At This Theatre Next Week!:

Resumen: En este artículo se muestra la estrecha relación que en los años 30 y 40 del siglo XX se estableció entre el cómic y el serial cinematográfico. Se explora la importancia del cómic tanto a nivel cuantitativo, con la gran producción de películas seriales basadas en cómics, como cualitativo, con la interrelación que se produjo a nivel narrativo entre el modelo de serialidad infinita de las tiras de prensa y el modelo narrativo de los seriales. Se produjo una relación intermedial a nivel industrial que fue fundamental a la hora del desarrollo de los seriales y que tiene muchos paralelismos con el modelo de franquicias que domina el panorama audiovisual en nuestros días. Abstract: This paper shows the close relationship that was established between the comic and the movie serials in the 1930s and 1940s. The importance of comics is explored both quantitatively, with the great production of serial films based on comics, and qualitatively with the interrelation that occurred at a narrative level between the open ended narrative model of the comic strips and the narrative model of the serials. There was an intermedia relationship at the industrial level that was essential when it came to developing the serials and that has many parallels with the franchise model that dominates the audiovisual scene today.

SOUTH KOREAN TV SERIES IN THE SERVICE OF MUSIC EDUCATION

In this article we study forms and methods used to popularize western classical music in a South Korean TV series. The main subject of analysis is the TV series Beethoven Virus (2008) devoted to a symphony orchestra in a fictional South Korean city. The main purpose of this TV series is the promotion of classical music, and the author of the article comes to the conclusion that its popularity among Korean audience is explained by its engaging, convincing artistic methods with respect to national cultural specificities, which were used to show the working environment of professional musicians. The series reveals real problems of modern Korean musical culture: “crisis of overproduction” of academic musicians; discrimination of graduates of South Korean musical educational institutions; prejudice that classical music is only for the rich. The author emphasizes that immersion into the atmosphere of professional musical life allows the viewers to apprehend the educational value of the TV series more clearly. Beethoven Virus demonstrates traditional Korean attitude towards European classical music determined by the Confucian roots; and at the same time, it depicts changes in the modern culture conditioned by gradual departure from traditional values. The two main characters — the young and the old conductors — symbolize the old and the new in the Korean musical culture. They interact in a traditional eastern way: the new spirit does not openly conflict with the established convention, but sprouts from it. The author suggests that the music is explained in the film through emotional associations which let the viewers fully perceive the musical idea. The author believes that this method, compared to other ways widespread in the West, corresponds to the nature of the specific sensation of European classical music associated with Confucian cultural roots. An opinion is expressed that methods of music education used in Beethoven Virus were chosen in accordance to the South Korean serial genre traditions: leitmotivs in the soundtrack and gesture clichés are of particular significance here. The author suggests that the South Korean experience of promoting musical classics by means of serial films can be used abroad — given that the differences in mentality and realities of musical life are taken into account.

Changing Views and Perspectives

This chapter examines Pearl White's serials in France and the transformations made in tailoring them to the local French setting during World War I. It first provides an overview of the glocalization of American serial films in France before discussing two of Pearl White's serials, Les Mystères de New-York and The House of Hate (La Maison de la haine). It then considers the marketing adaptations and marketing tie-ins of the serials for the French market, along with the incorporation of anti-German propaganda in their French novelizations. In shows that the adaptation not only aligned promotional material or changing intertitles to accommodate viewership, but also, under the stress of war, localization transformed a supposedly national body of “foreign” films into a highly flexible transnational film form. The chapter also explains how Pearl White's love for France that was often made apparent in her serials boosted the French admiration of her.

Introduction

This book explores the historiographic importance, narrative patterns, marketing, and cultural reception of the serial genre through a wider contextualization of the serial phenomenon and its fearless female heroines led by Pearl White, who plays the title character in The Perils of Pauline. It investigates the complexities of Pearl White's performance and the overall cultural power of serial queens in many markets at a critical historical juncture in the history of cinema. It examines how the serial film became part of a rethinking of production strategies, distribution and advertising patterns, and fan culture. It also considers the American film industry's expansion on the international market, fueled in large part by the profitable serial format, along with the serial craze's international impact. The book suggests that American serial films are an illustration of both globalization and an accompanying hegemonic practice of Hollywood cinema and the vicissitudes of glocalization.

“The Best-Known Woman in the World”

This chapter examines the fate of Pearl White's serials on the Swedish market during the early 1900s. More specifically, it analyzes the impact of censorship on White's films, and American serial films in general, in Sweden. Aside from censorship imposing stringent regulations on crime serials, traditional forms of marketing diluted the impact of the format and upset the chronology for the episodes, undercutting the popularity of the serial queens. Despite all the hype concerning her international following, White was never perceived as a truly big star in Sweden, mainly because only a selected few of her films actually made it to Swedish audiences. Out of her eleven serial films, only The Perils of Pauline and the three Exploits of Elaine serials were screened in Sweden. Furthermore, none of the Swedish copies have survived. The chapter also discusses Pathé Frère's impact on the Swedish film industry.

