Body Shots: Early Cinema’s Incarnations

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University of California Press, 2007 M10 9 - 214 páginas
This original and compelling book places the body at the center of cinema's first decade of emergence and challenges the idea that for early audiences, the new medium's fascination rested on visual spectacle for its own sake. Instead, as Jonathan Auerbach argues, it was the human form in motion that most profoundly shaped early cinema. Situating his discussion in a political and historical context, Auerbach begins his analysis with films that reveal striking anxieties and preoccupations about persons on public display—both exceptional figures, such as 1896 presidential candidate William McKinley, and ordinary people caught by the movie camera in their daily routines. The result is a sharp, unique, and groundbreaking way to consider the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American incarnation of cinema itself.

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Contenido

Body Movement Space
1
Part I Bodies in Public
13
Sounding the Origins of Cinema
63
Part II Bodies in Space
83
The Stilled Body
124
Notes
137
Bibliography
179
Index
195
Derechos de autor

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Página 152 - Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind.
Página 49 - My sense of myself grows by imitation of you, and my sense of yourself grows in terms of my sense of myself. Both ego and alter are thus essentially social; each is a socius and each is an imitative creation.
Página 65 - I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear...
Página 47 - A self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.
Página 48 - The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves, but an imputed sentiment, the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.
Página 172 - The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.
Página 31 - Cuba. In the name of humanity, in the name of civilization, in behalf of endangered American interests which give us the right and the duty to speak and to act, the war in Cuba must stop.
Página 136 - lifelike" we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death). Photography is a kind of primitive theater...
Página 136 - We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead...

Acerca del autor (2007)

Jonathan Auerbach is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park and is the author of Male Call: Becoming Jack London (1996) and The Romance of Failure: First-Person Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and James (1989).

Información bibliográfica