Movies as a World Force: American Silent Cinema and the Utopian Imagination

During the silent-feature era, American artists and intellectuals viewed cinema as a global force of unity, promoting mutual understanding and harmonious coexistence. Film-industry leaders embraced this utopian view in the early 1920s, asserting that movies had an uplifting social function. The Movies as a World Force explores the literature that shaped this understanding and its impact on silent films and their marketing campaigns. This view, a synthesis of New Age spirituality and new liberalism, provided a framework for the first official histories of American cinema and persisted as an advertising trope even after the transition to sound.

Format: Hardback
Length: 232 pages
Publication date: 28 February 2019
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Throughout the silent-feature era, American artists and intellectuals hailed cinema as a powerful force of global communion, a universal language that fostered mutual understanding and harmonious coexistence among diverse groups of people. In the early 1920s, film industry leaders began to embrace this utopian vision, seeking to elevate motion pictures to an essentially uplifting social function.

The Movies as a World Force delves into the extensive body of writing that shaped this understanding of cinema and explores how it influenced specific silent films and their marketing campaigns. The book reveals that the utopian and universalist view of cinema emerged as a synthesis of New Age spirituality and the new liberalism. It served as a framework for the first official, written histories of American cinema and continued to be employed as an advertising trope even after the transition to sound, as movies became reliant on specific national languages.

This book offers a comprehensive examination of the cultural significance of cinema during the silent-feature era, shedding light on the ways in which it shaped the artistic, intellectual, and social landscape of the time. It provides valuable insights into the complex relationship between cinema, globalization, and cultural identity, and will be of interest to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of film history and culture.

Weight: 490g
Dimension: 160 x 236 x 17 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780813593609