The works of Shakespeare and Dante or the figures of George Washington and Moses do not often enter into popular conceptions of the silent cinema, yet, between 1907 and 1910, the Vitagraph Company frequently used such material in producing "quality" films that promulgated "respectable" culture. William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson situate these films in an era of immigration, labor unrest, and mainstream American xenophobia, in order to explore the cultural views promoted by the films and the ways the audiences--the middle classes as well as workers and immigrants--related to what they saw. The authors associate the production of quality films with a top-down forging of cultural consensus on issues such as patriotism and morality, and reveal the surprising bottom-up negotiations of these films' "meanings.". Devoting chapters to the literary, historical, and biblical subjects used by Vitagraph, this book draws upon plays, pageants, school textbooks, and even product advertisements to illuminate the conditions of cinematic production and reception. It provides a detailed look at one aspect of the film industry's transformation from "despised cheap amusement" to the nation's dominant mass medium, while showing how cultural elites engaged in a struggle similar to that of today's American academy over the literary canon and national value systems. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The works of Shakespeare and Dante or the figures of George Washington and Moses do not often enter into popular conceptions of the silent cinema, yet, between 1907 and 1910, the Vitagraph Company frequently used such material in producing "quality" films that promulgated "respectable" culture. William Uricchio and Roberta Pearson situate these films in an era of immigration, labor unrest, and mainstream American xenophobia, in order to explore the cultural views promoted by the films and the ways the audiences--the middle classes as well as workers and immigrants--related to what they saw. The authors associate the production of quality films with a top-down forging of cultural consensus on issues such as patriotism and morality, and reveal the surprising bottom-up negotiations of these films' "meanings.."

Devoting chapters to the literary, historical, and biblical subjects used by Vitagraph, this book draws upon plays, pageants, school textbooks, and even product advertisements to illuminate the conditions of cinematic production and reception. It provides a detailed look at one aspect of the film industry's transformation from "despised cheap amusement" to the nation's dominant mass medium, while showing how cultural elites engaged in a struggle similar to that of today's American academy over the literary canon and national value systems.

Originally published in 1993.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Between 1908 and 1913, D.W. Griffith played a key role in the reformulation of film's narrative techniques, thus contributing to the creation of what we now think of as the classical Hollywood cinema. This book explores a critical period in the history of film acting: the emergence of the realistic "verisimilar" style in Griffith's biograph films. Roberta Pearson demonstrates how Griffith gradually abandoned the deliberately affected "histrionic" acting style derived from the 19th-century stage. No longer did actors mime distress by raising their arms to heaven or clutching their heads - a subtle facial expression, a slight change in posture would convey a character's extreme emotions instead.;Pearson makes detailed comparisons of certain biograph films and closely examines contemporary journalistic writing, acting manuals and the recollections of actors of the time.