Silent Film Performance: Dramatic Bodies on Screen

ISBN-13: 9783030751050 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022

Elisabetta Girelli

Opis

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 light of theories of mime and pantomime, arguing for its subversive potential in a Third Reich sound film.

Spis treści

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.

O autorze

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.

Blurb

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 light of 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 acting style. Girelli writes about acting style the way a musician performs a piece of music.”

–   Serge Cardinal, University of Montreal