Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth

the long version

In Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth, Paula Marantz Cohen tells the story of silent film's rise. American silent film, she contends, answered the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson and Thoreau for an original mode of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. Tracing silent film's roots in popular nineteenth-century forms such as vaudeville, landscape painting, and portrait photography, Cohen documents the way silent film took three elements already charged with meaning - the body, the landscape, and the face - and developed the cinematic genres of comedy, the western, and the melodrama. At the same time, American silent film helped produce a new concept of character, embodied in the movie star. -- from back cover.