Parallel tracks
Subtitle: the railroad and silent cinema
By: Lynne Kirby.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Durham, N.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 338
Subjects: Railroads in motion pictures.; Silent films.
Description: From its earliest days, the cinema has enjoyed a special kinship with the railroad, a mutual attraction based on similar ways of handling speed, visual perception, and the promise of a journey. Parallel Tracks is the first book to explore and explain this relationship in both theoretical and historical terms, blending film scholarship with railroad history. Describing the train as a mechanical double for the cinema, Lynne Kirby gives her romantic topic a compelling twist.

She views the railroad/cinema romance in light of the technological and cultural instability underlying modernity and presents the railroad and cinema as complementary experiences that shaped the modern world and its subjects - the passengers and spectators who traveled through that world.

In wide-ranging and provocative analyses of dozens of silent films - icons of film history like The General and The Great Train Robbery as well as many that are rarely discussed - Kirby examines how trains and rail travel embodied concepts of spectatorship and mobility grounded in imperialism and the social, sexual, and racial divisions of modern Western culture.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [253]-320) and index.