Author: Kalton C. Lahue
Publisher: New York : Castle Books
ISBN:
Category : Film serials
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
The adventure, romance, and pathos that were so much a part of the silent serial during the early years of the motion picture industry have vanished from the scene of the Hollywood movie studio. The present generation neither remembers - for none was born yet - nor cares; for to them the silent serial is but a small part of the American past which might never even have existed. But to those who themselves were growing up in the pre-talkie era, when the motion picture industry itself was just beginning to unfold its wings, the silent serial was an outlet for the fancies of children and the dreams of adults. It was an action-packed, thrill-a-minute entry into the world of exciting experiences. Bound and Gagged is the story of the silent serial: its birth; its growth; its heroes and heroines; its successes and failures; and finally its demise.
Author: Rudmer Canjels
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136837353
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Tracing the international consumption, distribution, and cultural importance of silent film serials in the 1910s and 1920s, Canjels provides an exciting new understanding of the cultural dimension and the cultural transformation and circulation of media forms. Specifically, he demonstrates that the serial film form goes far beyond the well-known American two-reel serial—the cliffhanger. Throughout the book, Canjels focuses on the biggest producers of serials, America, France, and Germany, while imported serials, such as those in the Netherlands, are also examined. This research offers new views on the serial work of well known directors as D.W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim, and Fritz Lang, while foregrounding the importance of lesser known directors such as Louis Feuillade or Joe May. In the early twentieth-century, serial productions were constantly undergoing change and were not merely distributed in their original form upon import. As adjusted serials were present in large quantities or confronted different social spaces, nationalistic feelings and views stimulated by the unrest of World War I and the expanding American film industry could be incorporated and attached to the serial form. Serial productions were not only adaptable to local discourses, they could actively stimulate and interact as well, influencing reception and further film production. By examining the distribution, reception, and cultural contexts of American and European serials in various countries, this cross-cultural research makes both local and global observations. Canjels thus offers a highly relevant case study of transnational, transcultural and transmedia relations.
Author: Barbara Tepa Lupack
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501748203
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
The first book-length study of pioneering and prolific filmmakers Ted and Leo Wharton, Silent Serial Sensations offers a fascinating account of the dynamic early film industry. As Barbara Tepa Lupack demonstrates, the Wharton brothers were behind some of the most profitable and influential productions of the era, including The Exploits of Elaine and The Mysteries of Myra, which starred such popular performers as Pearl White, Irene Castle, Francis X. Bushman, and Lionel Barrymore. Working from the independent film studio they established in Ithaca, New York, Ted and Leo turned their adopted town into "Hollywood on Cayuga." By interweaving contemporary events and incorporating technological and scientific innovations, the Whartons expanded the possibilities of the popular serial motion picture and defined many of its conventions. A number of the sensational techniques and character types they introduced are still being employed by directors and producers a century later.
Author: Robert K. Klepper
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476604843
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 596
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Book Description
This film reference covers 646 silent motion pictures, starting with Eadweard Muybridge’s initial motion photography experiments in 1877 and even including The Taxi Dancer (1996). Among the genres included are classics, dramas, Westerns, light comedies, documentaries and even poorly produced early pornography. Masterpieces such as Joan the Woman (1916), Intolerance (1916) and Faust (1926) can be found, as well as rare titles that have not received critical attention since their original releases. Each entry provides the most complete credits possible, a full description, critical commentary, and an evaluation of the film’s unique place in motion picture history. Birth dates, death dates, and other facts are provided for the directors and players where available, with a selection of photographs of those individuals. The work is thoroughly indexed.
Author: John D. Fair
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274501
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 485
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Book Description
John Fair and David Chapman tell the story of how filmmakers use and manipulate the appearance and performances of muscular men and women to enhance the appeal of their productions. The authors show how this practice, deeply rooted in western epistemological traditions, evolved from the art of photography through magic lantern and stage shows into the motion picture industry, arguing that the sight of muscles in action induced a higher degree of viewer entertainment. From Eugen Sandow to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, muscular actors appear capable of performing the miraculous, and with the aid of stuntmen and filming contrivances, they do. By such means, muscles are used to perfect the art of illusion, inherent in movie-making from its earliest days.
Author: William M. Drew
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081319685X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 825
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Book Description
In the early days of motion pictures—before superstars, before studio conglomerates, before even the advent of sound—there was a woman named Pearl White (1889–1938). A quintessential beauty of the time, with her perfectly tousled bob and come-hither stare, White's rise to stardom was swift; her assumption of the title of queen of American motion picture serials equally deserved. Born the youngest of five children in a small, rural Missouri farm town, White first began performing in high school. She would eventually make the decision to cut her education short, dropping out to go on the Trousdale Stock Company. A bit player in the early years of her career, she was eventually spotted by the Powers Film Company in New York. She made her film debut in 1910 and soon set herself apart from her female colleagues with her reputation for fearless performances that often involved her own stunt work. It was that same daring attitude that would put her on the map internationally as an actress. From flying airplanes to swimming across rapid rivers, to racing cars in serials like The Perils of Pauline (1914), White was undaunted by the demands of her onscreen career. She went on to star in popular serial classics such as The New Exploits of Elaine (1915), The Iron Claw (1916), The Fatal Ring (1917), and The Lightning Raider (1919). As active socially as she was professionally, White would also lend her audacious spirit to activism as she took part in the early feminist movement. Her bravery and mastery of her craft made her a positive role model for suffragettes who battled for women's rights in the United States. The Woman Who Dared: The Life and Times of Pearl White, Queen of the Serials, is the first full-length biography of this pioneering star. In this study of film history and female agency, Drew delves into the cultural impact of White's work and how it evolved along a concurrent trajectory with the social upheavals of the Progressive Era.
