Parallel tracks : the railroad and silent cinema /
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 theoretical and histori...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Durham :
Duke University Press,
©1997.
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| Series: | ACLS Humanities E-Book.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | 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 theoretical and historical terms, blending film scholarship with railroad history. Describing the train as a mechanical double for the cinema, Lynne Kirby gives her romantic topic a compelling twist. She views the railroad/cinema romance in light of the technological and cultural instability underlying modernity and presents the railroad and cinema as complementary experiences that shaped the modern world and its subjects - the passengers and spectators who traveled through that world. In wide-ranging and provocative analyses of dozens of silent films - icons of film history like The General and The Great Train Robbery as well as many that are rarely discussed - Kirby examines how trains and rail travel embodied concepts of spectatorship and mobility grounded in imperialism and the social, sexual, and racial divisions of modern Western culture. |
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| Physical Description: | ix, 338 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-320) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0822318393 9780822318392 0822318334 9780822318330 |