Looking for a book recommendation:
ISO a book that will explain, delineate, etc, narrative forms in film in the 1920s and 1930s.
Should be easy, right? Anybody out there taken a film theory class? John, maybe there's one on your visual culture list or something?
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Reception stuff or historical overviews would probably be good. It's for a paper on "Nanook of the North" (1922), which I'm sure you're familiar with - it's a "documentary" about the Inuit by Robert Flaherty - and I'm comparing it to the movie "Eskimo" (1933), which was a narrative fiction film (I guess you could maybe call it an an action-adventure...or a prototypical one) about the life of the explorer Peter Freuchen.
The point of the paper will be to talk about how native actors were used to give "Eskimo" a "documentary" flair, and I plan on talking about the way that each movie constructs "heroism" in their Inuit stars.
The prof suggested I ground the discussion in a sense of how other films from the time made heroes, etc. (But didn't have a book to recommend...) So I guess probably melodrama would be the genre I'd most be interested in...
Another thing is, if you have anything that's only about film from the 1930s, that might be sufficient - there's a ton, a ton of stuff on Nanook, so the Eskimo section is really what's lacking.
Hey,
I'm not sure if the 1930s book is out, but you might want to check Rutgers University Press's screen decade series. I've found American Cinema of the 1940s pretty helpful.
Maybe you should post on h-film
Ugh, it's not out yet. That woulda been perfect...
I'd think maybe some histories of documentary would be a good place to look.
You might try A New History of Documentary Film by Betsy A. McLane and Jack C. Ellis as a starter.
Well, hey, Carly! Why aren't you a member on here already? I'm going to invite you.
Yeah. Native Ams and film. That's a huge topic with copious and interesting lit that I do not have time to look at in the next two weeks. I really hate this phase of the semester, when you realize that your paper is more interesting than you have time for. Anyway, I'm looking at "Nanook" more from the perspective of ethnographic film, or trying to. (Flaherty went on to do several other ethnodocs, some in the South Seas, etc...) The _In the Money_ book sounds like a good bet, and blessedly, the PCL has it. At this point, I think I have to resist looking at the connection between pulps/novels and cinema, especially because this is a paper for an RTF class and the prof wants me to stay more at the level of textual analysis of the two films and not go too far afield. I proposed looking at these films as an extension of the practice of body display of Native Alaskans during this time period - at expositions, in museums - and she was dubious about that as well. (This is why I am not an RTF person.) But I think for my MA I will need to get into some kind of lit review about the action/adventure genre in the early 20th. I will ask you again.
Oh, hey, they just reissued the book about Ethnographic Film. It's called (so creative) Ethnographic Film: Revised Edition. It's by Karl G. Heider. From what I know, it discusses Nanook, but also places it in a context -- it wasn't the first film of the type, etc.
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