Screening Europe in Australasia

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.

Attention, Music, Dance: Embodying the “Cinema of Attractions”

In this essay I take up the question of whether the “cinema of attractions,” as identified and analyzed by film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault, might be a useful tool for critical analysis not only of early silent film, its exhibitionist aesthetics, and approach to spectatorship, but of theatrical dance from the period. Certainly, as for its general historical currency, the “cinema of attractions” is thought to encode the culture of modernity from which it arose: the visual spectacle, sensory fascination, bodily engagement, mechanical rhythm, violent juxtapositions, and new experiences of time and space available within the modern urban environment. Moreover, that cinema relied in no small part on dance itself: as a performing art, dance was central to the “attractions” industry, prime raw material starring The Body in Motion, a favorite fascination of contemporary art and popular entertainment. My aim is to push the analogy further, suggesting how cinema and theatrical dance might cue a similar mode of attention: that is, despite the former’s reliance on the camera, its reproductive aesthetic and industrial mechanicity, and the latter’s live theatrical aspect. Indeed, in the latter, I argue, music can be analogized to the camera itself, helping determine and sustain a particular attention economy, while pointing to itself—just as filmed objects stare at the camera—as artifice or contrivance.

Queer Laughter in the Archives of Silent Film Comedy

This chapter looks and listens for queer traces of lesbian sexuality in the archives of American silent film comedies, from 1894 to 1919. Like sexuality, laughter is arousing, ambiguous, and often difficult to understand out of context. Focusing on A Florida Enchantment (1914) and Phil-for-Short (1919), as well as several very early slapstick film comedies, the chapter pursues queer laughter as a historiographic method. It argues that potential queer subtexts emerge in tense conflict with their juxtaposition to offensive representations of blackface minstrelsy, patriarchal sexism, and capitalist class ideology. At once amusing and disturbing in their sexuality effects, these films provoke new intersectional strategies in queer critical reading.

The Machine Aesthetic

Film was allied with live performance because of its movement and also because many actors started in vaudeville. Hollywood often reproduced Broadway plays, prompting critics to try to define what might be specifically cinematographic, such as a facility for shifting from one layer of consciousness to another. Film allowed for a new kind of experience of dramatic art, more remote than theater in some ways but also endowed with new resources such as the close-up, location shooting, and a broad public sometimes apt for unaccustomed themes and treatments. Urban anonymity and the social effects of an increasingly mechanized environment were recurrent themes. The displacement of silent film by talkies was widely lamented, often on the grounds that silent film was just coming into its own as an art form, an early instance of questioning the reliability of technological progress.

KABARDINO-BALKARIA ON THE SOVIET SCREEN: “ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM” BY ANATOLY TERSKOI

Исследование выполнено в рамках проекта РНФ № 21-18-00518, https://rscf.ru/project/21-18-00518 В 1920-х гг. в СССР получило развитие производство так называемых «культур­фильмов» о народностях и территориях страны. Эти фильмы имели популярность у зрителей, являясь для многих единственной возможностью совершить кино-путе­шествие по «Шестой части мира». И одним из наиболее популярных мест для съем­ки краеведческих фильмов стал Кавказ – картины, снятые в регионе, становились буквальным открытием этой территории для населения столиц и центральных областей. Была у этого процесса и политическая подоплека – проект создания «Ки­ноатласа СССР» – альманаха о советизации многонациональной страны. В статье рассматриваются непредставленные в гуманитарном обороте теоретические разра­ботки, посвященные развитию этнографического кино, и апробированные на практи­ке в виде киноматериалов о Кабардино-Балкарии, созданные режиссером А.Н. Терским при активном участии научного консультанта Н.Ф. Яковлева. Экран немого кино прямо или косвенно отражал силуэты идеологии и политики, идентичности и куль­туры самобытной территории в период исторической трансформации (из окраины Российской империи в автономную область СССР). Теоретические опыты Терского яв­ляются вкладом в науку, будучи одними из самых ранних отечественных концепций по визуальной антропологии. А в его кинокадрах просматриваются региональные осо­бенности реализации центральных программ советского строительства. Наконец, кинофильмы о Кавказе явились и выгодным экспортным товаром, широко демонстри­ровались в прокате заграничных стран, формируя в общественном сознании образ многоукладной горной страны. Делается вывод о потенциале этнографического кино­документа как исторического источника, и как актуального ресурса для применения в широком спектре современных научно-творческих практик. In the 1920s in the USSR, the production of so called “cultural films” about the nationalities and territories of the country was developed. These films were popular with viewers, being the only opportunity for many to make a film journey through the “Sixth Part of the World”. And one of the most popular places for filming local history films was the Caucasus – the films made in the region became a literal discovery of this territory for the population of the capitals and central regions. This process also had a political background – a project to create a “Cinema-Atlas of the USSR” – an almanac about Sovietization of a multinational country. The article examines theoretical developments that have not been presented in the humanitarian circulation, devoted to the development of ethnographic cinema in the USSR, and tested in practice in the form of film materials about Kabardino-Balkaria, created by film-director A. Terskoi with the active participation of the scientific consultant N. Yakovlev. The silent film screen directly or indirectly reflected the silhouettes of the ideology and politics, identity and culture of a distinctive territory during the period of historical transformation (from the outskirts of the Russian Empire to the Soviet autonomous region). Terskoi’s theoretical experiments are a contribution to science, being one of the earliest domestic concepts of visual anthropology. And his footage reveals regional features of the implementation of the central programs of Soviet construction. Finally, films about the Caucasus were a profitable export commodity – they were widely shown at the box office in foreign countries, shaping in the public consciousness the image of a multi-layered mountainous country. The conclusion is drawn about the potential of the ethnographic film document as a historical source and as an actual resource for use in a wide range of modern scientific and creative practices.

A Film Scholar’s Guide to Writing Silent Film Restoration Reports

Authoritative film archival texts demand documentation of film restoration projects. Film archives often produce overly technical internal documentation, and although researchers occasionally publish film restoration reports, the ratio of reports to restoration projects is skewed in favour of films that stir academic debate. Film scholars can be recruited to engage with archives to write reports for lesser-known films, thereby increasing and improving film restoration documentation. However, the relationship between film scholars and film archivists must be improved, as these groups tend not to interact during the film restoration process. Based on a survey of 30 silent film restoration reports, a guide is provided to help film scholars approach archives and archivists to attain information for those reports. The guide is applied to Gräfin Küchenfee (1918), a silent film restored by EYE Filmmuseum for Il Cinema Ritrovato, to showcase usage of the guide and produce a report on the film’s restoration.