Parallel Tracks
The Railroad and Silent Cinema
By Lynne Kirby
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Subjects: Film History Series: Exeter Studies in Film History |
From its earliest days, the cinema has enjoyed a special kinship with the railroad, a mutual attraction based on similar ways of handling speed, visual perception, and the promise of a journey. PARALLEL TRACKS is the first book to explore and explain this relationship in both historical and theoretical terms, blending film scholarship with railroad history.
This highly original work reveals the profound impact that the railroad and the cinema have had on Western society and modern urban industrial culture. It will be eagerly received by those involved in film studies, American studies, feminist theory and the cultural study of modernity. It will also have appeal to general readers interested in silent films or in the history of the railroad.
Contents: Inventors and hysterics - the train in the pre-history and early history of cinema; romances of the rail in silent film; the railroad in the city; national identity in the train film.
“The triumph of this book is in bringing film theory and social history together to form a powerful collective that makes this examination of these two key industries compulsive reading." (Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1998) "Kirby's well-researched and well-written text places the separate, but as the author convincingly argues, conceptually related phenomena of silent cinema and the railway within both historical and theoretical contexts." (American Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1998)
Lynne Kirby is a Senior Producer at Court Television Network. Her articles on the railroad and cinema have appeared in major American film journals.
Parallel Tracks - The Railroad and Silent Cinema - Hardback cover
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Lynne Kirby
Exeter Studies in Film History
- 'Film Europe' And 'Film America' - Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920-1939
- Alternative Empires - European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism
- Alternative Film Culture in Interwar Britain
- The Appreciation of Film - The Postwar Film Society Movement and Film Culture in Britain
- The Big Show - British Cinema Culture in the Great War (1914-1918)
- British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years
- Cecil Hepworth and the Rise of the British Film Industry 1899-1911
- Celluloid War Memorials - The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War
- Charles Urban - Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897 - 1925
- A Chorus Of Raspberries - British Film Comedy 1929-1939
- Decoding the Movies - Hollywood in the 1930s
- Going to the Movies - Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema
- The Great Art Of Light And Shadow - Archaeology of the Cinema
- Hollywood, Westerns And The 1930S - The Lost Trail
- Legitimate Cinema - Theatre Stars in Silent British Films, 1908-1918
- The Lost Jungle - Cliffhanger Action and Hollywood Serials of the 1930s and 1940s
- Marketing Modernity - Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema
- Multimedia Histories - From Magic Lanterns to Internet
- Parallel Tracks - The Railroad and Silent Cinema
- A Paul Rotha Reader
- Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain - A Choice of Pleasures
- Reading the Cinematograph - The Cinema in British Short Fiction, 1896-1912
- Silent Features - The Development of Silent Feature Films 1914 - 1934
- The World According To Hollywood,1918-1939
- Young And Innocent? - The Cinema in Britain, 1896-1930