The Tenth Muse explores writings on the
cinema in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Laura Marcus examines the impact of cinema on early
twentieth-century literary and, more broadly, aesthetic
and cultural consciousness, by bringing together the
study of the terms and strategies of early writings
about film with literary engagement with cinema in the
same period. She gives a new understanding of the ways
in which early writers about film - reviewers, critics,
theorists - developed aesthetic categories to define and
accommodate what was called 'the seventh art' or 'the
tenth muse' and found discursive strategies adequate to
the representation of the new art and technology of
cinema, with its unprecedented powers of movement.
In examining the writings of early film critics
and commentators in tandem with those of more
specifically literary figures, including H.G.Wells and
Virginia Woolf, and in bringing literary texts into this
field, Laura Marcus provides a new account of
relationships between cinema and literature.
Intertwining two major strands of research - the
exploration of early film criticism and theory and
cinema's presence in literary texts - The Tenth Muse
shows how issues central to an understanding of cinema
(including questions of time, repetition, movement,
vision, sound and silence) are threaded through both
kinds of writing, and the ways in which discursive and
fictional writings overlapped.
The movement that
defined cinema was also perceived as a more fragile and
unstable ephemerality that inhered at every level, from
the fleeting nature of the projected images to the
vagaries of cinematic exhibition. It was the anxiety
over the mutability of the medium and its exhibition
which, from the 1920s onwards, led to the establishment
of such institutional spaces for cinema as the
London-based Film Society, the new film journals, and,
in the 1930s, the first film archives. The Tenth Muse
explores the continuities between these sites of
cinematic culture and the conceptual, literary and
philosophical understandings of the filmic medium.
|
|