Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space, livre ebook

Winner, 2015 SCMS Best Edited Collection Award

In this cross-cultural history of narrative cinema and media from the 1910s to the 1930s, leading and emergent scholars explore the transnational crossings and exchanges that occurred in early cinema between the two world wars. Drawing on film archives from around the world, this volume advances the premise that silent cinema freely crossed national borders and linguistic thresholds in ways that became far less possible after the emergence of sound. These essays address important questions about the uneven forces–geographic, economic, political, psychological, textual, and experiential–that underscore a non-linear approach to film history. The "messiness" of film history, as demonstrated here, opens a new realm of inquiry into unexpected political, social, and aesthetic crossings of silent cinema.

Introduction / Jennifer M. Bean
Part I. Picturing Space
Introduction / Anupama Kapse
1. Location, "Location": On the Plausibility of Place Substitution / Mark B. Sandberg
2. Insurgent Place as Visual Space: Location Shots and Rival Geographies of 1857 Lucknow / Priya Jaikumar,
Part II. Prints in Motion
Introduction / Jennifer M. Bean
3. Robespierre Has Been Lost: D. W. Griffith's Movies and the Soviet Twenties / Yuri Tsivian
4. An Afterlife for Junk Prints: Serials and Other "Classics" in Late-1920s Tehran / Kaveh Askari
5. Translations and Transportation: Toward a Transnational History of the Intertitle / Laura Isabel Serna
Part III: Impertinent Appropriations
Introduction / Anupama Kapse
6. From "Misemono" to Zigomar: A Discursive History of Early Japanese Cinema / Aaron Gerow
7. The Crisscrossed Stare: Chinese Protest and Propaganda in the Not-So-Silent Era / Yiman Wang
8. Around the World in 80 Minutes: Douglas Fairbanks and the Indian Stunt Film / Anupama Kapse
Part IV: Cosmopolitan Sexualities and Female Stars
Introduction / Jennifer M. Bean
9. National Soul/Cosmopolitan Skin: Swedish Cinema at a Crossroads / Jan Olsson
10. Queer Crossings: Greta Garbo, National Identity, and Gender Deviance / Laura Horak
11. Cosmopolitan Women: Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl / Patrice Petro
Notes
Bibliography
Contributors