A01=Rob King
Author_Rob King
bathing beauties
Category=ATF
Category=JBCC1
Category=NHK
charlie chaplin
cinema
comedy
comic traditions
entertainment
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
film
film comedy
film history
film industry
film studies
filmmaking
industrial workers
keystone film company
keystone kops
laughter
mack sennett
mass culture
mass entertainment
nonfiction
popular culture
shorts
silent cinema
silent film comedy
slapstick
studio system
tillies punctured romance
working class
Product details
- ISBN 9780520255388
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Dec 2008
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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From its founding in 1912, the short-lived Keystone Film Company - home of the frantic, bumbling Kops and Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties - made an indelible mark on American popular culture with its high-energy comic shorts. Even as Keystone brought 'lowbrow' comic traditions to the screen, the studio played a key role in reformulating those traditions for a new, cross-class audience. In "The Fun Factory", Rob King explores the dimensions of that process, arguing for a new understanding of working-class cultural practices within early cinematic mass culture. He shows how Keystone fashioned a style of film comedy from the roughhouse humor of cheap theater, pioneering modes of representation that satirized film industry attempts at uplift. Interdisciplinary in its approach, "The Fun Factory" offers a unique studio history that views the changing politics of early film culture through the sociology of laughter.
Rob King is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and History at the University of Toronto.
