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.

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.

A Casablanca of the North? Stockholm as imagined transnational setting in the British spy thriller Dark Journey

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 329-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Hochscherf
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
The North ◽  
Production Strategy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Film Market

The article examines the largely forgotten British émigré film Dark Journey, its Swedish setting and Scandinavian release. The spy drama, which tells the story of German and French secret agents in Stockholm during World War I by mixing thriller elements with romance, raises a number of questions regarding the representation of spies in a Scandinavian context, Sweden as a contested film market in the later 1930s and the transnational production strategy of films made at the Denham studios in Britain. It is one of the films that helped the profession of secret agents to change its image from a dingy and unchivalrous activity to an adventurous, illustrious and cosmopolitan enterprise. Interestingly, the film offers a very positive portrayal of its German protagonist, played by Conrad Veidt, that is at odds with other Anglo-American spy films but not at all uncommon for Swedish spy fiction.

“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.

American Film Industry in World War I Period

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (5) ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
Filipp Kovtonyuk
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Film ◽  
World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Film Market ◽  
American Film Industry

The paper deals with the history of economic development of the film industry in the United States during the First World War. The beginning of XX century seems to be a very special stage of cinema development, in particular from the point of the history of national economy, since exactly at this time took place a formation of the world film market, and cinema for the first time was used not only as a commodity but also as an instrument of mass propaganda. The purpose of article is to trace the development of the American film business and its key aspects in the early XX century and during the war, based on the analysis of the relevant literature. Film industry is considered as a system of production, distribution and exhibition of audiovisual products. This article contains the conclusions concerning the global expansion of the US film industry in a specified period. Also substantiated the fact that the middle 1900s became an extremely important period in the development of the American film industry, during which the basics of the classical Hollywood business model were established.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

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