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Author Hansen, Miriam, 1949-2011.

Title Babel and Babylon : spectatorship in American silent film / Miriam Hansen
Published Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1991

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Description 1 online resource (x, 377 pages) : illustrations
Contents Rebuilding the tower of Babel : the emergence of spectatorship -- A cinema in search of a spectator : film-viewer relations before Hollywood -- Early audiences : myths and models -- Chameleon and catalyst : the cinema as an alternative public sphere -- Babel in Babylon : D.W. Griffith's intolerance (1916) -- Reception, textual system, and self-definition -- "A radiant crazy-quilt" : patterns of narration and address -- Genesis, causes, concepts of history -- Film history, archaeology, universal language -- Hieroglyphics, figurations of writing -- Riddles of maternity -- Crisis of femininity, fantasies of rescue -- The return of Babylon : Rudolph Valentino and female spectatorship (1924-1926) -- Male star, female fans -- Patterns of vision, scenarios of identification
Summary Offers a perspective on American film by tying the growth of spectatorship to the historical transformation of the public sphere. Focusing on silent films, this text examines how the spectator concept evolved, integrating ethnically, socially and sexually differentiated audiences. Although cinema was invented in the mid-1890s, it was a decade more before the concept of a "film spectator" emerged. As the cinema began to separate itself from the commercial entertainments in whose context films initially had been shown--vaudeville, dime museums, fairgrounds--a particular concept of its spectator was developed on the level of film style, as a means of predicting the reception of films on a mass scale. In Babel and Babylon Miriam Hansen offers an original perspective on American film by tying the emergence of spectatorship to the historical transformation of the public sphere. Hansen builds a critical framework for understanding the cultural formation of spectatorship, drawing on the Frankfurt School's debates on mass culture and the public sphere. Focusing on exemplary moments in the American silent era, she explains how the concept of the spectator evolved as a crucial part of the classical Hollywood paradigm--as one of the new industry's strategies to integrate ethnically, socially, and sexually differentiated audiences into a modern culture of consumption. In this process, Hansen argues, the cinema might also have provided the conditions of an alternative public sphere for particular social groups, such as recent immigrants and women, by furnishing an intersubjective context in which they could recognize fragments of their own experience. After tracing the emergence of spectatorship as an institution, Hansen pursues the question of reception through detailed readings of a single film, D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), and of the cult surrounding a single star, Rudolph Valentino. In each case the classical construction of spectatorship is complicated by factors of gender and sexuality, crystallizing around the fear and desire of the female consumer. Babel and Babylon recasts the debate on early American cinema--and by implication on American film as a whole. It is a model study in the field of Cinema Studies, mediating the concerns of recent film theory with those of recent film history. -- Publisher
Analysis Cinema Films (Motion pictures) Audiences History
United States
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
English
Print version record
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Subject Silent films -- United States -- History and criticism
Motion picture audiences -- United States -- History
Feminism and motion pictures.
PERFORMING ARTS -- Film & Video -- Reference.
PERFORMING ARTS -- Film & Video -- General.
Feminism and motion pictures
Manners and customs
Motion picture audiences
Silent films
Publiek.
Stomme films.
Silent films -- United States -- History and criticism.
Motion picture audiences -- United States -- History.
Feminism and motion pictures -- United States.
SUBJECT United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140535
Subject United States
United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918.
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 90041808
ISBN 9780674038295
0674038290
0674058313
9780674058316
0674264290
9780674264298