Uplift Cinema

In Uplift Cinema, Allyson Nadia Field recovers the significant yet forgotten legacy of African American filmmaking in the 1910s. Like the racial uplift project, this cinema emphasized economic self-sufficiency, education, and respectability as the keys to African American progress. Field discusses films made at the Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes to promote education, as well as the controversial The New Era, which was an antiracist response to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. She also shows how Black filmmakers in New York and Chicago engaged with uplift through the promotion of Black modernity. Uplift cinema developed not just as a response to onscreen racism, but constituted an original engagement with the new medium that has had a deep and lasting significance for African American cinema. Although none of these films survived, Field's examination of archival film ephemera presents a method for studying lost films that opens up new frontiers for exploring early film culture.

White slave films, dramas documenting sex scandals, filmed prize fights featuring the controversial African-American boxer Jack Johnson, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation—all became objects of public concern after 1906, when the proliferation of nickelodeons brought moving pictures to a broad mass public. Lee Grieveson draws on extensive original research to examine the controversies over these films and over cinema more generally. He situates these contestations in the context of regulatory concerns about populations and governance in an early-twentieth-century America grappling with the powerful forces of modernity, in particular, immigration, class formation and conflict, and changing gender roles. Tracing the discourses and practices of cultural and political elites and the responses of the nascent film industry, Grieveson reveals how these interactions had profound effects on the shaping of film content, form, and, more fundamentally, the proposed social function of cinema: how cinema should function in society, the uses to which it might be put, and thus what it could or would be. Policing Cinema develops new perspectives for the understanding of censorship and regulation and the complex relations between governance and culture. In this work, Grieveson offers a compelling analysis of the forces that shaped American cinema and its role in society.

In The Image in Early Cinema, the contributors examine intersections between early cinematic form, technology, theory, practice, and broader modes of visual culture. They argue that early cinema emerged within a visual culture composed of a variety of traditions in art, science, education, and image making. Even as methods of motion picture production and distribution materialized, they drew from and challenged practices and conventions in other mediums. This rich visual culture produced a complicated, overlapping network of image-making traditions, innovations, and borrowing among painting, tableaux vivants, photography, and other pictorial and projection practices. Using a variety of concepts and theories, the contributors explore these crisscrossing traditions and work against an essentialist notion of media to conceptualize the dynamic interrelationship between images and their context.

The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema is a collection of new scholarship that investigates the first decades of motion-picture history from diverse perspectives and methodologies. Featuring over thirty essays by leading scholars in the field, the Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of cinema's earliest years while also illuminating how cinema derived strength from competing cultural forms, becoming in the process the most influential mass medium of the early twentieth century.

For over a century, cinephiles and film scholars have had to grapple with an ugly artifact that sits at the beginnings of film history. D. W. Griffith’s profoundly racist epic, The Birth of a Nation, inspired controversy and protest at its 1915 release and was defended as both a true history of Reconstruction (although it was based on fiction) and a new achievement in cinematic art. Paul McEwan examines the long and shifting history of its reception, revealing how the film became not just a cinematic landmark but also an influential force in American aesthetics and intellectual life. In every decade since 1915, filmmakers, museums, academics, programmers, and film fans have had to figure out how to deal with this troublesome object, and their choices have profoundly influenced both film culture and the notion that films can be works of art. Some critics tried to set aside the film’s racism and concentrate on the form, while others tried to relegate that racism safely to the past. McEwan argues that from the earliest film retrospectives in the 1920s to the rise of remix culture in the present day, controversies about this film and its meaning have profoundly shaped our understandings of film, race, and art.

Although overlooked by most narratives of American cinema history, films made for purposes outside of theatrical entertainment dominated twentieth-century motion picture production. This volume adds to the growing study of nontheatrical films by focusing on the ways filmmakers developed and audiences encountered ideas about race, identity, politics, and community outside the borders of theatrical cinema. The contributors to Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film examine the place and role of race in educational films, home movies, industry and government films, anthropological films, and church films as well as other forms of nontheatrical filmmaking. From filmic depictions of Native Americans and films by 1920s African American religious leaders to a government educational film about the unequal treatment of Latin American immigrants, these films portrayed—for various purposes and intentions—the lives of those who were mostly excluded from the commercial films being produced in Hollywood. This volume is more than an examination of a broad swath of neglected twentieth-century filmmaking; it is a reevaluation of basic assumptions about American film culture and the place of race within it. Contributors. Crystal Mun-hye Baik, Jasmyn R. Castro, Nadine Chan, Mark Garrett Cooper, Dino Everett, Allyson Nadia Field, Walter Forsberg, Joshua Glick, Tanya Goldman, Marsha Gordon, Noelle Griffis, Colin Gunckel, Michelle Kelley, Todd Kushigemachi, Martin L. Johnson, Caitlin McGrath, Elena Rossi-Snook, Laura Isabel Serna, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Dan Streible, Lauren Tilton, Noah Tsika, Travis L. Wagner, Colin Williamson

Sanctuary Cinema provides the first history of the origins of the Christian film industry. Focusing on the early days of film during the silent era, it traces the ways in which the Church came to adopt film making as a way of conveying the Christian message to adherents. Surprisingly, rather than separating themselves from Hollywood or the American entertainment culture, early Christian film makers embraced Hollywood cinematic techniques and often populated their films with attractive actors and actresses. But they communicated their sectarian message effectively to believers, and helped to shape subsequent understandings of the Gospel message, which had historically been almost exclusively verbal, not communicated through visual media. While radio eclipsed the motion picture as the Christian communication media of choice by the 1920s, the early film makers had laid the foundations for the current re-emergence of Christian film and entertainment, from Veggie Tales to The Passion of the Christ.

Comprised of 43 innovative contributions, this companion is both an overview of, and intervention into the field of cinema and gender. The essays included here address a variety of geographical contexts, from an analysis of cinema. Islam and women and television under Eastern European socialism, to female audience reception in Nigeria, to changing class and race norms in Bollywood dance sequences. A special focus is on women directors in a global context that includes films and filmmakers from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America. The collection also offers a solid overview of feminist contributions to thinking on genre from the "chick flick" to the action or Western film, to film noir and the slasher. Readers will find contributions on a variety of approaches to spectatorship, reception studies and fandom, as well as transnational approaches to star studies and essays addressing the relationship between feminist film theory and new media. Other topics include queer and trans* cinema, eco-cinema and the post-human. Finally, readers interested in the history of film will find essays addressing the methodological dimensions of feminist film history, essays on silent and studio era women in film, and histories of female filmmakers in a variety of non-Western contexts.