Title: Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth
First published: April 3, 2001
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.
Subjects: Silent films, History and criticism, Films muets, Histoire et critique, PERFORMING ARTS, Film & Video, Reference, Stomme films