag, and Queer Reproduction

Sister Acts:Victorian Porn, Lesbian Drag, and Queer Reproduction Kiki Loveday (bio) "It was Olga Nethersole in quite another atmosphere than the public sees her—a healthy, air-loving woman with a mentality strong enough and broad enough to grant her healthy views upon an unhealthy subject." This description of British actress-manager Olga Nethersole appeared in the Detroit News on January 1, 1900. In just a few short weeks, her theatrical production of Sapho would explode onto the national stage, making her the most famous actress in America and culminating in her arrest for public indecency.1 In the calm before the coming storm Nethersole is quoted as follows: Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. French Postcard, circa 1900, private collection. First of all … we must bring ourselves to understand and admit that there [End Page 201] is good in everyone. This is true, I believe, of all that class of women who is held at arm's length. It is this one thing which makes these women what they are to literature and the drama. … For such women are human, they have hearts and souls and flesh and blood, and can suffer as much, if not more than their sisters whose lives extend but little beyond the home.2 What do we make of Nethersole's appeal to sisterhood in this preemptive defense of Sapho? What might this seemingly innocuous Victorian voice tell us about the meaning of Sapphic sisterhood in the era of cinema's so-called "birth"? In 1989, Teresa de Lauretis decried "the sweeping of lesbian sexuality … under the rug of sisterhood."3 Yet, in the second half of the nineteenth century, sisterhood was being aggressively mobilized by Olga Nethersole, and other artists, to make public lesbian meanings that radically challenged the patriarchal family and social structures of the Victorian Era. Nethersole's call for sisterhood in the passage above activated a broader lesbian discourse of Sapphic kinship that was a crucial component of lesbian culture at the time and that I contend is central to understanding the lesbian pleasures of the silent screen. Consider the following mid-nineteenth-century Staffordshire figurine of the prototypical star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet. Modeled on an 1846 drawing of famed American actress Charlotte Cushman playing Romeo opposite her sister Susan as Juliet, these mass-produced artifacts ostensibly commemorate the Cushman sisters' performance.4 Lisa Merrill has persuasively read the figurines as a mark of Charlotte Cushman's iconicity and respectability. Merrill's groundbreaking work on Cushman certainly recognizes the sexual significance of what one critic in 1846 described as Cushman's "Sapphic Romeo."5 Merrill clearly points out that the figurine records "the complexity of two women performing as … romantic lovers."6 Yet, in her reading, this queer record is not just enabled by—but ultimately overdetermined by—the performers actual sisterhood that functions as evidence of Cushman's "respectability."7 Although not specifically tied to the Staffordshire figurine, film scholar Hilary Hallett's recent reading of Cushman as the most important foremother to the "Pickford revolution" (which brought film actresses to the forefront of the popular imagination) also hinges on notions of respectability, personal virtue, and moral character.8 Likewise, in her important volume Girls Will Be Boys, Laura Horak has connected the "cult following" for Cushman's Romeo to the hundreds of films featuring cross-dressed women produced during the silent era—and she too argues that such performances were "associated with wholesome entertainment."9 In contrast, I argue that rather than evincing Cushman's iconic respectability, the cross-dressed representation of Sapphic Sisterhood formally embodied in the figurine activates a "lurid," ripped-from-the-headlines meaning in the tradition [End Page 202] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. (left). Staffordshire figurine, Charlotte and Susan Cushman as Romeo and Juliet, circa 1852, private collection. Courtesy of Aldridges of Bath, Fine Art & Chattel Auctioneers. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. (right). Staffordshire figurine, The Assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corde, circa 1794, private collection. of Staffordshire pottery during this period.10 The popular trend of figurines embodying murderers and other scandalous personalities has been traced to the...

‘Have You a Happy Voice?’

