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Mixing film history with social history, Reel Patriotism examines the role played by the American film industry during World War I and the effects of the industry’s pragmatic patriotism in the decade following the war. Looking at such films as Joan the Woman and Wings and at the war-time activities of Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, film distributors, including George Kleine, and the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry, this book shows how heavily publicized gestures of patriotism benefited the reputation and profits of the movie business. Leslie Midkiff DeBauche shows how the United States government’s need to garner public support for the war, conserve food, raise mo...
This book recounts the reception of selected films about the Great War released between 1918 and 1938 in the USA and Great Britain. It discusses the role that popular cinema played in forming and reflecting public opinion about the War and its political and cultural aftermath in both countries. Although the centenary has produced a wide number of studies on the memorialisation of the Great War in Britain and to a lesser degree the USA, none of them focused on audience reception in relation to the Anglo-American ‘circulatory system’ of Trans-Atlantic culture.
Humor and entertainment were vital to the war effort during World War I. While entertainment provided relief to soldiers in the trenches, it also built up support for the war effort on the home front. This book looks at transnational war culture by examining seemingly light-hearted discourses on the Great War.
During the 1910s, films about war often featured a female protagonist. The films portrayed women as spies, cross-dressing soldiers, and athletic defenders of their homes—roles typically reserved for men and that contradicted gendered-expectations of home-front women waiting for their husbands, sons, and brothers to return from battle. The representation of American martial spirit—particularly in the form of heroines—has a rich history in film in the years just prior to the American entry into World War I. The American Girl Goes to War demonstrates the predominance of heroic female characters in in early narrative films about war from 1908 to 1919. American Girls were filled with the military spirit of their forefathers and became one of the major ways that American women’s changing political involvement, independence, and active natures were contained by and subsumed into pre-existing American ideologies.
This anthology explores the spatial dimension and politics of haunting. It considers how the ‘appearance’ of absence, emptiness and the imperceptible can indicate an overwhelming presence of something that once was, and still is, (t)here. At its core, the book asks: how and why do certain places haunt us? Drawing from a diversity of mediums, forms and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to Spectral Spaces and Hauntings illustrate the complicated ways absent presences can manifest and be registered. The case studies range from the memory sites of a terrorist attack, the lost home, a vanished mining town and abandoned airports, to the post-apocalyptic wastelands in literary fiction, the photographic and filmic surfaces where spectres materialise, and the body as a site for re-corporealising the disappeared and dead. In ruminating on the afteraffects of spectral spaces on human experience, the anthology importantly foregrounds the ethical and political imperative of engaging with ghosts and following their traces.
Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel (1882–1936) built an influential and prolific career as film exhibitor, stage producer, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, theater manager, war propagandist, and international celebrity. He helped engineer the integration of film, music, and live performance in silent film exhibition; scored early Fox Movietone films such as Sunrise (1927); pioneered the convergence of film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording in the 1920s; and helped movies and moviegoing become the dominant form of mass entertainment between the world wars. The first book devoted to Rothafel's multifaceted career, American Showman examines his role as the key purveyor of a new film e...
Erika Kuhlamn focusses on the war and postwar experiences of people, based on letters, diaries, magazine articles, and correspondences between widows and their governments. The author offers a comparison between a victorious and a defeated nation: the United States and Germany.
The first biography of Crystal Eastman, this book tells the story of one of the most prominent social justice activists of the twentieth century. A founder of the ACLU, Eastman helped to shape the defining movements of the modern era--labor, feminism, peace, and free speech.
The rise of cinema as the predominant American entertainment around the turn of the last century coincided with the migration of African Americans to the urban 'land of hope'. Discussing early films and illuminating black urban life in this period, this text presents a look at the early relationships between African Americans and cinema.
“Explains Pickford’s roles as not only a talented actress, but also as a philanthropist and industry leader who managed to end up her own producer.” —Time Out In the early days of cinema, when actors were unbilled and unmentioned in credits, audiences immediately noticed Mary Pickford. Moviegoers everywhere were riveted by her magnetic talent and appeal as she rose to become cinema’s first great star. In this engaging collection, co-published with the Library of Congress, an eminent group of film historians sheds new light on this icon’s incredible life and legacy. Pickford emerges from the pages in vivid detail, revealed as a gifted actress, a philanthropist, and a savvy industry leader who fought for creative control of her films and ultimately became her own producer. With extensive photos and illustrations, this book paints a fascinating portrait of a key figure in American cinematic history. Includes over 200 photos, illustrations, and stills from the collections of the Library of Congress and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences