Silent film comedy and American culture [electronic resource] / Alan Bilton.
Bilton's study of early 20th century American culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags bypassing rational thought to express the unconscious fears, wishes and concerns of the modern age. Sile...
Saved in:
| Online Access: |
Full Text (via Springer) |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York, NY :
Palgrave Macmillan,
2013.
|
| Subjects: |
Table of Contents:
- An introduction to silent film comedy and American culture: clowns, conformity, consumerism
- A convention of crazy bugs: Mack Sennett and America's immigrant unconscious
- Accelerated bodies and jumping jacks: automata, mannequins and toys in the films of Charlie Chaplin
- Nobody loves a fat man: conspicuous consumption and the case of Fatty Arbuckle in 1920's America
- Dizzy Doras and big-eyed beauties: Mabel Normand and the notion of the female clown in American silent film
- Consumerism and its discontents: Harold Lloyd and the anxieties of capitalism
- Buster Keaton and the south: the first things and the last
- Sleepwalkers on parade: the shell-shocked silence of Harry Langdon
- Conclusion.