Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Oxford University Press
Published: April 3, 2001
Language: eng
Number of pages: 234
ISBN-13: 9780195140941
First sentence: AT ONE POINT in Mary Pickford's 1917 film, The Little American, Mary's character, a young American woman who has recently arrived in France to visit a relative, finds herself caught in the throes of World War I and faced with a band of vicious "Huns" who have broken into the chateau where she is staying.
Description: In Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth, Paula Marantz Cohen tells the story of silent film's rise. American silent film, she contends, answered the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson and Thoreau for an original mode of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. Tracing silent film's roots in popular nineteenth-century forms such as vaudeville, landscape painting, and portrait photography, Cohen documents the way silent film took three elements already charged with meaning - the body, the landscape, and the face - and developed the cinematic genres of comedy, the western, and the melodrama. At the same time, American silent film helped produce a new concept of character, embodied in the movie star. -- from back cover.