Neither sublimes nor catastrophes: digital affordances in silent film heritage and suggestions from home movies collections

Samuel Beckett's Film has been the focus of several articles in the past decade. While current investigations of Beckett's film are diverse, what most of them share is their dependence on biographical data to support their readings. Many scholars who have written on Beckett's failed cinematic excursion, for example, point to Beckett's letter of 1936 to Sergei Eisenstein. However, the link between Beckett's interest in film and his admiration for James Joyce has sadly been overlooked. Both Irish writers saw the artistic possibilities in film and both admired the Russian silent film legend, Sergei Eisenstein. Although there is no record of Joyce and Beckett discussing cinema or of Beckett knowing about Joyce's meeting with Eisenstein in 1929, it seems unlikely that Beckett would not have known something about these meetings or Joyce's much earlier film enterprise, the Volta. By re-examining Film and speculating on the possible three way connections between Eisenstein, Joyce and Beckett, I wish to add a footnote to Beckett studies which hopefully will lead others to wander on the Beckett-Joyce-Eisenstein trail and which will open up further discussions of Film. Beckett's film is haunted by the memory of his friendship with James Joyce and his admiration for Eisenstein's talent, both of which are visible in the screen images and theme of Film.

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Silent Film and the Early Fiction of Stephen Leacock

Canadian Journal of Film Studies ◽

10.3138/cjfs.16.2.99 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 99-111

Author(s):

Paul Matthew St. Pierre

Keyword(s):

Silent Film ◽

Stephen Leacock

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Becoming the Demon Woman

10.1093/oso/9780190664473.003.0009 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Per Faxneld

Keyword(s):

Cultural Context ◽

Silent Film ◽

Femme Fatale ◽

Individual Level

Chapter9 analyses individuals who, both on and off the stage, actively assumed the role of the demon woman. Three persons are considered in detail: Sarah Bernhardt, the Italian marchioness Luisa Casati, and silent film actress Theda Bara. They chose—or, in Bara’s case, were chosen—to embody the (more or less supernatural or occult) femme fatale, as constructed mostly by male authors and artists. Seemingly, they felt this was empowering or useful for commercial, subversive, or other purposes. The analysis attempts to tease out some of the implications this enactment of a disquieting stereotype had on an individual level as well as in a broader cultural context. This also applies to the unknown women who wore jewellery depicting devils, demons, or Eve—a rebellious token clearly drawing on motifs familiar from Satanic feminism.

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Fin

10.1093/oso/9780198768913.003.0006 ◽

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.

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Early Theories of the Sound Film

10.1093/oso/9780199371075.003.0002 ◽

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.

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Performance Practices and Music In Early Cinema outside Hollywood

The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195328493.013.012 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 610-619

Author(s):

Kathryn Kalinak

Keyword(s):

Film Music ◽

Silent Film ◽

Early Cinema ◽

Performance Practices ◽

Moving Images ◽

Cultural Interface ◽

Silent Era

This chapterexamines the diversity of international practices in film music outside Hollywood during the silent film era. It describes performance practices around the globe and offers a broader context in which to consider American practices during this period. It suggests that music functioned as a cultural interface throughout the silent era in a way quite different from the sound era and that music in the silent era had an impressive power to interact with moving images in ways not controlled by films or their producers.

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