Table of Contents

PART I Interrogating the "National"1 Tom Gunning / Early cinema as global cinema: The encyclopedic ambition; 2 Jonathan Auerbach / Nationalizing attractions; 3 Frank Kessler / Images of the "National" in early non-fiction films; 4 Giorgio Bertellini / National and racial landscapes and the photographic form; 5 Charles O'Brien / Sound-on-disc:Cinema and Electrification in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States; 6 Torey Liepa / Mind-reading/mind-speaking: Dialogue in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the emergence of speech in American silent cinema; 7 Marta Braun and Charlie Keil / "Living Canada: Selling the Nation throughImages"; 8 Sheila Skaff / Early cinema and "the Polish question"PART II Colonialism/Imperialism9 Frank Gray / Our Navy and patriotic entertainment in Brighton at the start of the Boer War; 10 Ian Christie / "An England of our Dreams"?: Early Patriotic Entertainments with Film in Britain during the Anglo-Boer War; 11 Nico de Klerk / "The transport of audiences": making cinema "National"; 12 Panivong Norindr / Enlisting early cinema in the service of "la plus grande France"; 13 Marina Dahlquist / Teaching citizenship via celluloid; 14 David Mayer / Fights of Nations and national fights; 15 Gregory A. Waller / Japan onAmerican screens, 1908-1915PART III Locating/Relocating the "National" in Film Exhibition16 Paul S. Moore / Nationalist film-going without Canadian-made films?; 17 John Welle / The cinema arrives inItaly: city, region and nation in early film discourse; 18 Canan Balan / Wondrous pictures in Istanbul: from cosmopolitanism to nationalism; 19 Joseph Garncarz / The emergence of nationally specific film cultures in Europe, 1911-1914; 20 Gunnar Iversen / The Norwegian municipal cinema system and the development of a national cinema; 21 Daniel Sanchez-Salas / Spanish lecturers and their relations with the national; 22 Germaine Lacasse / Joseph Dumais and the language of French-Canadian silent cinema; 23 Rudmer Canjels / Localizing serials: Translating daily life in Les Mysteres de New-York (1915)PART IV Genre and the National24 Amanda Keeler ? Seeing the world while staying at home: slapstick, modernity and American-ness; 25 Rob King / "A Purely American Product": tramp comedy and white working-class formation in the 1910s; 26 Matthew Solomon for Peter Wollen / The "Chinese" conjurer: orientalist magic in variety theater and the trick film; 27 Oliver Gaycken / A note on the national character of early popular science films; 28 Dominique Nasta and Muriel Andrin / European melodramas and World War I: narrated time and historical time as reflections of national identity; 29 W.D. Phillips / "Cow-punchers, bull-whackers and tin horn gamblers": generic formulae, sensational literature, and early American cinema; 30 Wolfgang Fuhrmann / Early ethnographic film and the museumPART V Gender and the National31 Mark Hain / Black hair, black eyes, black heart: Theda Bara and race suicide panic; 32 Andrea Haller / Who is the "right" star to adore? Nationality, masculinity and the female cinema audience in Germany during World War IPART VI Memory, Imagination, and the National33 Joseph Yumibe / From Switzerland to Italy and all around the world: the Joseph Joye and Davide Turconi collections; 34 Jennifer M. Bean / The imagination of early Hollywood: movie-land and the magic cities, 1914-1916

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A richly illustrated, landmark anthology devoted to re-thinking the nation as a framing category for writing cinema history

About the Author

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.

Reviews

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 cliches, 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 "... 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