Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, by Jon Burrows

By Jon Burrows

This is the 1st new book-length examine of British cinema of the 1910s to be released for over fifty years, and it makes a speciality of the shut dating among the British movie and the Edwardian theatre. Why have been such a lot of West finish legends similar to Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Ellen Terry again and again tempted to dabble in silent movie paintings? Why have been movie manufacturers so prepared to hire them? Jon Burrows reviews their display performances and considers how effectively they made the transition from one medium to the opposite, and provides a few arguable conclusions in regards to the unusually extensive social variety of filmgoers to whom their movies appealed.

Show description

Read Online or Download Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918 PDF

Best theatre books

Resurrection Blues

Arthur Miller's penultimate play, Resurrection Blues, is a darkly comedian satirical allegory that poses the query: What may occur if Christ have been to seem on the earth at the present time? In an unidentified Latin American state, common Felix Barriaux has captured an elusive innovative chief. The insurgent, identified via a variety of names, is rumored to have played miracles through the nation-state.

Hernani

En imposant Hernani, chef-d'oeuvre du drame romantique, à l. a. Comédie-Française, temple du classicisme, Victor Hugo fut à l'origine de l'une des plus célèbres batailles de l'histoire littéraire. "Tissu d'extravagances", fruit d'un "esprit humain affranchi de toute règle et de toute bienséance" selon los angeles censure.

The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics

The Theater of fact argues that seventeenth-century baroque and twentieth-century neobaroque aesthetics must be understood as a part of an identical advanced. The Neobaroque, instead of being a go back to the stylistic practices of a selected time and position, might be defined because the continuation of a cultural procedure produced as a reaction to a selected challenge of idea that has beset Europe and the colonial international for the reason that early modernity.

Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder

(Applause Books). Rainer Werner Fassbiner left at the back of a literary and cinematic legacy which holds a different position within the historical past of eu movie and within the tradition of the 20th century. It developed because the expression of an period, among 1966 and 1982, in a rustic which was once then one other Germany and which now not exists.

Extra resources for Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918

Example text

In 1911 The Era reprinted a lecture on gesture given by one such figure, Miss Davies Webster, at the Conservatoire Theatre, London. 31 This reference to melodrama, along with the preceding comment from this same journal about the tastes of provincial audiences, is one 39 legitimate cinema of a number of clear hints and suggestions in the stage trade press that an older art of traditional vigorous gesture was still practised in many theatrical outposts immediately beyond the West End. Clarence Derwent asked rhetorically in 1912 if there could be any readers out there who had not sat at the provincial melodrama and marvelled at the grotesque movements which are supposed to lend point to the most obvious remarks, as for instance, the rigidly extended arm and upturned finger which invariably accompany the melodramatic heroine’s demand that somebody or other shall leave her house?

1 This opening chapter is an attempt to follow Levine’s recommendation and explores the cultural image and working practices of various representative types of professional stage actors in the late Victorian and Edwardian era. The exercise is necessary in order to understand better the ‘heritage’ which British filmmakers were drawing upon in hiring theatre stars: the stylistic and cultural values they intended to adopt and the kinds of audiences that, following Levine’s logic, could be expected to tag along with them.

What were actors and acting like on the stage at this time? What were the 27 legitimate cinema key trends and styles? What did critics see as the aims and values of good acting? Which kinds of actors did they celebrate and valorise most? Are there major differentiations in tastes across social classes with regard to audience preferences for particular actors and styles of acting? 2 The idea that there might be a performance style able to stand as a marker of national cultural identity and which might then be adopted in a formulation of national cinematic values is an intriguing one.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.50 of 5 – based on 10 votes