Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2023.2209938
Agata Frymus
What did ‘a night at the movies’ mean to audiences during the 1920s? What sort of pleasures did cinema offer to star-struck fans removed from us now by more than a century? Film historians have been asking these very questions, with increased frequency, since the late 1990s. This is true especially when it comes to the habits of early cinemagoers in the Global North, and in the United States more specifically. At times, this increased scholarly interest generated controversy: the identity of the early moviegoers – their economic stature and linguistic ability – has been debated and, at times, contested. Historians such as Judith Thissen (1999, 2014), Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (1999) and Giorgio Bertellini (1999, 2005), among others, discussed the myriad of ways in which European immigrants in American metropolises made sense of their adopted country, and the role that the movies played in navigating their urban surroundings. By 1908, American reformers saw photoplays as a ‘universal language’, capable of communicating with foreign residents who came to the United States with little or imperfect English (Abel 1999, 120–121; Staiger 1992). If these new populations could immerse themselves in the moving pictures, they could also be taught lessons about civic duty and the Protestant values. Essentially – or so the story went – cinematic apparatus had the potential to serve as a tool to assimilate various groups into the ideal of American society. This narrative has been incorporated, to great effect, into the first generation of film histories. In fact, it was central to Lewis Jacobs’ (1939, 12) first large-scale study of the American film industry:
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2023.2160301
Kiki Loveday
ABSTRACT In 1896 ‘the Nethersole kiss’ revolutionized the stage kiss and made legitimate-stage actress Olga Nethersole a household name. This article considers Olga Nethersole’s queer influence on the early erotic genres of the kissing film and the ‘stag’ film, arguing that she originated the mainstream Sapphic tropes of the twentieth century. Leaning on foundational texts by Shelley Stamp, Charles Musser and Linda Williams and drawing on recent work by Susan Potter and Russell Sheaffer, this article intervenes in the presumed ‘male only’ discourse of ‘stag’ during the early silent film era (1896–1907). Using original archival research including newspapers, catalogues, scrapbooks, and other ephemera such as erotic ‘French’ postcards, I reconsider a cluster of films that engage Nethersole’s onstage and offstage ‘character’, including The Kiss (Edison, 1896), Something Good – Negro Kiss (Selig, 1898), Sapho (Lubin, 1900), The New Kiss (Edison, 1900), Sapho Kiss (Lubin, 1900), In a Massage Parlor (American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1902), The Seven Ages (Edison, 1905), A Modern Sapho (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1905), and Under the Old Apple Tree (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1907). I demonstrate that these films constituted a racialized Sapphic authorial discourse that produced queer pleasures for early audiences by engaging Nethersole’s scandalous stardom. As a progenitor of early erotic screen genres, Nethersole must be contextualized in relation to the spectrum of erotic entertainment at the turn of the century from the ‘unobjectionable’ to the pornographic. In this context, I demonstrate how the intermediality of early cinema, so often understood through the heterosexualized metaphor of ‘birth’, is better understood as a form of queer reproduction.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2023.2160420
Rebecca Harrison
ABSTRACT Drawing on archival research, biographical writing, and autobiography, this article explores the life of early film comedienne Mabel Normand to make a case for feminist methodologies in film history. First, it provides a meta-analysis of existing biographies of, and scholarship about, Normand to interrogate the patriarchal narratives that inform theatrical, musical, and cinematic representations of the star. In doing so, the article uses Jane Gaines and Monica Dall’Asta’s notion of ‘constellating’ women to situate the actress’s biographical canon in a longer history of tragically framed white women that includes Marilyn Monroe, whose commoditisation by writers is crucial to the propagation of myths about Normand. Second, the article reflects on elements of subjective and personal bias that inform the author’s analysis of Mabel Normand’s life and career. And finally, the article argues that the conditions under which research is produced must be recognised as method acknowledging the inequalities rife in the academy, the article draws attention to the ongoing gaps and ellipses in feminist historiography.
