Silent Film Comedy and American Culture

By: Alan Bilton

Sign Up Now! Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into Bookshare to access this title. Learn about membership options, or view our freely available titles.

Synopsis: Bilton's study of early 20th century American culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags bypassing rational thought to express the unconscious fears, wishes and concerns of the modern age. Silent film comedy, with its childlike love of the illogical, the destructive and the anti-social, seems to suggest a form of comic revolt against the mechanisation and the uniformity of the machine age, but the book also charts how a new consumer culture sought simultaneously to tame and contain these energies, redirecting them in the service of a newly emergent mass culture. Not just a film history of the silent era, Bilton also provides a provocative and lively engagement with the origins of mass culture, tracing the origins of Hollywood's dream factory and alongside it the roots of our own irrational, childlike, celebrity-obsessed consumer culture.

Book Quality:: Publisher Quality
ISBN-13:: 9781137020260
Publisher:: Palgrave Macmillan
Date of Addition:: 03/23/17
Copyrighted By:: Springer
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: Entertainment, Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Social Studies, Humor
Submitted By:: Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.