Film Serials and the American Cinema, 1910-1940: Operational Detection
Abstract
Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialised films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival research, Ilka Brasch details the aesthetic appeals of film serials within their context of marketing and exhibition and that they adapt the pleasures of a flourishing crime fiction culture to both serialised visual culture and the affordances of the media-modernity of the early 20th century. The study furthermore traces how film serials brought the broadcast model of radio and television to the big screen and thereby introduced models of serial storytelling that informed popular culture even beyond the serial's demise.
Keywords
General & world history; General & world history; General & world historyDOI
10.1515/9789048537808ISBN
9789462986527OCN
1062395917Publisher
Amsterdam University PressPublisher website
https://www.aup.nl/Publication date and place
Amsterdam, 2018Series
Film Culture in Transition,Classification
Digital, video and new media arts
Theatre studies
Film history, theory or criticism