本文通过档案研究、传记写作和自传，探讨了早期电影喜剧女演员梅布尔·诺曼德的生活，为电影史上的女权主义方法论提供了一个案例。首先，它对诺曼的现有传记和学术研究进行了荟萃分析，以质疑为这位明星提供戏剧、音乐和电影表现的父权叙事。为此，本文采用了简·盖恩斯(Jane Gaines)和莫妮卡·达尔阿斯塔(Monica Dall ' asta)关于“排列”女性的概念，将这位女演员的传记经典置于包括玛丽莲·梦露(Marilyn Monroe)在内的悲惨的白人女性的更长的历史中，这些女性被作家商品化对诺曼神话的传播至关重要。其次，文章反思了主观和个人偏见的因素，这些因素影响了作者对梅布尔·诺曼德的生活和事业的分析。最后，文章认为，研究的产生条件必须被视为一种承认学术界普遍存在的不平等现象的方法，文章提请注意女性主义史学中持续存在的差距和省略。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2023.2160293
Jane M. Gaines
ABSTRACT We already know that Antonia Dickson co-wrote The Kinetograph, the Kinetoscope and the Kineto-phonograph (1895) with her inventor brother William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, published as a Raff and Gammon pamphlet and now considered the ‘first’ history of motion pictures. The late Paul Spehr was one of Antonia’s champions, and he suggested what a more careful reading of the prose style of that ‘history’ might reveal about the likely author. Also, a comparison with W.K.L. Dickson’s 1933 version of that history – published 30 years after Antonia’s death and after he had moved to the UK – reveals distinct differences not only in prose style but also in the conceptualization of the invention. Here is a re-introduction to Antonia Dickson relative to her talents (music historian, art historian, pianist, poet, translator, popular science writer) and achievements (including co-authorship of a biography of Thomas Edison), the single-authored ‘Nine Hundred and Fifty Miles by Telephone’, in Cassier’s Magazine (November 1892), written after she witnessed the first successful telephone call between New York and Chicago. Then, in ‘Wonders of the Kinetoscope’ from 1895 she published her own account of how moving pictures worked, significant for its grasp of how the device functioned. From there I offer another angle on the contradictory accounts of invention published in the newly illustrated engineering journals of the late nineteenth century.
我们已经知道，安东尼娅·迪克森与她的发明家兄弟威廉·肯尼迪·劳里·迪克森(William Kennedy Laurie Dickson)共同创作了《活动电影放映机》、《活动电影放映机》和《活动留声机》(1895年)，并以《拉夫和盖蒙》小册子的形式出版，现在被认为是电影的“第一部”历史。已故的保罗·斯佩尔(Paul Spehr)是安东尼娅的支持者之一，他建议，如果更仔细地阅读那篇“历史”的散文风格，可能会揭示出这位可能的作者。此外，与W.K.L.迪克森1933年版本的这段历史相比——在安东尼娅死后30年，他搬到英国后出版——不仅在散文风格上，而且在发明的概念化上都有明显的不同。这里是对安东尼娅·迪克森的重新介绍，关于她的才能(音乐史学家、艺术史学家、钢琴家、诗人、翻译者、科普作家)和成就(包括与人合著托马斯·爱迪生传记)，在《卡西尔杂志》(1892年11月)上，她见证了纽约和芝加哥之间第一次成功的电话之后，她写了一篇独立的“电话九百五十英里”。然后，在1895年出版的《活动放映机的奇迹》(Wonders of the Kinetoscope)一书中，她发表了自己对电影如何工作的描述，对这种设备如何运作的把握意义重大。从这一点出发，我从另一个角度来看待19世纪后期新出版的插图工程期刊上关于发明的矛盾叙述。
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2023.2160329
Andrew Shail
ABSTRACT This article examines eleven personifications of cinema from the UK during the period 1912–1929, personifications that unanimously ‘sexed’ the medium female. It demonstrates that femaleness was not an inevitable characteristic of personifications of this particular medium and so explores why these female personifications came about when they did, showing that they both a) unconsciously symptomatized several distinguishing features of the medium during the period (including its potential to function aesthetically, its emergent mediativity, its sensationalist content, the unusual availability of both the space of the cinema auditorium and film work to women, its affinities with various elements of modernity that were already coded female and its own challenges to forms of tradition that were coded male) and b) (in most cases) were deliberately fashioned to classify the new medium as having a particular affinity with women, in an effort to improve its public image.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2023.2160417
Laraine Porter
ABSTRACT By the mid-1920s, the top echelons of the film industry on both sides of the Atlantic were almost entirely dominated by men. Despite women becoming the majority consumers for cinema culture, male studio bosses, producers, directors and publicists mediated women’s tastes and expectations through the silent and early sound period. Taking Iris Barry’s claim that cinema ‘exists for the purpose of pleasing women’ (Barry 1926, 59), this article considers how women became increasingly significant, not only as audiences for films but to the burgeoning consumer cultures surrounding cinema including magazines, novels, fashion, beauty and leisure. Additionally, Lisa Stead’s assertion that ‘The movies, and going to the movies, were for many British women an integral part of their experience of modernity’ (2016, 1) is examined in relation to how women’s tastes and patterns of consumption, helped steer the expansion of the cinema industry and its associated fan cultures. This article also addresses how young female cinemagoers and entertainment seekers were dismissed as ‘flappers’ and often excoriated by Britain’s intellectual elite. It examines how cinema’s stubbornly persistent male power base was forced to accommodate and address women’s cultural tastes due to their numerical significance as consumers.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-19DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2157301
Alex W. Bordino
