bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
D.W. Griffith and the Development of American Narrative Cinema
Authors: Keil Charlie 
Published: November 2011

AbstractThe first and arguably most significant phase of D. W. Griffith's film directing career began in 1908 and ended in 1913, the years when he was the most important filmmaker at the preeminent film production company in America. That Griffith's tenure at Biograph coincides almost to the year with the tumultuous period of industrial and formal change typically referred to as “the transitional era” is but one of many reasons that historians view the director as central to the period's developments. But what role did Griffith ultimately play in the American film industry's adoption of a storytelling approach that brought together the resources of performance and decor, framing and composition, and, most crucially, editing, in producing thousands of one‐reel narratives for a growing audience of moviegoers in the post‐nickelodeon marketplace? Some have questioned the tendency to attribute the period's change in narrational strategies to the singular achievements of Griffith, no matter how impressive those achievements may have been. Opposition to understanding Griffith as a key transitional figure derives less from any hesitation about his talent and more from the distinctiveness of his output. The debate focuses on whether we should label Griffith as a representative director of this period: While he may be the era's most celebrated filmmaker, does he actually define that era? Close attention to the formal qualities of Griffith's Biograph films can certainly help us to assess more precisely his contribution to the developing norms of the transitional period; but beyond such study, we also need to consider his films in relation to those of his competitors. Only then can we establish with any certainty whether Griffith stood apart from the rest of the industry during the Biograph years, or whether he merely realized the aims of the era more proficiently, albeit also more idiosyncratically, than any other filmmaker at this time.
Women and the Silent Screen
Authors: Stamp Shelley 
Published: November 2011

AbstractWomen were more engaged in movie culture at the height of the silent era than they have been at any other time since. Female filmgoers dominated at the box office; the most powerful stars were women, and fan culture catered almost exclusively to female fans; writers shaping film culture through the growing art of movie reviewing, celebrity profiles, and gossip items were likely to be women; and women's clubs and organizations, along with mass‐circulation magazines, played a signature role in efforts to reform the movies at the height of their early success. In Hollywood women were active at all levels of the industry: The top screenwriters were women; the highest‐paid director at one point was a woman; and women held key leadership roles in the studios as executives and heads of departments like photography, editing, and screenwriting. Outside Hollywood women ran movie theaters, screened films in libraries and classrooms, and helped to establish venues for nonfiction filmmaking. Looking at the extraordinary scope of women's participation in early movie culture — indeed, the way womenbuiltthat movie culture — helps us rethink conventional ideas about authorship and the archive, drawing in a broader range of players and sources. As Antonia Lant reminds us, the binary notion of women working on “both sides of the camera” needs to be significantly complicated and expanded in order to accommodate all of the ways in which women engaged with and produced early film culture (2006, 548–549).
“The Poor Little Rich Girl”
Authors: Sturtevant Victoria 
Published: November 2011

Abstract
The Pickford persona was so cherished in part because it had these two sides, and so embodied a number of dynamic contradictions. The film roles Pickford played as often emphasize her doll‐like beauty as they ask her to dress in rags and present herself as a feisty ragamuffin child. She is glorious but humble, remote but familiar. Her films often indulge these twin compulsions (to muddy Pickford up and also to style her in beautiful lace dresses with golden curls) by placing her in narratives of class rise, or fantasized class rise, that allowed her characters to make a shift from one half of the persona to another, from grubby urchin to democratic princess. Time and again she descends among the children and is restored anew to a magical position of privilege.
African‐Americans and Silent Films
Authors: Massood Paula J. 
Published: November 2011

Abstract

Histories of African‐American participation in American silent film often cite D. W. Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation
(1915) as the defining moment in black cinematic representation. The film's myths of black inferiority and the sanctity of white nationhood seemed almost nostalgic at a moment of national growth and change, of which the new film technology was a part. At the same time, its images of black brutes lasciviously chasing innocent white women and a congressional hall filled with barefoot, chicken‐eating black coons solidified a number of myths that appealed to a young nation furiously attempting to define itself in the face of increasing immigration from abroad, the massive growth of urban industrial areas (and the attendant loss of an agrarian culture), and the threat of world war.
Chaplin and Silent Film Comedy
Authors: Maland Charles J. 
Published: November 2011

AbstractOn May 12, 1913, Keystone movie producer Mack Sennett sent a telegram to Alf Reeves, the manager of a touring British music hall company, performing at the Nixon Theater in Philadelphia. It read: “IS THERE A MAN NAMED CHAFFIN IN YOUR COMPANY OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT STOP IF SO WILL HE COMMUNICATE WITH KESSEL AND BAUMAN 24 LONGACRE BUILDING BROADWAY NEW YORK.” Reeves showed the telegram to a featured comedian, Charles Chaplin, whom Sennett, although he had forgotten the name, had seen perform at the American Music Hall in 1911. Chaplin had no experience in the movies but agreed to try after Sennett offered him $150 weekly — twice his music hall salary (Chaplin 1964, 137–139).
Immigrant Stardom in ImperialAmerica
Authors: Negra Diane 
Published: November 2011

