Picturing American Modernity Traffic Technology and the Silent Cinema 1st Edition by Kristen Whissel 0822341859 9780822341857

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ISBN 10: 0822341859

ISBN 13: 9780822341857

Author: Kristen Whissel

In Picturing American Modernity, Kristen Whissel investigates the relationship between early American cinema and the experience of technological modernity. She demonstrates how between the late 1890s and the eve of the First World War moving pictures helped the U.S. public understand the possibilities and perils of new forms of “traffic” produced by industrialization and urbanization. As more efficient ways to move people, goods, and information transformed work and leisure at home and contributed to the expansion of the U.S. empire abroad, silent films presented compelling visual representations of the spaces, bodies, machines, and forms of mobility that increasingly defined modern life in the United States and its new territories. Whissel shows that by portraying key events, achievements, and anxieties, the cinema invited American audiences to participate in the rapidly changing world around them. Moving pictures provided astonishing visual dispatches from military camps prior to the outbreak of fighting in the Spanish-American War. They allowed audiences to delight in images of the Pan-American Exposition, and also to mourn the assassination of President McKinley there. One early film genre, the reenactment, presented spectators with renditions of bloody battles fought overseas during the Philippine-American War. Early features offered sensational dramatizations of the scandalous “white slave trade,” which was often linked to immigration and new forms of urban work and leisure. By bringing these frequently distant events and anxieties “near” to audiences in cities and towns across the country, the cinema helped construct an American national identity for the machine age.

Picturing American Modernity Traffic Technology and the Silent Cinema 1st Table of contents:

1: THE EARLY CINEMA ENCOUNTERS EMPIRE: WAR ACTUALITIES, AMERICAN MODERNITY, AND MILITARY MASCULINITY

Curing the Ills of Industrialization: Overseas Empire, Modernity, and American Masculinity

Naval Views and the War Actuality’s Promotion of “Fascinated Inspection”

War Preparations, Camp Life, and Racial Constructions of Imperial Identity

2: PLACING AUDIENCES ON THE SCENE OF HISTORY: MODERN WARFARE AND THE BATTLE REENACTMENT AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

The Peculiar Authenticity of the Live Reenactment

The Reenactment’s Witness-Spectator vs. Humbug’s Detective-Spectator

Appropriations and Transformations: Rough Riders and Battle Reenactments on Film

The Mastery of Trauma: Reenactment, Repetition, and Heroic Femininity

The Reenactment’s Reality Effect and the Ideal Actuality

3: ELECTRIC MODERNITY AND THE CINEMA AT THE PAN-AMERICAN EXPOSITION: THE CITY OF LIVING LIGHT

Setting the Stage: The Electrified City of Light and Motion

Electric Spectacles and the Articulation of Modern American Power

Panoramas, Dioramas, and (Films of) the Pan-American Exposition

Modern Power, Cinema, and the Electric Chair

Postscript: Galvanizing the Torpid Body with Liquid Electricity

4: REGULATING MOBILITY: TRAFFIC, TECHNOLOGY, AND FEATURE-LENGTH NARRATIVITY

Traffic in Souls and the Perils and Potential of New Technologies

The Human Motor, “Moral Breakdown,” and Pedestrian Traffic in Shoes

Modern Fatigue and Moral Breakdown

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