ABSTRACT This essay examines the differences between American and British modernity around the turn of the twentieth century. The author argues that American modernity tended to paradoxically embrace what was considered premodern, while British modernity sought to more clearly dichotomize what was perceived as rural primitivity and civil British modernity. To elucidate these ideological differences, theories of modernity and antimodernity are addressed in tandem with close textual analyses of early film reenactments of the South African War (1899–1902). While British film reenactments of the South African War tended to reify British imperialism, American films were often ideologically ambivalent, thus providing more of an opportunity for American exhibitors and audiences to contemplate and discern British imperialism for themselves. This study also explores theoretical questions related to reenactment and simulated reality, specifically how British filmmakers, unlike American filmmakers, constructed a clear distinction between civility and primitivity as real.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-25DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2146152
Sonsoles Hernandez Barbosa
ABSTRACT This article presents an exploration of the mechanisms that underpinned simulacrum in the 19th century. To do so, I take as a case study an attraction presented at the Universal Exhibition of 1900: the multi-sensory panorama known as the Maréorama. This device offered audiences the experience of a half-hour boat trip across the Mediterranean Sea. In this paper I shall argue that this simulation combines period-relevant codes that link with other artistic and cultural practices of the period – early cinema, prestidigitation, Wagnerian ‘total work of art’ – and a component of technological innovation oriented towards perfecting multi-sensoriality. This combination turned the Maréorama into one of the most sophisticated mimetic immersion devices at the time, blending the tradition of the great rotundas with the effects of mobile panoramas. Other features of this panorama were the physical shocks generated by the motion of the supporting platform and the interactive role assumed by the spectator, which, along with the mimesis, added an element of fiction. I shall argue that the simulation of new realities was stimulated by the imaginaries generated by contemporary novels such as Julius Verne’s, which illustrated future scenarios and the exploration of unknown landscapes. The Maréorama allowed the spectator to travel across the Mediterranean from the shores of the Seine in a record time. Panoramas, including the Maréorama, became exponents of the utopian capacity of conquering the world, overcoming the limitations of time and space.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-23DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2149774
Aonan Wu
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Pub Date : 2022-11-03DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2137222
J. A. Mitchell
ABSTRACT On a 1924 tour of San Quentin Prison, film star Mary Pickford sat to have her photograph taken in the studio of imprisoned photographer Sid Kepford, who was responsible for taking the prison’s mugshots. Pickford was far from the only motion picture celebrity to pass through the institution, however, and this article exposes the extent to which San Quentin was a destination for Hollywood’s actors and directors, who moved about the prison with great freedom due to the permission granted to them by star-struck wardens. This article places the Pickford photograph in a history of carceral images, outlines a history of film spectatorship at San Quentin, and reveals just how inviting the prison was to its panoply of Hollywood guests.
{"title":"Mary Pickford’s mugshot: early Hollywood celebrities and San Quentin Prison","authors":"J. A. Mitchell","doi":"10.1080/17460654.2022.2137222","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2022.2137222","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT On a 1924 tour of San Quentin Prison, film star Mary Pickford sat to have her photograph taken in the studio of imprisoned photographer Sid Kepford, who was responsible for taking the prison’s mugshots. Pickford was far from the only motion picture celebrity to pass through the institution, however, and this article exposes the extent to which San Quentin was a destination for Hollywood’s actors and directors, who moved about the prison with great freedom due to the permission granted to them by star-struck wardens. This article places the Pickford photograph in a history of carceral images, outlines a history of film spectatorship at San Quentin, and reveals just how inviting the prison was to its panoply of Hollywood guests.","PeriodicalId":42697,"journal":{"name":"Early Popular Visual Culture","volume":"2 1","pages":"331 - 347"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89179756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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