Author: Karen Ward Mahar
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801890845
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood explores when, how, and why women were accepted as filmmakers in the 1910s and why, by the 1920s, those opportunities had disappeared. In looking at the early film industry as an industry—a place of work—Mahar not only unravels the mystery of the disappearing female filmmaker but untangles the complicated relationship among gender, work culture, and business within modern industrial organizations. In the early 1910s, the film industry followed a theatrical model, fostering an egalitarian work culture in which everyone—male and female—helped behind the scenes in a variety of jobs. In this culture women thrived in powerful, creative roles, especially as writers, directors, and producers. By the end of that decade, however, mushrooming star salaries and skyrocketing movie budgets prompted the creation of the studio system. As the movie industry remade itself in the image of a modern American business, the masculinization of filmmaking took root. Mahar's study integrates feminist methodologies of examining the gendering of work with thorough historical scholarship of American industry and business culture. Tracing the transformation of the film industry into a legitimate "big business" of the 1920s, and explaining the fate of the female filmmaker during the silent era, Mahar demonstrates how industrial growth and change can unexpectedly open—and close—opportunities for women.
Author: Kalton Carroll Lahue
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Denise Lowe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317718968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 644
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Book Description
Examine women’s contributions to film—in front of the camera and behind it! An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930 is an A-to-Z reference guide (illustrated with over 150 hard-to-find photographs!) that dispels the myth that men dominated the film industry during its formative years. Denise Lowe, author of Women and American Television: An Encyclopedia, presents a rich collection that profiles many of the women who were crucial to the development of cinema as an industry—and as an art form. Whether working behind the scenes as producers or publicists, behind the cameras as writers, directors, or editors, or in front of the lens as flappers, vamps, or serial queens, hundreds of women made profound and lasting contributions to the evolution of the motion picture production. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930 gives you immediate access to the histories of many of the women who pioneered the early days of cinema—on screen and off. The book chronicles the well-known figures of the era, such as Alice Guy, Mary Pickford, and Francis Marion but gives equal billing to those who worked in anonymity as the industry moved from the silent era into the age of sound. Their individual stories of professional success and failure, artistic struggle and strife, and personal triumph and tragedy fill in the plot points missing from the complete saga of Hollywood’s beginnings. Pioneers of the motion picture business found in An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films include: Dorothy Arnzer, the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America and the only female director to make a successful transition from silent films to sound Jane Murfin, playwright and screenwriter who became supervisor of motion pictures at RKO Studios Gene Gauntier, the actress and scenarist whose adaptation of Ben Hur for the Kalem Film Company led to a landmark copyright infringement case Theda Bara, whose on-screen popularity virtually built Fox Studios before typecasting and overexposure destroyed her career Madame Sul-Te-Wan, née Nellie Conley, the first African-American actor or actress to sign a film contract and be a featured performer Dorothy Davenport, who parlayed the publicity surrounding her actor-husband’s drug-related death into a career as a producer of social reform melodramas Lois Weber, a street-corner evangelist who became one of the best-known and highest-paid directors in Hollywood Lina Basquette, the “Screen Tragedy Girl” who married and divorced studio mogul Sam Warner, led The Hollywood Aristocrats Orchestra, claimed to have been a spy for the American Office of Strategic Services during World War II, and became a renowned dog expert in her later years and many more! An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Women in Early American Films: 1895-1930 also includes comprehensive appendices of the WAMPAS Baby Stars, the silent stars remembered in the Graumann Chinese Theater Forecourt of the Stars and those immortalized on the Hollywood Walk of Stars. The book is invaluable as a resource for researchers, librarians, academics working in film, popular culture, and women’s history, and to anyone interested either professionally or casually in the early days of Hollywood and the motion picture industry.
Author: Stuart Oderman
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476613699
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 409
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Book Description
With a theatrical career spanning nearly 100 years, Gish saw motion pictures evolve from flickers to blockbusters. Usually playing someone needing to be rescued or protected, her trademark delicacy and vulnerability belied a strong and complex woman whose fatherless childhood taught her frugality, love for her mother and her sister, Dorothy, and a distrust of men. The author, who was her friend, chronicles the hardships, heartaches, and fierce determination that shaped her all her days. With rare photographs and intimate recollections of Lillian, Dorothy, and many other important figures.
