Silent Film Performance: Dramatic Bodies on Screen

✍ Scribed by Elisabetta Girelli

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 118
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
Sign of the Uncanny: Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916, USA)
References
Performing Loneliness: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Silent Soliloquy in Baryshnya i Khuligan/The Young Lady and the Hooligan (1918, USSR)
References
Re-booting the Self: Ivan Mozzhukhin and Queer Failure in Feu Mathias Pascal/The Late Mathias Pascal (1926, France)
References
‘Our Bravest and Most Beautiful Soldier’: Pola Negri, Wartime, and the Gendering of Anxiety in Hotel Imperial (1927, USA)
References
Silent Performance Beyond Silent Film: Harald Kreutzberg in Paracelsus (1943, Germany)
References
Index