Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent FilmAlthough cinema was invented in the mid-1890s, it was a decade more before the concept of a “film spectator” emerged. As the cinema began to separate itself from the commercial entertainments in whose context films initially had been shown—vaudeville, dime museums, fairgrounds—a particular concept of its spectator was developed on the level of film style, as a means of predicting the reception of films on a mass scale. In Babel and Babylon, Miriam Hansen offers an original perspective on American film by tying the emergence of spectatorship to the historical transformation of the public sphere. |
Contents
A Cinema in Search of a Spectator FilmViewer Relations before Hollywood | 23 |
Early Audiences Myths and Models | 60 |
Chameleon and Catalyst The Cinema as an Alternative Public Sphere | 90 |
Babel in Babylon D W Griffiths Intolerance 1916 | 127 |
Reception Textual System and SelfDefinition | 129 |
A Radiant CrazyQuilt Patterns of Narration and Address | 141 |
Genesis Causes Concepts of History | 163 |
Film History Archaeology Universal Language | 173 |
Riddles of Maternity | 199 |
Crisis of Femininity Fantasies of Rescue | 218 |
The Return of Babylon Valentino and Female Spectatorship19211926 | 243 |
Male Star Female Fans | 245 |
Patterns of Vision Scenarios of Identification | 269 |
Notes | 297 |
366 | |
367 | |