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Silent Film Comedy and American Culture
Alan Bilton 
Start page: 1
Swansea University Author:
Alan Bilton
Abstract
This absorbing study of early 20th Century American Culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags bypassing rational thought to express the unconscious fears, wishes and concerns of the modern age. Sil...
| Published: |
Basingstoke
Palgrave Macmillan
2013
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| Online Access: |
http://us.macmillan.com/silentfilmcomedyandamericanculture/AlanBilton |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa278 |
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| Abstract: |
This absorbing study of early 20th Century American Culture interprets the anarchic absurdity of slapstick movies as a form of collective anxiety dream, their fantastical images and illogical gags bypassing rational thought to express the unconscious fears, wishes and concerns of the modern age. Silent film comedy, with its childlike love of the illogical, the destructive and the anti-social, seems to suggest a form of comic revolt against the mechanization and the uniformity of the machine age, but the book also charts how a new consumer culture sought to simultaneously tame and contain these energies, redirecting them in the service of a newly emergent mass culture. Not just a film history of the silent era, the book offers a provocative and lively engagement with the origins of mass culture, tracing the origins of Hollywood’s dream factory and alongside it the roots of our own irrational, childlike, celebrity-obsessed consumer culture. |
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| Keywords: |
Silent Film, Comedy, American Culture, Consumerim |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
1 |