Description
Book SynopsisInvestigates the relationship between early American cinema and the experience of technological modernity. This book demonstrates how, between the late 1890s and the eve of World War I, moving pictures helped the US public understand the possibilities and perils of forms of "traffic" produced by industrialization and urbanization.
Trade Review“
Picturing American Modernity is a noteworthy contribution to the ongoing historiographic reworking of early cinema history. It is based on excellent archival work, which leads to new conclusions about the complex forces that shaped the cinema in its first two decades.”—
Anne Friedberg, author of
The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft“In
Picturing American Modernity, Kristen Whissel thinks through the relation between early cinema and American culture at the turn of the century in imaginative and original ways. Probing cinema’s interaction with both current events and other forms of mass entertainment (such as the Spanish-American War, the World Expositions, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show), Whissel traces the creation of a new mass audience and cinema’s role in shaping the culture of American imperialism. Her in-depth analysis of the films
Traffic in Souls and
Shoes reveals that the concept of ‘traffic’ can also organize strategies of film narration, as the cinema began to define itself as a new form of storytelling and national identity.”—
Tom Gunning, author of
The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and ModernityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Early Cinema Encounters Empire: War Actualities, American Modernity, and Military Masculinity 21
2. Placing Audiences on the Scene of History: Modern Warfare and the Battle Reenactment at the Turn of the Century 63
3. Electric Modernity and the Cinema at the Pan-American Exposition: The City of Living Light 117
4. Regulating Mobility: Traffic, Technology, and Feature-Length Narrativity 161
Conclusion 215
Notes 233
Bibliography 253
Index 263
