1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910485601003321

Autore

Girelli Elisabetta

Titolo

Silent Film Performance : Dramatic Bodies on Screen / / by Elisabetta Girelli

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Pivot, , 2021

ISBN

9783030751036

Edizione

[1st ed. 2021.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (118 pages)

Disciplina

791.43028

Soggetti

Motion picture acting

Motion pictures - History

Screen Performance

Film and TV History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Sign of the Uncanny: Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916, USA) -- Chapter 3: Performing Loneliness: Vladimir Mayakovsky's Silent Soliloquy in Baryshnya i Khuligan / The Young Lady and the Hooligan (1918, USSR) -- Chapter 4: Re-booting the Self: Ivan Mozzhukhin and Queer Failure in Feu Mathias Pascal / The Late Mathias Pascal (1926, France) -- Chapter 5: 'Our Bravest and Most Beautiful Soldier': Pola Negri, Wartime, and the Gendering of Anxiety in Hotel Imperial (1927, USA) -- Chapter 6: Silent Performance Beyond Silent Film: Harald Kreutzberg in Paracelsus (1943, Germany) -- Index.

Sommario/riassunto

This book provides a groundbreaking exploration of silent film performance. It combines close reading of silent screen acting with theoretically informed analysis, stressing the overlap between different performative arts, such as film and stage acting, dance, mime, and pantomime. The boundary between silent and sound films is also challenged. Anna Pavlova's acting in The Dumb Girl of Portici is read through Freud's work on the uncanny, disability studies, and notions of intermediality. Vladimir Mayakovsky's performance in The Young Lady and the Hooligan is approached as a silent soliloquy and a representation of loneliness. Ivan Mozzhukhin's tour de force in The



Late Mathias Pascal is discussed through a queer failure lens, while Pola Negri's presence in Hotel Imperial is analysed with the aid of texts on wartime anxiety. Harald Kreutzberg's stunning number in Paracelsus is examined in the lightof theories of mime and pantomime, arguing for its subversive potential in a Third Reich sound film. Elisabetta Girelli is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She has published widely on performance, stardom, silent film, Queer Theory, and cinematic representation. "Even with a perfect conceptual framework, if you cannot describe how an actor moves, bends, jumps, dances, smiles, breaks into despair, bites his hands, closes her eyes, and if you cannot do it with a vivid and ekphrastic style of writing that can produce specific images, you cannot study film acting. Girelli is the kind of gifted writer that acting studies needs. She knows what a significant detail is; she can show how these details form a gesture, an expression, an ethical or a political stance; and she has the ability to unfold her descriptions with rhythm, thereby reproducing the specific duration of any actingstyle. Girelli writes about acting style the way a musician performs a piece of music." - Serge Cardinal, University of Montreal.