Fin

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Gestalt Theory ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Final Work

This concluding chapter briefly turns to Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s cacophonous ‘book of the dark’, with its many references to cinema, forms the centre of a discussion of the emergence of sound film. The importance of touch in both silent and sound film is restated through reference to the film criticism of Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, and Gertrude Stein, and Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), a late silent film focusing on Chaplin’s relationship with a blind flower-seller. The complex interrelationship between sound and image in both film and Finnegans Wake is contemplated through gestalt theory and multi-perspectival ‘figure–ground images’. The chapter concludes by returning to Ulysses, to consider the never-produced Reisman–Zukofsky screenplay and the ways in which the film would, and would not, have affirmed a phenomenological reading of Joyce’s text.

Early Theories of the Sound Film

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Buhler
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Transition To Sound ◽  
Definition Of

Chapter 2 examines several major theories that emerged during the transition to sound film, when even the definition of the sound film was contested. The theories of sound film that arose during the transitional decade from 1926 to 1935 focused on the closely related forms of recorded theater and silent film and worked to articulate how sound film differed from them. They also gave considerable attention to asynchronous sound in part because it was a figure specific to sound film (or in any event more difficult to produce in other art forms) and in part because asynchronous sound had affinities with montage. The chapter focuses on five important theorists who wrote prolifically during the transition years: Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Harry Potamkin.

Screening Europe in Australasia

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie K. Allen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
World War ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Dramatic Shift

This book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as always having dominated global film culture through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century. Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history—and its implications for cross-cultural exchange—was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, and brings it vividly to life. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions.

When the Music Surges

2013 ◽  
pp. 558-582
Author(s):  
Michael V. Pisani
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Theater Music

This chapterexamines the influence of the theater music of the nineteenth century on modern film music practices. It shows that the soundscape of the theater was considerably richer and more varied than has previously been suggested and that the techniques of the nineteenth-century melodrama also leapt beyond the silent film to influence underscoring practices in the sound film of the 1930s and 1940s. It provides examples to illustrate that many more useful connections could be made between the practice of composing music for the theater and composing for film melodramas.

Mapping Cinema Ghosts: Reconstructing the Circulation of Nordic Silent Film in Australia

2019 ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Julie K. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Silent Films ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Distribution Chain ◽  
Economic Developments

This chapter examines how Nordic silent films circulated as far away from Scandinavia as in Australia. This far-flung distribution chain was facilitated and hampered by political and economic developments on both sides of the globe. In the 1910s, the Copenhagen-based Nordisk Film Company was the second largest exporter of films in the world. Distributed primarily by Pathé Frérès and Nordisk, Swedish and Danish silent films played to great success all over the continent of Australia. Early Nordic stars, in particular Asta Nielsen and Valdemar Psilander, were beloved. As products of neutral countries, Danish and Swedish films continued to circulate internationally during the war. By the time silent film was rendered obsolete by sound film, the distribution of Nordic film in the Pacific was largely a thing of the past. The chapter reconstructs the circulation of these films from remaining traces including newspapers of the period

Gestural (In)visibility in Béla Balázs and Helmuth Plessner

2019 ◽  
pp. 107-124
Author(s):  
Lucia Ruprecht
Keyword(s):  
Philosophical Anthropology ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Helmuth Plessner

This chapter juxtaposes the film criticism of Béla Balázs with the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner in order to carve out their approaches to gesture. It gives particular attention to Plessner’s “Grenzen der Gemeinschaft: Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus” (“The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism”) and Balázs’s “Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films” (“Visible Man or the Culture of Film”). Both authors have a pronounced interest in the potential of social gesture to inform public life, yet they articulate it in different ways: where Balázs bemoans too little gestural embodiment, Plessner sees too much of it. Balázs emphatically conjures up the promise of a gestural cure that he detects in the heightened corporeal expressivity of silent film; Plessner considers such expressivity as symptom not only of gestural, but also aesthetic, social and political ills.

Two Paradigmatic Tales, between Genres and Genders

2019 ◽  
pp. 150-196
Author(s):  
W. Anthony Sheppard
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Hollywood Film ◽  
French Film ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Madame Butterfly ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter focuses on multiple versions of the Madame Butterfly narrative in Hollywood film and on multiple versions of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1915 silent film The Cheat. One focus is on the relationship between music in these films and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and on how the Butterfly narrative was reworked to project developing perceptions of race and gender. The relationship between operatic and cinematic Orientalist representation is explored in the 1932 Madame Butterfly and the 1962 My Geisha. DeMille’s “The Cheat” inspired works stoking fears of the “Yellow Peril.” The story was transformed into a play (1918). Camille Erlanger’s “Forfaiture,” the first opera to be based on a film, premiered in Paris (1921). A silent film was released in 1923 and a sound film in 1931. In 1937, a French film starred Sessue Hayakawa, the Japanese actor who played the “villain” in 1915. This offers an opportunity to compare the role of music and realization of Orientalism in four genres.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

The introduction presents the book’s scope, approach, and organization. It recounts the history of the transition to synchronized sound film, which has largely been examined from the perspective of American cinema. However, because of aspects of French cinematic and musical culture that were unique to France, the transition unfolded in very different ways, becoming a hotly debated topic and resulting in divergent artistic responses. The introduction lays out the competing conceptions of sound film in France—for instance, its aesthetic proximity to either live theater or silent film, and its potential as a realist medium or a source of abstract fantasy—and the ways these conceptions played out in practitioners’ writings and films of the period. The films created during this “transitional” moment in filmmaking encourage us to reconsider long-held assumptions about the relationship between music and the moving image.

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