Silent Film and the Early Fiction of Stephen Leacock

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-111
Author(s):  
Paul Matthew St. Pierre
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Stephen Leacock

James Joyce and Sergei Eisenstein: Haunting Samuel Beckett's Film

2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Weiss
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Biographical Data ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
The Past

Samuel Beckett's Film has been the focus of several articles in the past decade. While current investigations of Beckett's film are diverse, what most of them share is their dependence on biographical data to support their readings. Many scholars who have written on Beckett's failed cinematic excursion, for example, point to Beckett's letter of 1936 to Sergei Eisenstein. However, the link between Beckett's interest in film and his admiration for James Joyce has sadly been overlooked. Both Irish writers saw the artistic possibilities in film and both admired the Russian silent film legend, Sergei Eisenstein. Although there is no record of Joyce and Beckett discussing cinema or of Beckett knowing about Joyce's meeting with Eisenstein in 1929, it seems unlikely that Beckett would not have known something about these meetings or Joyce's much earlier film enterprise, the Volta. By re-examining Film and speculating on the possible three way connections between Eisenstein, Joyce and Beckett, I wish to add a footnote to Beckett studies which hopefully will lead others to wander on the Beckett-Joyce-Eisenstein trail and which will open up further discussions of Film. Beckett's film is haunted by the memory of his friendship with James Joyce and his admiration for Eisenstein's talent, both of which are visible in the screen images and theme of Film.

Jeff, A Play, 'Suggested by Stephen Leacock'

1981 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
Robert G. Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Stephen Leacock

Becoming the Demon Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Per Faxneld
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Context ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Femme Fatale ◽  
Individual Level

Chapter9 analyses individuals who, both on and off the stage, actively assumed the role of the demon woman. Three persons are considered in detail: Sarah Bernhardt, the Italian marchioness Luisa Casati, and silent film actress Theda Bara. They chose—or, in Bara’s case, were chosen—to embody the (more or less supernatural or occult) femme fatale, as constructed mostly by male authors and artists. Seemingly, they felt this was empowering or useful for commercial, subversive, or other purposes. The analysis attempts to tease out some of the implications this enactment of a disquieting stereotype had on an individual level as well as in a broader cultural context. This also applies to the unknown women who wore jewellery depicting devils, demons, or Eve—a rebellious token clearly drawing on motifs familiar from Satanic feminism.

Fin

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cleo Hanaway-Oakley
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Gestalt Theory ◽  
Finnegans Wake ◽  
Dorothy Richardson ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Final Work

This concluding chapter briefly turns to Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake (1939). Joyce’s cacophonous ‘book of the dark’, with its many references to cinema, forms the centre of a discussion of the emergence of sound film. The importance of touch in both silent and sound film is restated through reference to the film criticism of Bryher, Dorothy Richardson, and Gertrude Stein, and Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), a late silent film focusing on Chaplin’s relationship with a blind flower-seller. The complex interrelationship between sound and image in both film and Finnegans Wake is contemplated through gestalt theory and multi-perspectival ‘figure–ground images’. The chapter concludes by returning to Ulysses, to consider the never-produced Reisman–Zukofsky screenplay and the ways in which the film would, and would not, have affirmed a phenomenological reading of Joyce’s text.

Early Theories of the Sound Film

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Buhler
Keyword(s):  
Silent Film ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Transition To Sound ◽  
Definition Of

Chapter 2 examines several major theories that emerged during the transition to sound film, when even the definition of the sound film was contested. The theories of sound film that arose during the transitional decade from 1926 to 1935 focused on the closely related forms of recorded theater and silent film and worked to articulate how sound film differed from them. They also gave considerable attention to asynchronous sound in part because it was a figure specific to sound film (or in any event more difficult to produce in other art forms) and in part because asynchronous sound had affinities with montage. The chapter focuses on five important theorists who wrote prolifically during the transition years: Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Harry Potamkin.

Performance Practices and Music In Early Cinema outside Hollywood

2013 ◽  
pp. 610-619
Author(s):  
Kathryn Kalinak
Keyword(s):  
Film Music ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Cultural Interface ◽  
Silent Era

This chapterexamines the diversity of international practices in film music outside Hollywood during the silent film era. It describes performance practices around the globe and offers a broader context in which to consider American practices during this period. It suggests that music functioned as a cultural interface throughout the silent era in a way quite different from the sound era and that music in the silent era had an impressive power to interact with moving images in ways not controlled by films or their producers.

Narrative skills and genre knowledge: Ways of telling in the primary school grades

1990 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Hicks
Keyword(s):  
Primary School ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Primary Grade ◽  
Primary School Children ◽  
Narrative Texts ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
Narrative Skills ◽  
On Line ◽  
Genre Knowledge

ABSTRACTChildren in the preschool years develop a linguisticrepertoireof narrative skills as they adapt their ways of representing events to different occasions of language use. The present study examines the abilities of primary school children to draw upon their repertoire of narrative skills in the service of language tasks. Children in grades K-2 were shown a shortened version of the silent film,The Red Balloon, and were asked to perform three narrative tasks: (a) produce an on-line narration of a 3-minute segment from the film, (b) recount the film's events as a news report, and (c) recount the film's events as an embellished story. The narrative texts produced for each task were subjected to analyses of linguistic markers of genre differences. The findings revealed very subtle distinctions between the narrative texts produced for the three genre tasks, leading to the conclusion that primary grade children have only nascent ability to apply their genre knowledge to school language tasks.

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