AbstractHistorically positioned as she was between the passive, pure ideal woman of the late 1800s and the “New Woman” of the 1920s, Polish‐born Pola Negri — the consummate silent‐era vamp who arrived in Hollywood from Berlin in 1922 — had ties to both stereotypes. The relationship between them in Negri's career provides insight into Hollywood's female image repertoire and an understanding of transgressive ethnic femininity in turn‐of‐the‐century American culture.
Unsophisticated Lady
Authors: Jacobs Lea 
Published: November 2011

Abstract

During the transition to sound in Hollywood, several articles in the film industry trade press suggested that audiences were no longer interested in “sophisticated” fare and that the new technology had occasioned the resurrection of “10–20–30 style melodrama” or “old tear‐jerking hits.”
1
Most of the films to which the journalists referred were adaptations of well‐known stage plays —
Madame X
,
East Lynne
,
Common Clay
— that fell under the generic rubric of what present‐day critics have called the maternal melodrama. This investigation of the reception of such films across the course of the 1920s and early 1930s aims to shed light upon what was considered “old‐fashioned melodrama” in the period, and also to explain shifts in critical attitudes toward the genre.
Two or Three Things We Thought We Knew about Silent Film Sound
Authors: Altman Rick 
Published: November 2011

Abstract
Some years ago I started work on what I expected to be the first chapter of a general history of Hollywood sound. I knew I had to cover the sound for silent films, but I figured that this task would be easily accomplished. After all, didn't everyone writing about silent film sound agree on the basic contours of early accompaniment practices? Right from the earliest years of cinema, everyone seemed to concur, films were accompanied by the ever‐present piano playing light classical selections or improvised creations, until such time as the piano could be replaced by an orchestra playing a carefully confected score specifically designed to match each film's shifting emotional tone. Finding one version or another of this same story in one history after another, my first impulse was just to borrow a few references from the many books that devote a short initial chapter to the sounds of silents: London (1936), Manvell and Huntley (1957), Bazelon (1975), Evans (1975), Gorbman (1987), Prendergast (1992), Flinn (1992), Kalinak (1992), Brown (1994), Chion (1995). But I kept hearing my own voice, as I would tell my graduate students never to trust received opinion and to be especially suspicious of widespread agreement on underresearched topics. Enjoying a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the time, I figured I could afford a week or two to check out at least the basic references shared by these writers.
Synchronized Sound Comes to the Cinema
Authors: Young Paul 
Published: November 2011

AbstractBy 1926, Hollywood had established conventions for staging, filming, and editing silent pictures that told stories efficiently and enjoyably while emphasizing the glamour and pathos of their stars. But in that same year Warner Bros. threatened the stability of these conventions by releasingDon Juan(directed by Alan Crosland), the first major‐studio feature film distributed with synchronized musical accompaniment. Even more radical was the prologue Warners distributed withDon Juanto the few theaters equipped to project it with sound: a gaggle of short films featuring fully synchronized speeches, orchestral music, opera singers, and jazz. Warners' breakthrough is a documented fact; how the studio system managed the breakthrough, however, is a matter of some debate. One influential account, Alexander Walker's 1978 bookThe Shattered Silents, suggests thatDon Juan's release was the first step toward an industry‐wide panic that came to a head with Warners' release of the first “part‐talking” picture,TheJazz Singer, the following year. Suddenly, Walker reports, industry leaders foresaw talking pictures taking over the film industry, but had no clue how to harness or even survive the upheaval a full transition to sync sound would undoubtedly wreak on this “silent” industry (Walker 1986, 40–41, 62–68).
Helios and the Apocalypse
Authors: Baer Nicholas 
Published: November 2011

AbstractThree technologies that emerged in the nineteenth century — the railroad, photography, and film — found verbal and visual expression in the figure of the horse. The train or “Iron Horse” offered a mechanical alternative to the stagecoach as a mode of transport beginning in the early nineteenth century, and gave rise to debates about the merits of “horse‐power” versus “steam‐power.” In the United States, the railroad system not only ensued from and advanced processes of industrialization and modernization, but also served an intrusive and expansionist function; in the words of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “The mechanization of transportation was … seen … as a means of gaining a new civilization from a hitherto worthless (because inaccessible) wilderness” (1986, 90–91). American processes of westward expansion and national incorporation found symbolic finalization on May 10, 1869, when politician, business magnate, and scientific horseman Leland Stanford struck the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, in an act that marked the convergence of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads — and, by extension, the completion of the first transcontinental railroad. Three years after this ceremonial event, which was famously photographed by Andrew J. Russell, Stanford commissioned Eadweard Muybridge to analyze the movement of a horse through a series of photographs that is commonly cited as a precursor to motion pictures.1
Re‐visioning Frank Capra
Authors: Zagarrio Vito 
Published: November 2011

