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.

Imagining Women at the Movies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Canan Balan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Gender Politics ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Turkish Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Creative Writers ◽  
Turkish Cinema ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
Film Market

This chapter examines early film culture in Istanbul by focusing on how Turkish male writers constructed cinema-going Turkish women in early twentieth-century and postwar Istanbul. The goal is to analyze gendered concerns about spectatorship emerging in the patriarchal imagination of that time. In order to understand the reception of early cinema in Turkey as well as the cultural status of Turkish cinema among the Ottoman/Turkish intelligentsia and the gender politics surrounding it, the chapter looks at novels, poems, and newspaper reviews. The discussion begins with an overview of film market in post-World-War I Istanbul and cinema-going as a public experience in the Ottoman capital. An analysis of female spectators depicted by male authors reveals a changing culture of spectatorship. This occurred concomitantly with the sociopolitical transition from the declining Ottoman Empire to the rise of the Turkish nation-state. The chapter argues that the change in gender politics during this period triggered the new anxieties that creative writers project onto the activity of filmgoing, and particularly that by cinema-going women.

War on Film: The American Cinema and World War I, 1914-1941

1983 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 1017
Author(s):  
Arthur F. McClure ◽  
Michael T. Isenberg
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
American Cinema

The Outlaw and No-Man’s Land: The International Circulation of Visual Repertoires in World War I

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sandberg
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
International Circulation ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Cultural Framework ◽  
No Man's Land ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis paper proposes a reevaluation of the relationship between Swedish feature films and World War I during the years 1914–18, suggesting that a widespread visual repertoire of war imagery circulating in Europe and Sweden through the illustrated weeklies and cinema newsreels created a production and exhibition context in which various visual tropes from the war formed a baseline, taken-for-granted cultural framework for the meaning of Swedish films, even though Sweden was not directly involved in the conflict. The paper chooses as its main case study Victor Sjöström’s 1917 film

“Light Filtering through Those Shutters”: Joyless Streets, Mnemic Symbols, and the Beginnings of Feminist Film Criticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 63-95
Author(s):  
Jenelle Troxell
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
World War ◽  
Civilian Population ◽  
Feminist Film ◽  
Origin Myth

This article examines the origin myth of the feminist film journal Close Up, namely, an excursion by its founders Bryher and H.D. to see G. W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925) in a small cinema in Montreux, Switzerland. Throughout the essay, I use Joyless Street as a case study to analyze the ways in which theories of trauma can be effectively brought to bear on melodramas of the post–World War I era and, in the process, demonstrate the appeal Pabst’s works held for the Close Up editors, who shared his interest in trauma, psychoanalysis, and healing. By analyzing Joyless Street through the lens of Close Up, I demonstrate how Bryher and H.D. anticipate the development of trauma theory, which emerged in the early 1990s. Unlike traditional, often totalizing, applications of psychoanalysis (which emphasize notions of spectator desire and lack), the Close Up writers’ engagement of psychoanalysis focuses on issues of history, memory, and the response of spectators to historically specific situations. Their theory further suggests that in addition to surrogate fantasy fulfillment, film—in its recurring representation of trauma—might aid in mastering shared cultural symptoms, which women often experienced in isolation. Through their sustained analysis of film melodrama, the Close Up writers demonstrate that the war, beyond its devastating effects on combatants, also impacted the (female) civilian population—resulting in Close Up’s call for a critical film culture that speaks to that experience.

The origins of screenwriting practice and discourse in Portugal

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Benis
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
American Cinema ◽  
Oriented Film ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
Historical Culture ◽  
The Many

Following previous works by Patrick C. Loughney, Isabelle Raynauld, Steven Maras, Ian Macdonald, Alain Carou and Steven Price on screenwriting’s historical development in national frameworks, this article proposes to examine Portuguese screenwriting historical culture in relation to its major external influences: French, Italian and American cinema. If it is true that American mainstream cinema and its screenwriting models are now hegemonic and increasingly present in Portuguese film culture, it is also true that Portugal had (and continues to have) a strong ‘author-oriented’ film tradition, focused on artistic processes, clearly present in its screenwriting culture. Such characteristics developed first under the influence of French and Italian silent cinema, through the contribution of foreign film directors who worked in Portugal and established schools there. Also important were the cinematographic experiences (film and writing) made by modernist poets during the silent film period. Finally, the powerful influence of the French Politique des Auteurs (1950s) also helped to configure Portuguese screenwriting culture. To contextualize the Portuguese experience specifically, I explore the origins of screenwriting practice and discourse in Portugal, addressing the many political, historical and financial aspects that impacted the Portuguese perception of screenwriting craft from an early stage.

War on Film: The American Cinema and World War I, 1914-1941

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 295
Author(s):  
Arthur F. McClure ◽  
Michael T. Isenberg
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
American Cinema

War on Film: The American Cinema and World War I, 1914-1941

1982 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 1184
Author(s):  
David Culbert ◽  
Michael T. Isenberg
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
American Cinema

Vaudeville

Eubie Blake ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 85-110
Author(s):  
Richard Carlin ◽  
Ken Bloom
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
The Road ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
First Sound ◽  
Dramatic Performance ◽  
On The Road ◽  
No Man's Land

This chapter describes Sissle and Blake’s career performing on white vaudeville. Unlike other black acts of the day, when appearing on stage, they insisted on performing without blackface and in formal clothing. Their act, including Sissle’s dramatic performance of songs like “On Patrol in No Man’s Land,” successfully drew on Sissle’s experiences in World War I. As black performers, however, they faced difficulties on the road and had to deal with the systematic racism of the day. The chapter also discusses the making of their first sound film for Lee De Forest; Eubie’s work making piano rolls; and initial recordings for Pathé. The chapter concludes with the foundations of their partnership with comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles, including their first meeting and their decision to collaborate on a Broadway show.

scholarly journals The Life and Times of Karola Szilvássy, Transylvanian Aristocrat and Modern Woman

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 172-192
Author(s):  
Réka M. Cristian
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
World War ◽  
The World

In this study Cristian surveys the life and work of Baroness Elemérné Bornemissza, née Karola Szilvássy (1876 – 1948), an internationalist Transylvanian aristocrat, primarily known as the famous literary patron of Erdélyi Helikon and lifelong muse of Count Miklós Bánffy de Losoncz, who immortalized her through the character of Adrienne Milóth in his Erdélyi trilógia [‘The Transylvanian Trilogy’]. Research on Karola Szilvássy is still scarce with little known about the life of this maverick woman, who did not comply with the norms of her society. She was an actress and film director during the silent film era, courageous nurse in the World War I, as well as unusual fashion trendsetter, gourmet cookbook writer, Africa traveler—in short, a source of inspiration for many women of her time, and after.

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