Movies As a World Force
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€132.99
1920's
A01=Ryan Jay Friedman
American
Author_Ryan Jay Friedman
Category=AGA
Category=ATF
Category=ATFA
Category=JBCT
Category=N
cinema
Douglas Fairbanks
early film theory
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
film
film entertainment
Gerald Stanley
Gerald Stanley Lee
global communion
Hollywood
marketing campaigns
mass communication
media studies
motion pictures
New Age
new liberalism
new-liberal
political philosophy
Post-Reform Progressivism
Rupert Hughes
silent cinema
silent film
silent-era
social function
universal language
utopian
utopian cinema writing
written histories of American Cinema
Product details
- ISBN 9780813593609
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 04 Feb 2019
- Publisher: Rutgers University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Throughout the silent-feature era, American artists and intellectuals routinely described cinema as a force of global communion, a universal language promoting mutual understanding and harmonious coexistence amongst disparate groups of people. In the early 1920s, film-industry leaders began to espouse this utopian view, in order to claim for motion pictures an essentially uplifting social function. The Movies as a World Force examines the body of writing in which this understanding of cinema emerged and explores how it shaped particular silent films and their marketing campaigns. The utopian and universalist view of cinema, the book shows, represents a synthesis of New Age spirituality and the new liberalism. It provided a framework for the first official, written histories of American cinema and persisted as an advertising trope, even after the transition to sound made movies reliant on specific national languages.
RYAN J. FRIEDMAN is an associate professor of English and the director of film studies at Ohio State University in Columbus. He is the author of Hollywood's African American Films: The Transition to Sound (Rutgers University Press).
