Ghetto Film and Gangster: Italian Immigrants in Early American Silent Cinema

American Spectators, Tatlers, and Guardians

10.5406/illinois/9780252036705.003.0002 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Jared Gardner

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Golden Age ◽

Silent Cinema ◽

Early American ◽

The Relationship

This chapter explores the forms, fantasies, and energies that gathered around the American magazine in the eighteenth century. Traditionally, the early American magazine has been seen as a kind of “overture” to the “Golden Age” of the American magazine to follow. Yet, the chapter considers this early “primitive” magazine in terms of the ambitions and energies with which it was invested, revealing its unique aspects and aspirations to periodical culture before the 1820s that mark it as discrete from the magazine to follow, in ways not dissimilar to the relationship between silent cinema and the sound cinema that emerges after 1927. Understood in its own terms and in relationship to a broader transatlantic circulation of energies and texts, the early American magazine can be seen to represent something very different from the magazine that was to follow.

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Black hands and white hearts: Italian immigrants as ‘urban racial types’ in early American film culture

Urban History ◽

10.1017/s0963926805002427 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 31 (3) ◽

pp. 375-399 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

GIORGIO BERTELLINI

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Film Industry ◽

Film Culture ◽

Early American ◽

The People ◽

The Everyday ◽

Jacob Riis ◽

Italian Immigrants ◽

Gangster Films ◽

White Ethnics

Through the concept of ‘character’ or ‘urban racial type’, traversing literature, science and metropolitan life, Bertellini reconsiders early American cinema's colour-based biracialism epitomized by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). In the New York-based film industry race also emerged from the city's dense intermingling of ‘white ethnics’ and broader shifts in epistemological emphasis – from inheritance to the environment. If Italian immigrants were racialized as innately violent in early gangster films, after 1915 heartbreaking melodramas of destitution and misfortunes adopted instead a combination of still othering and universal characterizations.Half the people in ‘the Bend’ are christened Pasquale…When the police do not know the name of an escaped murderer, they guess at Pasquale and send the name out on alarm; in nine cases out of ten it fits. Jacob Riis, 1890I like to play the Italian because his costume, his mannerisms, his gestures, and his unlikeness to the everyday people of the street make him stand out as a romantic and picturesque person. Actor and director George Beban, 1921

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“Images of the Secret Self”: The Idea of the Non-Human in German Expressionist and Early American Horror Cinema

AVANCA | CINEMA ◽

10.37390/avancacinema.2020.a108 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Beáta Fenyvesi

Keyword(s):

First World War ◽

World War ◽

Silent Cinema ◽

Moral Issues ◽

Political Situation ◽

Early American ◽

The Us ◽

First World

In historian Leslie Fiedler’s book “Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self” (1978), he argues that monsters are intriguing for us because we look at them as mirrors of ourselves. Although the fantasy of manipulating nature emerged centuries ago, Germany’s Expressionist silent cinema had its own place and message for using monsters. In the post-First World War climate, characters such as Cesare in Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Paul Wegener and Carl Boese’s golem (1920), and Fritz Lang’s pseudo-Maria (1927) are all reflections of the era’s political situation. Meanwhile in the US, genetic imagery was a known and popular topic and movies like Frankenstein (1931) directed by James Whale were inspired by the German works. It also sums up the cultural, ethical, and moral issues of the 1920s, which are still valid today. Although the cultural environments of the two countries are different, they both make use of the same concept in order to show greed for power: the concept of the non-human.

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