Overview
- Provides a groundbreaking exploration of silent film performance
- Combines close reading of silent film acting with theoretically informed analysis
- Challenges the boundary between silent and sound films
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (6 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book provides a groundbreaking exploration of silent film performance. It combines close reading of silent screen acting with theoretically informed analysis, stressing the overlap between different performative arts, such as film and stage acting, dance, mime, and pantomime. The boundary between silent and sound films is also challenged. Anna Pavlova’s acting in The Dumb Girl of Portici is read through Freud’s work on the uncanny, disability studies, and notions of intermediality. Vladimir Mayakovsky’s performance in The Young Lady and the Hooligan is approached as a silent soliloquy and a representation of loneliness. Ivan Mozzhukhin’s tour de force in The Late Mathias Pascal is discussed through a queer failure lens, while Pola Negri’s presence in Hotel Imperial is analysed with the aid of texts on wartime anxiety. Harald Kreutzberg’s stunning number in Paracelsus is examined in the light oftheories of mime and pantomime, arguing for its subversive potential in a Third Reich sound film.
Reviews
“Even with a perfect conceptual framework, if you cannot describe how an actor moves, bends, jumps, dances, smiles, breaks into despair, bites his hands, closes her eyes, and if you cannot do it with a vivid and ekphrastic style of writing that can produce specific images, you cannot study film acting. Girelli is the kind of gifted writer that acting studies needs. She knows what a significant detail is; she can show how these details form a gesture, an expression, an ethical or a political stance; and she has the ability to unfold her descriptions with rhythm, thereby reproducing the specific duration of any acting style. Girelli writes about acting style the way a musician performs a piece of music.”
– Serge Cardinal, University of Montreal
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Elisabetta Girelli is Honorary Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. She has published widely on performance, stardom, silent film, Queer Theory, and cinematic representation.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Silent Film Performance
Book Subtitle: Dramatic Bodies on Screen
Authors: Elisabetta Girelli
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75103-6
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-75102-9Published: 20 June 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-75105-0Published: 21 June 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-75103-6Published: 18 June 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 112
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Screen Performance, Film History