Abstract

Frank Capra has been consistently identified as a populist, at times a demagogic, conservative filmmaker, whose films have long been classified as escapist fantasies of goodwill portraying a comic, optimistic, sentimental view of American life. He often has been described as a populist because his films are both for and about the “little people,” celebrating the vitality, ingenuity, noble aspirations, and strength of character of the common man. He prescribes small‐town good‐neighborliness as an antidote to the greed, evil, and selfishness of cynical big‐city villains. His good‐neighbor policy, the flavor of “Capracorn,” and the message that happiness comes from little things (and certainly not from money) have defined — but also confined — Capra to a narrow, optimistic vision of New Deal‐era America. This has made it easy to deny him the significant dignity of “authorship” and to place him within the tradition of “American visions,” as Raymond Carney does in his book
American Vision
, or as Joseph McBride does in his biography,
The Catastrophe of Success
.
“Let
'
Em Have It”
Authors: Vasey Ruth 
Published: November 2011

Abstract

In the 1930s, the major Hollywood studios produced approximately 400 films per year. The vast majority of these faded from public memory almost immediately after their initial period of exhibition, but a small number have continued to resonate in the public imagination to the present day. Prominent amongst these is a spate of “gangster” films, including
Little Caesar
(Warner Bros., 1930),
The Public Enemy
(Warner Bros., 1931), and
Scarface: The Shame of a Nation
(Caddo, 1932), the majority of which were made in the production season of 1930/1931, when a grand total of 23 films revolving around “gang” themes were produced. This amounted to less than 6 percent of the industry's total annual output and from 1932 onwards the numbers of these movies dwindled, but the notoriety of a handful of the early films was perpetuated, particularly at Warner Bros., by the recirculation and reformulation of elements of the original gangster formula. This essay considers some of the factors that, while contributing to the popularity of the unreconstructed screen gangster in the early 1930s, also insured that he made an early exit from Hollywood's production schedules. It traces his subsequent reincarnations throughout the decade in forms that, while being engineered to constitute more socially benign entertainment, were nevertheless characterized by an increasingly complex, nuanced, and contradictory relationship with their audiences.
Cinema and the Modern Woman
Authors: Pravadelli Veronica 
Published: November 2011

AbstractIn American cinema of the 1930s the image of the modern woman and the trajectory of female desire present two different models. Between the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s, American cinema continued to focus on the image of the young, self‐assertive, and sexy woman in her multiple facets: Working girls, gold diggers, flappers, show girls, and kept women inundated the talkies and perpetuated the cult of New Womanhood that emerged in the early years of the century. This tendency would wane as the decade progressed. From about the mid–1930s, the dominant narrative of female desire was tuned to the formation of the couple and to marriage while the figure of the emancipated woman became marginal. In this process the representation of class rise and upward mobility were also questioned and the heroine's social aspirations were more often thwarted than supported. One need only compareBaby Face(1933) andStella Dallas(1937), both starring Barbara Stanwyck in the leading role, to realize how the convergence between gender and class changed dramatically in just a few years. In the second half of the 1930s, only the upper‐class protagonists of screwball comedy enjoyed sexual freedom and independence, while working‐class women were denied both upward mobility and gender equality.
The Magician
Authors: Naremore James 
Published: November 2011

AbstractAccording to John Houseman, Orson Welles was “at heart a magician whose particular talent lies not so much in his creative imagination (which is considerable) as in his proven ability to stretch the familiar elements of theatrical effect far beyond their normal point of tension” (1972, 495). Left‐handed as the compliment may seem, Welles was in fact a magician, and watching his movies is sometimes like attending a performance by Blackstone or Sorcar. InCitizen Kane(1941), for example, there is a famous shot where the camera moves in to a close‐up of a group photograph of theChroniclestaff while Kane talks about what good men they are; suddenly Kane walks right into the photo, and as the camera pulls back from the assembled journalists we find ourselves at anInquirerparty six years later. Near the beginning ofThe Magnificent Ambersons(1942) Welles reads Booth Tarkington offscreen while the house across the street from the Amberson mansion is shown in long shot; slowly the sky darkens, a moon appears, and the house is festooned with lanterns — as if by magic, a winter day is transformed into a summer night. Moments like these are not merely functional; they also draw upon a cinema of illusionism as old as Méliès. Even if we were to disregard such obvious showpieces of movie trickery, Welles's films would still seem flamboyant, filled with magic and “theatrical effect.”
A Victory “Uneasy with Its Contrasts”
Authors: Giovacchini Saverio 
Published: November 2011