The arrival of sound cinema in Britain created a vogue for particular kinds of voices and the quest for the elusive ‘talkie’ voice. The new recording technology favoured deeper, more resonant male voices while women’s voices in the higher register did not record so well. This problem particularly affected British female stars not previously stage-trained in voice projection or those like Mabel Poulton with pronounced accents or voices that did not match their silent screen images. Many young women stars had been cast for their looks and glamour while older female character actors who had graduated in the theatre fared much better during the transition to sound. This article examines the opprobrium directed at the female voice in the 1920s, from early BBC broadcasting to the perceived dissonance between the visual images of female stars in silent cinema and how they sounded in the talkies.

Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory ed. by Barry Keith Grant, Malisa Kurtz (review)

Reviewed by: Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory ed. by Barry Keith Grant, Malisa Kurtz Christina Parker-Flynn Notions of Genre: Writings on Popular Film Before Genre Theory. Edited by Barry Keith Grant and Malisa Kurtz. University of Texas Press, 2016, 294 pages Each genre film, according to one of the most firmly established “rules” of film genre study, must exhibit qualities that determine its relationship to other examples in the genre. Barry Keith Grant and Malisa Kurtz’s Notions of Genre is no different. While claiming to be something unique, a study in genre through works written before the academic tradition (1970-) became firmly established, it also self-locates precisely within the types of writings one expects in a genre reader. Notions of Genre offers a compilation of essays on popular film from 1945 to 1970 that reflect an early and organic preoccupation with film genre theory, prior to its proper academic application. A distinguished film scholar well known for his Film Genre Reader, “the first scholarly anthology on film genre” released in 1986, Barry Keith Grant reveals his enthusiasm for the prehistory of film genre in the Introduction to its current, fourth edition (2013), in which he emphasizes the early significance of Robert Warshow’s article on the gangster film (1948) and André Bazin’s essay on the western (1952), both works included here in Notions of Genre, as the earliest contributions to genre theory (7). Grant and Kurtz use essays by more familiar authors—like Warshow and Bazin, who have been considered forefathers to genre study since the publication of Christine Gledhill’s The Cinema Book (1985)—to balance out their reintroduction of historically lesser-known work and authors. Grant and Kurtz divide the collection into four sections, the first two (“Comedy” and “Western”) directly indicative of film genre labels, and the last two (“The Fantastic” and “Crime and Punishment”) more universally applicable beyond the realm of film studies proper. The first section on “Comedy” is nicely anchored by the first two readings, James Agee’s “Comedy’s Greatest Era” and Siegfried Kracauer’s “Silent Film Comedy,” important and familiar works written by authors who clearly befit the book’s project. Though perhaps better known as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, James Agee was one of the earliest and most steadfast film critics before the vocation truly existed, defending film’s artistry as a writer at Time and The Nation, and writing his most influential piece, “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” included here, as a freelancer for Life Magazine. Kracauer’s essay largely argues that the physicality of slapstick comedy evoked “material life at its crudest” and therefore intrinsically “conformed to the spirit of the medium predestined to capture the fortuitous aspects of physical life” (36). Though Kracauer’s essay represents meta-level film Theory more than genre theory in a limited sense, both Agee’s and Kracauer’s texts lament the devaluation of physical comedy at the advent of sound cinema. The remaining four readings in the section range from 1963 to 1968 and all revolve around the same axis. In “Whatever Happened to Hollywood Comedy?” Dwight MacDonald illustrates how “the old magical world” of silent comedies disappears by mid-century, when contemporary films become too realistic to be amusing abstractly, with films like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad [End Page 59] World (1963) violating the “basic rules of comedy” (54). The last two essays explore film comedy systematically, with Donald W. McCaffrey charting “The Evolution of the Chase in the Silent Screen Comedy,” and Carolyn and Harry Geduld mapping the transformation of comedic characters upon the introduction of sound. Highlights of the second section on the “Western” include Bazin’s highly influential essay “The Western, or the American Film Par Excellence” and George Bluestone’s “The Changing Cowboy: From Dime Novel to Dollar Film,” another early work in adaptation studies, itself pioneered by Bluestone’s seminal book Novels Into Film (1957). Interestingly, despite being devoted to a genre not highly regarded for its representation of diversity, this section exemplifies the widest assortment of critical methods and authors of any in the book. Harry Schein, chemical engineer and founder of the...

