’I won't talk! I won't say a word!’ Contextualising Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist (original) (raw)
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The capacity of the human face to affect behavior in the observer is obvious and unquestioned, yet we lack a usable philosophy of facial expression. This essay looks at one effect of the face in its highest moment of expressiveness: it discusses the redemptive force of a woman's face, as portrayed in Dante's works and in the modern film. Beatrice's face becomes a mediator to heaven and thus establishes a long tradition of that trope in Petrarchan love lyric. The invention of photography and cinema enabled nuanced, emotionally charged facial representation that departed from the affect-free pictorial representation of woman's face from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. In Michael Hazanivicius's film The Artist, the face of a redemptive woman mediates access to a compassionate world of charm, glamour, and innocence. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2017) 8, 67–82.
Journal of Social History, 2017
This essay focuses on two cultural shifts at the end of the 1920s, the watershed decade in the emergence of modern culture in the United States. First, in deaf education , oralism (lipreading and audible speech) reached its peak level of control as the method of instruction, replacing manualism (sign language). Second, at the cinema, talkies replaced silent movies. In each case—manualism to oralism and silents to talkies—the central change involved using audible spoken language in place of a purely visual form of communication. Contemporaries wrote about these two historical shifts using remarkably similar terms. The silent movies that were produced during the transition period (1927–1930) were even sometimes called " dumbies, " recalling a common slur regarding the deaf. Yet historians have not made the connection. Scholarship on the transition to talkies emphasizes technological , production, and business challenges presented by sound, especially dialogue , in the cinema. Likewise, historians of the Deaf cultural experience in the United States emphasize the fight to preserve sign language, and although a few have noted that the arrival of the talkies led to (further) cultural exclusion of the deaf, these scholars focus more on the misrepresentation of deafness in films and the limited opportunities for deaf actors in Hollywood. This article argues that the concurrence of these two independent and seemingly unrelated historical changes—oralism and talkies—was not a coincidence. Both changes reflected larger beliefs about normalcy, language, communication, deafness, intelligence, and ultimately humanity in the early-twentieth century.
WHEN WAS THE ‘STUDIO ERA’ IN BENGAL: TRANSITION, TRANSFORMATIONS AND CONFIGURATIONS DURING THE 1930s
Wide Screen, 2019
his paper focuses on the moment of transition during early 1930s and revisits the industrial shifts, which were taking place in Calcutta, Bengal, with the arrival of the sync-sound mechanism and what is popularly described as ‘Talkies’. Through a close-reading of film magazines of the period it shows how such transformations, at the level of film cultures and practices, were taking place and the manner in which certain houses were investing in sound systems, which activated the consolidation of the studios. This paper, however, emphasizes on the silent films, which circulated simultaneously, and draws attention to the gradual growth of the studios, emergence of new configurations and popular debates, which highlight how cinema in Bengal was also imagined with regard to Hollywood hits, other than the fact that it was located in the ‘bazaar’.
Mary Pickford as written by Frances Marion
in: Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives edited by Monica Dall’Asta, Victoria Duckett, Lucia Tralli. Published by AMS Acta University of Bologna in association with The University of Melbourne. pp. 220-230, 2013
Women and Screen Cultures is a series of experimental digital books aimed to promote research and knowledge on the contribution of women to the cultural history of screen media. Published by the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna, it is issued under the conditions of both open publishing and blind peer review. It will host collections, monographs, translations of open source archive materials, illustrated volumes, transcripts of conferences, and more. Proposals are welcomed for both disciplinary and multi-disciplinary contributions in the fields of film history and theory, television and media studies, visual studies, photography and new media. Edited by: Monica Dall'Asta, Victoria Duckett, Lucia Tralli ISBN 9788898010103 2013. Published by the Department of Arts, University of Bologna in association with the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and Women and Film History International Graphic design: Lucia Tralli
Writing About Sound: The Early Talkie Periodicals in India
International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Text, Object, 2019
This chapter investigates the aural impact on the cinematic discourse of film periodicals in India in the 1930s, when synchronized sound became part of the filmic medium. Based on contemporary disciplinary revisions that have made sonic influences part of a more inclusive and perceptual approach to cultural engagement (Erlmann 2004), I explore how the sonic inscribes itself in the textual/visual of the early film magazines and journals, which in itself is an interesting site that negotiates the demands of mass production of the film industry in a bourgeois form with claims and aspirations to engage the cultural aesthetics of the new format. There are two primary facets of the periodical that I wish to engage as part of my analysis: first, the “noise” that emerges around film music in the cinematic discourse. Music became the primary identifiable sound for the new talking film produced in different parts of India. Its presence was extremely popular and constantly discussed in terms of as a guilty pleasure in these film magazines, which constantly desired and posited the idea of an alternative modern form. It also serves as an important background to theorize listening for talking films. Second, I consider how the aural interacts and integrates with the emerging visual narrative of early stardom in the country.