Pearl, the Swift One, or the Extraordinary Adventures of Pearl White in France

This chapter examines the Pearl White phenomenon on the French market, with particular emphasis on the French influence on Pathé Frère's American serial films and the obvious resemblance between the Pauline character and the French athlete, mountaineer, and aviator Marie Marvingt. Also known as “the fiancée of danger,” “the most important woman in France since Joan of Arc,” and “the universal sportswoman,” Marvingt was already familiar to the American audience by the time The Perils of Pauline was released in 1914. The parallels between the stories of White and Marvingt suggest that the former's popularity among French audiences was not simply due to some exotic fascination for the peerless modernity of the American New Woman, but was instead rooted in some very familiar experiences of feminine heroism. This chapter also explores White's forerunners as well as emulators in the French serial genre from Musidora to Protéa.

Fascinations for the Nation

This chapter examines the delayed but still strong and lasting impression that Pearl White left on Czechoslovakia's critics, viewers, and avant-garde movement. Drawing on a series of articles in Czech periodicals from the late 1910s to the 1930s, it considers the issues presented by White and the American serial films regarding the international market, the need to come to terms with Hollywood's global reach, and the impact of glocalized Americana for local production. The chapter first looks at the sudden influx of American films in Czechoslovakia after World War I before discussing how America was perceived as a model of democracy and cultural modernity in the early years of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It then explores how White fueled the fantasies of the Czech populace as well as the ways that she was appropriated and re-imagined in the service of various discourses that spoke for the mental and physical well-being of the nation. It also analyzes White's Czech career within the context of larger issues related to spectatorship, film aesthetics, and the creation of star mythology.

Not Quite (Pearl) White

This chapter examines the construction of one form of modern Indian femininity in the late colonial period by focusing on the intriguing figure of Fearless Nadia, aka Mary Evans. Billed as the “Indian Pearl White,” Evans seems to have been the personification of the “Heroine of a Thousand Stunts” but without her gentler qualities. This chapter first provides an overview of the Fearless Nadia serial films before discussing the films of brothers Homi and Jamshed Wadia, including Diamond Queen. It then analyzes Nadia within the film production context of 1930s Bombay and how the Wadia brothers dealt with her whiteness/otherness and negotiated the points of tension in her image. It also considers the extent to which Nadia copied White and other Hollywood stunt stars, suggesting that this was a form of colonial mimicry in reverse that provided potent currency in the nationalist era. The chapter shows that, despite her whiteness, Fearless Nadia became part of the nationalist movement during the late colonial period in films that many considered anti-British.

Wander, Watch, Repeat: Jean Rhys and Cinema

This explores how modernist literature in the late 1920s and in the 1930s engaged with and conceptualised cinema culture, focusing on Jean Rhys’s early novels as a case study. It first examines her attention to urban geography and female movement, considering how she mapped city spaces through cinema visits. Rhys’s novels use cinema sites to construct a layered geography of memory and present experience for her female characters, mediated through locally specific choices in cinema venues. Second, it considers the relationship between Rhys’s literary style and cinema, considering how her early fiction forged intermedial connections between cinematic and literary techniques to describe these cinematic encounters and interconnect them with wider concerns in her fictions about the performative nature of women’s public bodily presence within the urban environment. Third, it considers Rhys’s use of certain types of cinematic texts and genres as a way of reflecting back on these issues, considering the relationship between genre structures and their modes of cinematic exhibition, and Rhys’s careful structuring of the everyday experiences of her heroines. Here, the chapter explores how Rhys’s references to comedy and serial films especially opened up a unique vantage point on women, visibility and value.

Exporting Perilous Pauline

Exceptionally popular during their time, the spectacular American action film serials of the 1910s featured exciting stunts, film tricks, and effects set against the background of modern technology, often starring resourceful female heroines who displayed traditionally male qualities such as endurance, strength, and authority. The most renowned of these “serial queens” was Pearl White, whose career as the adventurous character Pauline developed during a transitional phase in the medium's evolving production strategies, distribution and advertising patterns, and fan culture. This book explores how American serial films starring Pearl White and other female stars affected the emerging cinemas in the United States and abroad. The book investigates the serial genre and its narrative patterns, marketing, cultural reception, and historiographic importance, with chapters on Pearl White's life on and off the screen as well as the “serial queen” genre in Western and Eastern Europe, India, and China.