The Fun Factory - The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture

1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-0-520-25538-8
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 376 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 590 g

From its founding in 1912, the short-lived Keystone Film Company—home of the frantic, bumbling Kops and Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties—made an indelible mark on American popular culture with its high-energy comic shorts. Even as Keystone brought "lowbrow" comic traditions to the screen, the studio played a key role in reformulating those traditions for a new, cross-class audience. In The Fun Factory, Rob King explores the dimensions of that process, arguing for a new understanding of working-class cultural practices within early cinematic mass culture. He shows how Keystone fashioned a style of film comedy from the roughhouse humor of cheap theater, pioneering modes of representation that satirized film industry attempts at uplift. Interdisciplinary in its approach, The Fun Factory offers a unique studio history that views the changing politics of early film culture through the sociology of laughter.

Autoren/Hrsg.

King, Rob

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Freizeitsoziologie, Konsumsoziologie, Alltagssoziologie, Populärkultur
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I: “SATIRE IN OVERALLS”: THE KEYSTONE FILM COMPANY AND POPULAR CULTURE

1. “The Fun Factory”: Class, Comedy, and Popular Culture, 1912-1914

2. “Funny Germans” and “Funny Drunks”: Clowns, Class, and Ethnicity at Keystone, 1913-1915

3. “The Impossible Attained!” Tillie's Punctured Romance and the Challenge of Feature-Length Slapstick, 1914-1915

PART II: “MORE CLEVER AND LESS VULGAR”: THE KEYSTONE FILM COMPANY AND MASS CULTURE

4. “Made for the Masses with an Appeal to the Classes”: Keystone, the Triangle Film Corporation, and the Failure of Highbrow Film Culture, 1915-1917

5. “Uproarious Inventions”: Keystone, Modernity, and the Machine, 1915-1917

6. From “Diving Venus” to “Bathing Beauties”: Reification and Feminine Spectacle, 1916-1917

Conclusion

Notes

Filmography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Rob King is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and History at the University of Toronto.