American Silent Film: Discovering Marginalized Voices, edited by Gregg Bachman and Thomas J. Slater, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. (from Archer Library)
Movies at the Margins: the distribution of films to theaters in small-town America, 1895-1919 by George Potamianos
Historical: low density rural centres got second run films, months after cities because of shipping costs and the loss of revenue during transit. Towns paid cheaper rates but booked up to four months in advance and still didn't always get what they asked for.
Charlie Steiner's Houston Hippodrome: moviegoing on New York's Lower East Side, 1909-1913 by Judith Thissen
Yiddish theatre and nickelodeon entrepreneur Steiner in New York, a historical review.
Page 42, in 1912, Hebrew Variety Actors's Unions declared that performances be limited to five per night. This created a shift towards more film and less live performance.
"shmuts" = filth
"Have You the Power?": the Palmer photoplay corporation and the film viewer/author in the 1920s by Anne Morey
Page 50, "The [Palmer] school worked to promote a notion of self-expression that was simultaniously standardized and individual"
T
he Fiery Gaze: a modest proposal for better seeing by Jean Chateauvert
"prefilic address" to talking to the director or crew
"postfilmic address" is talking to the audience
Page 72, "The distinction of the object of the look ... permits the identification of no fewer than four distinct styles: (1) a look whose object is the camera; (2) a look of prefilmic address whose object is the an audience present at the filmed show; (3) a look of postfilmic address whose object is the group of film spectators; and (4) a look staged in a face-to-face encounter in a subjective shot, the object of which is another character, whose point of view the subjective shot represents."
Page 89, "The look of individuated prefilmic address has been prohibited only in fiction film ... it crosses the line between documentary and fiction"
Interesting background for Mr. Saul and Professor Delusia
John Randolph Bray: animation pioneer by Mark Langer
Page 94, intro talks about reading the names in the animation credits then looking up the animators in the New York phone book and calling them, creating his own area of research.
Page 99, Hurd's patent for cels is discussed.
Page 107-114, Bray interviewed in 1975, age 96. He died in 1978.
Sound and the Silent Film by Maureen Furniss
Page 115-116, "a rough projection is, in some ways, just as valid as a perfect one, and probably more so. Audiences of the early days very well may have seen deteriorated prints in the advanced stages of use."
Page 116, Research has shown that music and other sounds affect body rhythms such as breathing, the heart beat, blood flow, and brain functions"
(AN)
Page 123, Photoplayer or "pit organ", an autmatic device for music which grew in populatiry for large theatres. Later became the Wurlitzer.
Sex and Snow: landscape and identity in the God's Country films of Nell ShipmanS by Kay Armatage
Page 126; Paragraph describes why woman who directed popular films are not studied. "How do we account for this? Feminist film theory has developed out of studies of the classic realist text, and it has remained embedded in the classic realist text. Needless to say, like anything else considered classical, that model was created and is largely perpetuated by men. And since feminist film theory has developed as a critique of the classic realist text, demonstrating the mechanisms of its complicity in the nurturing of the patriarchal unconscious, feminist film theoreticians, rather than studying the work of women filmmakers, have contributed to the body of scholarship supporting canonical figures and the many genres directors involved in the production of melodrama, film noir, musicals, and porn films."
Page 127-8, Nell Shipman ... her films were always set in Canada -- 'God's Country' -- as the heroine she defeated the villains and rescued the heroes".
Page 129, "Regionality then functioned as an adjunct to teh founding mythology of a hegemonic nation"
Page 130-131, Canada key words in searching for films: "Alaska Highway, Arctic, bank robbers, Canadian Pacific Railway, criminals, dance halls, doctors, dogs, escape, French Canadians, fur trade, gold horses, Indians, Inuit, Klondike, lumber trade, miners, mounted police, murder, Northwest , outlaws, pioneers, prospectors, Rocky Mountains, ships, smuggling, thieves, trading posts, trappers, Yukon.".
Normalizing Stars: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Hollywood Consolidation by Sam Stoloff
Page 150, List of sources of tension and strife in USA 1919-1922 including strikes, race riots, KKK, red scare, flu, suffrage, -- suggests Hays office colludes with studios against Arbuckle to "crack down on workers".
Page 157, "By 1913, when Arbuckle began his film career, fat bodies no longer signified power or status. Instead, they were more and more a source of shame"
Shift is from the importance of excess (money, weight, etc) to importance of control of that excess or of the body.
Page 162, "Masculinity is ... an expression of bodily control while ... the fat bod is presumed to be out of control"
The Fictionalized Ethinic Biography: Nita Naldi and the Crisis of Assimilation by Diane Negra
Page 177, Niter Naldi, vamp actress deemed "the female Valintino" was New York born Irish Donna Dooley.
Page 180, Eastern Europeans seen as inferior, not as "white" as western.
June Mathis: a woman who spoke through silents by Thomas J. Slater
Page 204, note 28, refers to "Blueprints for feature films" by Staiger and Loughrey regarding silent screenwriting.
Page 205, "June Mathis's ideas stemmed from her belief in a strict but benevolent social hierarchy ... carrying forward the values of the nineteenth century".
Page 210, Spiritual powers brought not by adversity.
"These 'feminine' qualities defined in the 19th century as 'the cult of true womanhood'
Page 213, Mathis wrote "The Red lantern" (1919) about the boxer rebellion.
"Abstract and Brief Chronicles": The early history of MGM revisioned by Joanne E. Rapf
no notes. Reconsidered history by daughter of mogul who is now retired film academic.
