03178nam 22004575 450 991081307490332120200406050111.00-8135-9363-810.36019/9780813593630(CKB)4950000000159906(MiAaPQ)EBC5897700(DE-B1597)529586(OCoLC)1120697140(DE-B1597)9780813593630(EXLCZ)99495000000015990620200406h20192019 fg engurcnu||||||||txtrdacontentcrdamediacrrdacarrierThe Movies as a World Force American Silent Cinema and the Utopian Imagination /Ryan Jay FriedmanNew Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, [2019]©20191 online resource (v, 254 pages) illustrations0-8135-9360-3 Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-248) and index.Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Motion Pictures and Modern Communion -- 1. Enlightened Public Opinion: Postreform Progressivism, Mental Science, and Gerald Stanley Lee's "Moving-Pictures" -- 2. "The Occult Elements of Motion and Light": Vachel Lindsay's Utopia of the Mirror Screen -- 3. "The Motion Picture Is War's Greatest Antidote": Rescue as Release of Force in D. W. Griffith's Intolerance -- 4. "Everything Wooed Everything": The Triumph of Morale over Moralism in Rupert Hughes's Souls for Sale -- 5. "Little Grains of Sand": Positive Thinking and Corporate Form in Douglas Fairbanks's The Thief of Bagdad -- Conclusion: Universal History and the Historicity of Film Entertainment -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index -- About the AuthorThroughout the silent-feature era, American artists and intellectuals routinely described cinema as a force of global communion, a universal language promoting mutual understanding and harmonious coexistence amongst disparate groups of people. In the early 1920s, film-industry leaders began to espouse this utopian view, in order to claim for motion pictures an essentially uplifting social function. The Movies as a World Force examines the body of writing in which this understanding of cinema emerged and explores how it shaped particular silent films and their marketing campaigns. The utopian and universalist view of cinema, the book shows, represents a synthesis of New Age spirituality and the new liberalism. It provided a framework for the first official, written histories of American cinema and persisted as an advertising trope, even after the transition to sound made movies reliant on specific national languages.Utopias in motion picturesSilent filmsUnited StatesHistoryUtopias in motion pictures.Silent filmsHistory.791.43/672Friedman Ryan Jay, authttp://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/relators/aut1128056DE-B1597DE-B1597BOOK9910813074903321The Movies as a World Force4070572UNINA