Stagestruck Filmmaker
Stagestruck Filmmaker

Author: David Mayer

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2009-03-01

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 1587298406

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An actor, a vaudevillian, and a dramatist before he became a filmmaker, D. W. Griffith used the resources of theatre to great purpose and to great ends. In pioneering the quintessentially modern medium of film from the 1890s to the 1930s, he drew from older, more broadly appealing stage forms of melodrama, comedy, vaudeville, and variety. In Stagestruck Filmmaker, David Mayer brings Griffith’s process vividly to life, offering detailed and valuable insights into the racial, ethnic, class, and gender issues of these transitional decades. Combining the raw materials of theatre, circus, minstrelsy, and dance with the newer visual codes of motion pictures, Griffith became the first acknowledged artist of American film. Birth of a Nation in particular demonstrates the degree to which he was influenced by the racist justifications and distorting interpretations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Moving through the major phases of Griffith’s career in chapters organized around key films or groups of films, Mayer provides a mesmerizing account of the American stage and cinema in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. Griffith’s relationship to the theatre was intricate, complex, and enduring. Long recognized as the dominant creative figure of American motion pictures, throughout twenty-six years of making more than five hundred films he pillaged, adapted, reshaped, revitalized, preserved, and extolled. By historicizing his representations of race, ethnicity, and otherness, Mayer places Griffith within an overall template of American life in the years when film rivaled and then surpassed the theatre in popularity.

List of Films, Reels and Views Examined
List of Films, Reels and Views Examined

Author: Pennsylvania. State Board of Censors of Moving Pictures

Publisher:

Published: 1918

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13:

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"... containing the names and the disposition made of more than 20,000 pictures, from ... May 15th, 1915, up to the end of the year 1917. This list will be supplemented by further lists presented at the end of each half yearly period."--Pennsylvania. State Board of Censors of Moving Pictures. Report, 1918, p. 7.

A Girl’s Life in New Orleans
A Girl’s Life in New Orleans

Author: Ella Grunewald

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2023-05-10

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 0807179981

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A Girl’s Life in New Orleans presents the diary of Ella Grunewald, an upper-middle-class teenager in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century. Grunewald, the daughter of one of the Crescent City’s leading music dealers, used her journal to record the major events of her day-to-day life, documenting family, friendships, schooling, musical education, and social activities. Her entries frequently describe illness, death, and other tragedies. Though attentive to the city’s classical music scene, Grunewald also recounts theater shows, Carnival balls and parades, Catholic religious observances, and the World’s Fair that the city hosted in 1884. Expertly annotated and introduced by Hans Rasmussen, Grunewald’s journal is a rare window on the life of a young woman in the South between 1884 and 1886. Adding depth to that account, Rasmussen includes a shorter journal Grunewald kept of her family’s travels in Italy and Germany in the spring of 1890. In it, she describes visits to Catholic churches, museums, Roman ruins, and other tourist attractions. Tragically, Grunewald contracted malaria during the latter part of the journey and died overseas at age twenty-two.

Folktales of the Jews, Volume 1
Folktales of the Jews, Volume 1

Author: Dov Noy

Publisher: Jewish Publication Society

Published: 2006-09-03

Total Pages: 769

ISBN-13: 0827608292

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Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion begins the most important collection of Jewish folktales ever published. It is the first volume in Folktales of the Jews, the five-volume series to be released over the next several years, in the tradition of Louis Ginzberg's classic, Legends of the Jews. The 71 tales here and the others in this series have been selected from the Israel Folktale Archives, Named in Honor of Dov Noy, The University of Haifa (IFA), a treasure house of Jewish lore that has remained largely unavailable to the entire world until now. Since the creation of the State of Israel, the IFA has collected more than 20,000 tales from newly arrived immigrants, long-lost stories shared by their families from around the world. The tales come from the major ethno-linguistic communities of the Jewish world and are representative of a wide variety of subjects and motifs, especially rich in Jewish content and context. Each of the tales is accompanied by in-depth commentary that explains the tale's cultural, historical, and literary background and its similarity to other tales in the IFA collection, and extensive scholarly notes. There is also an introduction that describes the Sephardic culture and its folk narrative tradition, a world map of the areas covered, illustrations, biographies of the collectors and narrators, tale type and motif indexes, a subject index, and a comprehensive bibliography. Until the establishment of the IFA, we had had only limited access to the wide range of Jewish folk narratives. Even in Israel, the gathering place of the most wide-ranging cross-section of world Jewry, these folktales have remained largely unknown. Many of the communities no longer exist as cohesive societies in their representative lands; the Holocaust, migration, and changes in living styles have made the continuation of these tales impossible. This volume and the others to come will be monuments to a rich but vanishing oral tradition.