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Resource type: Journal Article Language: en: English Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2014.924422 BibTeX citation key: McKenna2014 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: Caricature, Film, Randformen des Comics, USA Creators: McKenna Collection: Early Popular Visual Culture |
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Abstract |
During the 1910s, film trade journals and fan magazines documented cinema’s expanding economic and cultural significance, celebrating actors, studios and motion pictures with evangelical enthusiasm. These journals also inadvertently archived the film industry’s growing pains, allowing us to trace both the growth of celebrity culture and the motion pictures’ industrial formation. Central to this formative period was the relentless discourse of uplift, which focused on ways to assert cinema’s cultural legitimacy yet at the same time highlighted the industry’s own perception of its precarious social standing. This article examines the use of editorial cartoons in fan and trade journals to track the cultural aspirations of the film industry. This article traces how cartoon commentary deployed the visual signifiers of class and social status to assert cinema’s cultural legitimacy.
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