"An interesting take on Hollywood studio-era history that challenges the narrow focus of existing scholarship and revises familiar perceptions of Warner Bros. The focus on acting and performance usefully opens up the relationship between theatre and cinema, and the impact of Broadway on film acting and studio working practices in the crucial period of the transition to synchronised sound. Highly recommended as a valuable contribution to the area of acting and performance studies."-Pam Cook, Professor Emerita in Film, University of Southampton, UK. Editor of The Cinema Book (Third Edition, 2007) and author of Nicole Kidman (2012) "This book is a fascinating account of the creative symbiosis between stage and screen at a crucial juncture in Hollywood's history. Shingler's fully historicized and contextual-ized account revises what Warner Bros stood for and achieved with its prestige pictures and stars. By interweaving the histories of early sound technologies, Broadway's acting traditions and the economic imperatives of studio filmmaking, this book highlights key performers and studio personnel long neglected in standard histories of Hollywood. With its refreshing focus on acting craft and method before 'the Method', this book produces a vital, new perspective on how films were made, played and received in 1923-39."-Sarah Street, Professor of Film and Foundation Chair of Drama, University of Bristol, UK This series encompasses the spectrum of contemporary scholarship on screen performance and embraces productive tensions within film and media studies and between cinema and cultural studies. It features historical research that sheds light on the aesthetic and material forces that shape the production and reception of screen performances in different times, venues, and locales. The series also presents research that expands our understanding of screen performance by examining various types and registers of performance, including those outside the domain of conveying character. The series strives to offer new insights into film/media practice and history by exploring the tools and methods of screen performance practitioners as well as the shifting modes and significances of screen performance in changing social-technological environments. More information about this series at
No abstract
In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope sent back to astronomers at the University of Arizona a series of vivid colour images of the Eagle Nebula, a dense formation of interstellar gas and dust the likes of which cradle newborn stars. As evidence that our perceptual universe, in every sense of the word, is defined by the representational powers of colour technology, the Hubble's “cosmic close-ups” are a clear case in point. Colour has become a standard representational form and hence the visual form. If so, what can be said of the recent popularity and proliferation of the black-and-white image?No self-respecting café-bar or discriminating home, it seems, can now do without a black and white print on the wall. Commercial photography and certain forms of advertising have found a new niche in black and white, and even sepia is staging a come-back. The popularity of the black-and-white image cannot be divorced from the commercial culture in which it circulates; it is a “look” and a marker of taste. Monochrome is a stylistic trend but a revealing one, especially if one considers the growing preoccupation in America with heritage and memory. Both Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes give black and white a status of authenticity judged in relation to past time “properly” captured. For Sontag, monochrome gives an image a sense of age, historical distance, and aura. She writes, “the cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the photograph from patina.” Likewise, Barthes comments on the artifice of colour, how it is a “coating applied later on to the original truth of black and white.” For both critics, monochrome is an aesthetic of the authentic figured around a basic quality of pastness.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.