The Bat is a three-act play by Mary Roberts Rinehart that was first produced by Lincoln Wagenhals and Collin Kemper in 1920. The story combines elements of mystery and comedy as Cornelia Van Gorder and guests spend a stormy night at her rented summer home, searching for stolen money they believe is hidden in the house, while they are stalked by a masked criminal known as "the Bat". The Bat's identity is revealed at the end of the final act.
Introduction: Mediated America: Americana as Hollywoodiana / Jan Olsson, Kingsley Bolton -- Italian marionettes meet cinematic modernity / Jan Olsson -- "A red-blooded romance"; or Americanizing early multi-reel feature cinema: the case of The spoilers / Joel Frykholm -- Song of the sonic body: noise, the audience, and early American moving picture culture / Meredith C. Ward -- Constructing the global vernacular: American English and the media / Kingsley Bolton -- You only live once: repetitions of crime as desire in the films of Sylvia Sidney, 1930-1937 / Esther Sonnet -- Punks! Topicality and the 1950s gangster bio-pic cycle / Peter Stanfield -- Importing evil: the American gangster, Swedish cinema, and anti-American propaganda / Ann-Kristin Wallengren -- Sun Yu and the early Americanization of Chinese cinema / Corrado Neri -- If America were really China or how Christopher Columbus discovered Asia / Gregory Lee -- Civil rights on the screen / Michael Renov -- Goodbye rabbit ears: visualizing and mapping the U.S. Digital TV transition / Lisa Parks -- Archival transitions: some digital propositions / Pelle Snickars -- Are Americans human? / Evelyn Ch'ien -- Afterword: Rethinking the American century / William Uricchio.
This exploration of fashion in American silent film offers fresh perspectives on the era preceding the studio system, and the evolution of Hollywood's distinctive brand of glamour. By the 1910s, the moving image was an integral part of everyday life and communicated fascinating, but as yet un-investigated, ideas and ideals about fashionable dress.
Looks at the history of radio broadcasting as an aspect of American culture, and discusses social tensions, radio formats, and the roles of African Americans and women
Noel Burch's new book is a critique of the assumptions underlying 'classical' approaches to film history: the assumption that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being; and the assumption that this language was a universal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself." "His major thesis is that, on the contrary, film language has a social and economic history, that it evolved in the way it did because of when and where it was constructed -- in the capitalist and imperialist west between 1892 and 1929." "The book examines the chronology of the emergence of what it defines as cinema's Institutional Mode of Representation and the socio-historical circumstances in which this took place. It examines the principles of visualisation -- camera placement and movement, lighting, editing, mise-en-scene -- that film-makers and audiences came to internalize over the first three decades. Special emphasis is laid on the allimportant change that occurred in the imaginary placing of the spectator, from a position of exteriority to the film image, implicit in both film-form and viewing conditions during the primitive era (pre-1909), to the imaginary centering of the spectator-subject, completed only with the generalisation of lip-synch sound after 1929. It is the contention of this book that this imaginary centering of a sensorily isolated spectator is the keystone of the cinematic illusion of reality, still achieved today by the same means as it was sixty years ago.
In Chicago, an ordinary key unlocks a magical trunk packed with robbers and a pie. In Boston, five magical bon-bons make an ordinary senator, an ordinary professor, an ordinary girl and her ordinary parents do the most extraordinary things A young cowboy lassoes Father Time; the dummy in Mr. Floman's department store window comes to life; and a tiny beetle gives a New England farmer and his wife a pump which pumps not water, but gold Author of the much-loved Oz books, L. Frank Baum transforms the familiar with his magical mix of humor and enchantment. Most of the twelve stories in this delightful collection are set in America where, so it seems, modern fairies, knooks, and ryls are always causing the most astonishing things to happen These tales will enchant both young and old. When American Fairy Tales first appeared, Baum's reputation as a storyteller had already been established by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in 1900. The twelve stories in this collection were originally syndicated weekly in at least five newspapers during the first half of 1901. The first book edition, which this facsimile reprints, came out later that year.