AbstractIn 1941, screenwriter Paul Jarrico was elated to leave his hometown, Los Angeles, to join the Merchant Marine. The urgency of the war made his work as a screenwriter at MGM pale. “We are getting a little tired of telling ourselves that the greatest contribution to the war we can make is right at our desks,” he wrote to friend and comrade Michael Wilson, himself then serving with the Marines. “The tendons of conscience grow taut,” he went on to observe (Ceplair 2007, 69). He was finally assigned to serve in the Merchant Marine on a Liberty ship bound for Naples, Italy. He was on it for three and half months. “The voyage was wonderful, everything I wanted, the smartest thing I ever did,” Jarrico wrote Wilson (Ceplair 2007, 71). He would enlist again in 1945. Many Hollywood leftists shared Jarrico's enthusiasm. At its onset the war seemed a great opportunity to defend their country in uniform. The war effort also seemed to swing Hollywood in the direction leftists had long supported.
Hollywood as Historian, 1929–1945
Authors: Smyth J. E. 
Published: November 2011

AbstractWhile American filmmakers' preoccupation with visualizing the past is nearly as old as the cinematic medium itself, large‐scale historical filmmaking truly emerged as a substantial component of production with the successes of European historical epics (Cabiria, 1914), biblical dramas (Judith of Bethulia, 1914), Westerns (The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, 1913), adaptations of popular historical literature (A Tale of Two Cities, 1917), biopics (Joan the Woman, 1916), the success ofGettysburg(1913), and the notoriety of D. W. Griffith'sTheBirth of a Nation(1915). History — predominantly European and American — was reconstructed and enjoyed in a wide variety of formats, adaptations, and emerging film genres during the silent era. There was no distinct “historical” genre; rather, historical dramas, lives, and perspectives formed a small but prestigious component of silent film production. Though biographies of “great” men and dramatic political and military events featured prominently, filmmakers also represented the history of Native Americans (The Red Man's View, 1909;The Vanishing American, 1925), women (Janice Meredith, 1924;So Big, 1924;Glorious Betsy, 1928), African‐Americans (Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1927), and the working class (Oliver Twist, 1922;Down to the Sea in Ships, 1923). By 1927, American filmgoers could expect half a dozen major historical films and a cluster of shorts and serials in theaters each year. But by the early 1930s, what had once been an occasional, expensive practice became the Industry's “most innovative, prestigious, and controversial form of feature filmmaking” (Smyth 2006, 6). Although the historical film did not exist as a traditional genre, Hollywood's obsession with projecting the past was the dominant production trend from the early sound era through the mid‐1940s, impacting every form of feature filmmaking, from musicals to literary adaptations to biopics to war films, Westerns, and gangster pictures.
Taking Stock at War's End
Authors: Grundmann Roy 
Published: November 2011

AbstractAt the end of World War II, America found itself at one of the most profound junctures in its history. War had not only transformed the national economy, but had ushered in significant social and cultural change, much of which was set in motion before the United States entered the war but would be irreversible in large part as a result of it. Although the transition to a peacetime economy presented broad‐based opportunities, the end of the war also created numerous challenges, dilemmas, and hardships that had not been anticipated. As large sectors of production had to be modernized and retooled for the manufacture of consumer goods, the daunting task of reorganizing the national workforce was further complicated by the need to absorb the massive influx of returning veterans seeking jobs — some of which no longer existed in the peacetime economy, while others were now possibly taken by women. It would not be long before the vicissitudes of industrial reorganization and postwar economic retrenchment, therefore, would ignite conflicts between labor and industry. To be sure, some of these conflicts stemmed from the years of the Great Depression, but their New Deal legacy took on a new status in the post–World War II political climate.
The Gun in the Briefcase
Authors: Arthur Paul 
Published: November 2011

Abstract

The image is a fleeting one: In a darkened motel room on the outskirts of a border town, a man in a business suit wrestles open a briefcase, previously entrusted to his new bride, only to discover that important legal papers and his government‐issue revolver are missing. Without another shred of information concerning narrative context or patterning, this shot might already augur the volatile collision of social and psychosexual themes underpinning our long‐standing fascination with film noir. Add to this scenic description the sole fact that the man in question is a Mexican narcotics agent played by Charlton Heston in olive makeup and we sense
critical mass
on the horizon. Arriving as it does at the historical end of the noir universe,
Touch of Evil
(1958) is a film in which practically every discernible signifier can be made to register with cataclysmic impact.