'The downward path': The seduction of the spectator in American silent film historiography.

摘要

In an attempt to approach the persistent gravity of the classical Hollywood film spectator as an indicator of its hegemonic populism, the dissertation conceives of the historiography of the silent era as a melodramatic seduction plot. Seeking to rise to the methodological challenge posed by early cinema, Freud's seduction theory (as it has been elaborated by Jean Laplanche) is proposed as an alternative psychoanalytic model of cultural incorporation, to provide the frame to consider the constitution of the film populism of classical Hollywood spectatorship as a series of decisive historical encounters with the alterity of film's monstrative address. In an exploration of the bodies of work of film scholars including Linda Williams, Tom Gunning, Ben Brewster, Miriam Hansen and Mary Ann Doane, this project posits a dialectical itinerary to reimagine the transition from attractions to (narrative) seduction, and to rethink the way that the monstration of cinema (and its cultural hypostases) comes to invade the intimacy of the spectatorial interior. It reconsiders the decisive conflicts of American silent film's infancy against the screen of analyses of early American Mutoscope and Biograph Company peepshows and the silent films of Cecil B. DeMille, Rudolph Valentino, and Louise Brooks.;Keywords Film Spectatorship; Film Historiography; Film Theory; Silent Film; Early Cinema; Melodrama; Cinema of Attractions; Film Monstration; Transitional Cinema; Psychoanalysis; Seduction Theory; Jean Laplanche; Judith Butler; Film Bodies; Sex Appeal; Traffic in Souls (1913); The Downward Path (1900); The Picture the Photographer Took (1904); The Ten Commandments (1923); Cobra (1925); Pandora's Box (1929); Cecil B. DeMille; Rudolph Valentino; Louise Brooks; Tom Gunning; Miriam Hansen; Linda Williams; Ben Brewster; Mary Ann Doane; Christian Metz.