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Early Cinema and the National
Edited by Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini and Rob King
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Book Presentation:
While many studies have been written on national cinemas, Early Cinema and the "National" is the first anthology to focus on the concept of national film culture from a wide methodological spectrum of interests, including not only visual and narrative forms, but also international geopolitics, exhibition and marketing practices, and pressing linkages to national imageries. The essays in this richly illustrated, landmark anthology are devoted to reconsidering the nation as a framing category for writing cinema history. Many of the 34 contributors show that concepts of a national identity played a role in establishing the parameters of cinema's early development, from technological change to discourses of stardom, from emerging genres to intertitling practices. Yet, as others attest, national meanings could often become knotty in other contexts, when concepts of nationhood were contested in relation to colonial/imperial histories and regional configurations. Early Cinema and the "National" takes stock of a formative moment in cinema history, tracing the beginnings of the process whereby nations learned to imagine themselves through moving images.
About the authors:
Richard Abel is Robert Altman Collegiate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Screen Arts & Culture at the University of Michigan. Most recently he edited the award-winning Encyclopedia of Early Cinema. He is author of Americanizing the Movies and 'Movie-Mad' Audiences, 1910–1914.
Giorgio Bertellini is Assistant Professor in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He is author of Emir Kusturica.
Rob King is Assistant Professor in the Cinema Studies Program and Department of History at the University of Toronto.
Press Reviews:
"... has 34 authors of as many chapters that consider the nation state as a framing category for writing cinema history." —Bruce A. Austin, COMMUNICATION BOOKNOTES Q, Vol. 40.3 July-Sept. 2009
Abel (Univ. of Michigan), Bertellini (Univ. of Michigan), and King (Univ. of Toronto) are all specialists in the field of early cinema. Here they bring together 34 essays by as many historians to tackle a big subject, namely, how motion pictures in the first two decades of the 20th century constructed 'communities of nationality.' As historian Tom Gunning suggests in his essay, cinema was international before it was national, and 'cinema's relation to both global and national discourses arose in the first decades of the twentieth century.' The sheer scope and variety of subject matter (not to mention the microscopic size of the text font) is daunting. Technological change, geopolitical contexts, exhibition and marketing practices, inter-titling, and colonial/imperialistic considerations are only a few ingredients in this Dagwood sandwich of a book. Best begun with modest nibbles, it eventually proves to be a bountiful repast of meditations on what Abel calls 'national imaginaries' as overlapping components: geographical origin, the imagined sense of belonging, cultural clichés, and/or constructed images. The editors declare the 'rethinkings' in this book are 'profoundly relevant [in this] era of newly globalized capitalism, mass migrations of peoples across borders, and deceptive imperialist adventures.' Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. -- ChoiceJ. C. Tibbetts, University of Kansas, Jan. 2010
See the publisher website: John Libbey Publishing
> From the same authors:
Our Country/Whose Country? (2024)
Early Westerns and Travel Films as Stories of Settler Colonialism
by Richard Abel
Subject: Countries > United States
Movie Mavens (2021)
US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923
Dir. Richard Abel
Subject: On Films > Movie magazines
The Divo and the Duce (2019)
Promoting Film Stardom and Political Leadership in 1920s America
Subject: Actor > Rudolph Valentino
Hokum! (2017)
The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture
by Rob King
Subject: Genre > Comedy/Humor
Menus for Movieland (2015)
Newspapers and the Emergence of American Film Culture 1913-1916
by Richard Abel
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Fun Factory (2008)
The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture
by Rob King
Subject: Genre > Comedy/Humor
Americanizing the Movies and Movie-Mad Audiences (2006)
1910-1914
by Richard Abel
Subject: Silent Cinema
French Film Theory and Criticism 1907-1939 (1988)
vol.1: 1907-1929 - vol. 2: 1929-1939
by Richard Abel
> On a related topic:
How the Movies Got a Past (2023)
A Historiography of American Cinema, 1894-1930
Subject: Silent Cinema
Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (2014)
Dir. Jennifer M. Bean, Laura Horak and Anupama Kapse
Subject: Silent Cinema
Shooting Cowboys and Indians (2004)
Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood
Subject: Silent Cinema
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