Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States, by Martin L. Johnson

Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

关键词: localism;    community media;    modernity;    film history;    recognition;   

DOI  :  https://doi.org/10.33178/alpha.20.21

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States, Martin L. Johnson begins with a grand, if parodic, tone when he says, in reference to the book of Genesis: “[i]n the beginning, all moving images were local” (1). Like any good essentialising statement, it aims not so much at an overarching truth, but rather at creating new ways of thinking within a well-rehearsed framework. The new in this statement is an attempt to provide an alternative story for the origins of cinema, circumventing the now well-established theories like Tom Gunning’s “cinema of attractions” (57) or Charles Musser’s cinema of “narrative integration” (407).In this way the book sets the scene for the importance of local film and its place neither as an “ahistorical film genre” that provides a “remnant of forgotten people and distant places,” (3) nor as something that mimics established film genres. Instead, Johnson looks at how local film was a “mode” as opposed to a genre of filmmaking, and how practitioners of this mode “presented, and challenged, the local they claimed to represent,” (3) while simultaneously challenging the prevalence of classical Hollywood cinema and the type of spectatorship it engendered.

【 授权许可】

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