Maternal Stars of the Silent Screen: Gender, Genre, and Photoplay Magazine

My ongoing research, driven by archival praxis, has been grounded in life writing, women’s studies, modernism, and popular culture. After becoming a mother in the late 1990s, I was increasingly inv...

Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources by Kendra Preston Leonard (review)

Reviewed by: Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources by Kendra Preston Leonard Tim Shorkey Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources Kendra Preston Leonard A-R Editions, Inc., 2016, 277 pages One of the most commonly held misconceptions regarding cinematic history is that there was a so-called silent film period. To be sure, prior to the advent of sound-on-film technology (and Al Jolson's breaking of the sound barrier), film stock did not have the capacity to save a film's audio alongside its visual material for convenient synchronous exhibition. But that certainly doesn't mean that the cinematic experience existed in silence. Certainly, even from the dawn of film as a new medium—W.K.L. Dickson was experimenting with sound film a few short years after the first Edison camera tests were shot—there were efforts to provide audiences with a fuller experience, complete with (often synchronized) sound from a source outside the film stock itself. While others have performed research on early cinema's soundtrack over the years (Richard Abel and Rick Altman come to mind, for example), nowhere is the catalog of primary and secondary sources so conveniently itemized than in Kendra Preston Leonard's essential reference text, Music for Silent Film: A Guide to North American Resources. The book is among those contained in the Music Library Association Index and Bibliography Series, and as such, approaches the material with the intent "…to collect the major resources in the United States and Canada into one volume that can be used by enthusiasts, performers, and scholars—anyone with an interest in music for the silent screen" (vii). In other words, the author approaches the material not from a scholarly perspective so much as that of a musical performer. Indeed, the book contains "information on how to find music, publications from the period about how and what to play for the movies, and scholarship about the music used for the silent cinema" (viii.). [End Page 66] The text is broken into a section on primary sources (Part 1) and another on secondary sources (Part 2). Part 1 contains seven chapters, each detailing a different grouping of original materials. Chapter 1, "Archives," annotates the online Silent Film Sound and Music Archive, along with contact information for several brick and mortar archives located throughout Canada and the United States. Similarly, Chapter 2 specifies "a few libraries that lend out or rent music for silent film" (17). Chapter 3, "Instruction Books," provides a brief introduction to source books for potential accompanists, all but one of which "are held by libraries or archives in the United States and Canada either in print or microform" (19). Chapter 4, "Photoplay Albums," chronicles "known albums or anthologies of music for the silent cinema" (25). Chapter 5 offers a detailed listing of interviews with silent film accompanists, including subjects "from both the silent era and the present day" (31). Chapter 6, "Books," is the shortest chapter, listing only four references that would not fit into any other category. Conversely, Chapter 7, "Articles," is the longest chapter, and it includes published industry periodicals and articles from contemporaneous sources. Part 2 contains just two chapters: one on scholarly books and the second on scholarly articles. One of the book's strengths is its multiple indices; for it includes a name index (for authors as well as subjects), a title index (for an alphabetical listing of the titles of all articles, books, and chapters), a film title index, and finally, a subject index. So, for example, if my local civic organization wanted to screen D. W. Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918) on its 100th anniversary, I could look it up in the title index to find it referenced by three different items (the text's citations are all numbered from one to 1862, and the indices refer to these, not page numbers). The first, item 403, turns out to be a primary article from Moving Picture World that discusses suggested music cues for the picture, useful information to a potential screener striving to replicate the total experience. This hypothetical nicely illustrates one of the author's...

Transcending Categories, Staging Autonomy: Marion Davies’s Transitions from Showgirl to Screen Star and Producer-Manager

Marion Davies (1897–1961) transitioned from showgirl and musical theatre performer in the 1910s to silent screen star and actress-producer in the 1920s. In addition to her comedic talents, she multitasked as producer-manager of her production unit, ‘Marion Davies Productions’ at Cosmopolitan Productions. She used her professional collaborations with screenwriter-friend Frances Marion and strong directors such as King Vidor to make appealing pictures that also transformed her star image. This paper argues that her years of discipline and professionalism on the stage and in show business contributed to her subsequent screen successes and as actress-producer of the films in which she starred. Her career complicates the notions of stardom and creative agency in the ‘lively arts’ of the late 1910s–1930s.

Shifting Perspectives: Enhancing Healthcare Professionals' Awareness Through a Disability Studies Undergraduate Curriculum

Disability Studies has experienced steady growth in the humanities, the social sciences, and education departments of a growing number of United States colleges and universities. One area of study that has remained static is undergraduate health science, where the number of schools offering a degree in disability studies has grown slightly from two in 2009 (Cushing &amp; Smith, 2009b; Taylor &amp; Zubal-Ruggieri, 2013) to four in 2015 (Zubal-Ruggieri, 2015). Some disability scholars believe that health science students are missing out on an opportunity to incorporate this perspective into their outlook and approach to disability. Longmore (1991) believes that "students interested in healthcare . . . need to have the opportunity to study this [disability] in the same way that they have the opportunity to study women's history or African American history or Asian history" (Stanford University News Service, Silent Screen Villains section, para.12). This opportunity can shape a group of healthcare professionals who view disability from a unique individual perspective. The purpose of this survey research study was to examine alumni self-perception of the impact of completing a one-semester (16 credit) disability studies concentration in an undergraduate health science major. Fifty-one alumni from a New York area public research 1 level university who graduated between 2006 and 2012 with a Bachelor of Science in Health Science and a concentration in Disability Studies were surveyed to examine their perception of the helpfulness of the curriculum in four areas: practice and/or post-graduate study, comfort level interacting with people with disability, confidence level in ability to work with people with disability, and sensitivity and awareness of disability issues. This survey research study used descriptive statistics to analyze the responses to 10 Likert questions. The paper also includes comments from one open-ended question that allowed respondents to add additional thoughts and comments. The results strongly indicated that the health science alumni perceived a positive increase in the four focus areas as a result of completing the disability studies concentration.

Nasty women hitting the silent screen at Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto 2017

Nasty women hitting the silent screen at Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto 2017

Editor's Introduction

Editorial| October 01 2017 Editor's Introduction: Betterment Mark Lynn Anderson Mark Lynn Anderson Mark Lynn Anderson is an associate professor of film and media studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he hosted the Eighth International Women and the Silent Screen conference in 2015. He is currently writing a book on early histories of the studio system, posterity, and the rise of public relations. He is the author of Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America (University of California Press, 2011). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Feminist Media Histories (2017) 3 (4): 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2017.3.4.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Lynn Anderson; Editor's Introduction: Betterment. Feminist Media Histories 1 October 2017; 3 (4): 1–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2017.3.4.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFeminist Media Histories Search One of the sad ironies of twentieth-century political life in the United States is how the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended voting rights to all women citizens of the republic, effectively worked thereafter to mark almost every social, political, and cultural initiative mounted by women as only “special interest.” Prior to the amendment's ratification in 1920, the suffrage movement had provided women of various ideological stripes and from diverse backgrounds a context for both complaint and action within a public sphere where their very disenfranchisement was increasingly grounds for both acknowledging and granting them a voice in cultural enterprises, regulatory and reform institutions, and even social policy formation, albeit stratified by those hierarchies of race, ethnicity, age, religion, and class that operated everywhere else in American society. By the 1910s it was practically unthinkable to hold a hearing on a pressing social problem, form a commission addressing inequities... You do not currently have access to this content.