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OverviewIn the earliest years of cinema, travelogues were a staple of variety film programs in commercial motion picture theaters. These short films, also known as ""scenics,"" depicted tourist destinations and exotic landscapes otherwise inaccessible to most viewers. Scenics were so popular that they were briefly touted as the future of film. But despite their pervasiveness during the early twentieth century, travelogues have been overlooked by film historians and critics. In Education in the School of Dreams, Jennifer Lynn Peterson recovers this lost archive. Through innovative readings of travelogues and other nonfiction films exhibited in the United States between 1907 and 1915, she offers fresh insights into the aesthetic and commercial history of early cinema and provides a new perspective on the intersection of American culture, imperialism, and modernity in the nickelodeon era. Peterson describes the travelogue's characteristic form and style and demonstrates how imperialist ideologies were realized and reshaped through the moving image. She argues that although educational films were intended to legitimate filmgoing for middle-class audiences, travelogues were not simply vehicles for elite ideology. As a form of instructive entertainment, these technological moving landscapes were both formulaic and also wondrous and dreamlike. Considering issues of spectatorship and affect, Peterson argues that scenics produced and disrupted viewers' complacency about their own place in the world. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Jennifer Lynn PetersonPublisher: Duke University Press Imprint: Duke University Press Dimensions: Width: 16.30cm , Height: 2.80cm , Length: 23.90cm Weight: 0.730kg ISBN: 9780822354413ISBN 10: 0822354411 Pages: 400 Publication Date: 22 May 2013 Audience: College/higher education , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print  This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xix Introduction. The Dreamworld of Cinematic Travel 1 1. Varieties of Travel Experience: Burton Holmes and the Travelogue Tradition 23 2. The Living Panorama of Nature : Early Nonfiction and the American Film Industry 63 3. The Five-Cent University : Educational Films and the Drive to Uplift the Cinema 101 4. Atop of the World in Motion : Visualizing the Pleasures of Empire 137 5. Scenic Films and the Cinematic Picturesque 175 6. A Weird and Affecting Beauty : Watching Travel Films in the 1910s 207 7. The Nation's First Playground : Wilderness Modernized in the American West 235 Epilogue. Reveries of the Solitary Walker 269 Notes 277 Filmography 323 Bibliography 331 Index 353Reviews"""Education in the School of Dreams is an outstanding book written by one of early cinema's smartest scholars. Jennifer Peterson brings the aesthetic beauty and ideological complexity of the film travelogue to life on every page. She asks the right questions of these films and their viewing contexts and offers theoretically sophisticated answers that will have an impact on historians of travel writing, geography, visual education, and the social sciences."" - Alison Griffiths,author of Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View" Jennifer Lynn Peterson brings an imaginative scholarship to a much-needed study of a genre pervasive in popular cinema of its time yet unjustly ignored by film historians as presumably mundane. Education in the School of Dreams reveals that travelogues still have much to teach us about how the world was perceived and visually reproduced in the early decades of cinema. Peterson shows how such films not only deal with travel per se, but engage significant concepts, including nature, aesthetics, transportation, modernity, and popular and formal education. Peterson's research is both deep and broad, offering a truly impressive examination of hundreds of movies demanding our reconsideration. --Dan Streible, author of Learning with the Lights Off: A Reader in Educational Film Education in the School of Dreams is an outstanding book written by one of the smartest scholars of early cinema. Jennifer Lynn Peterson brings the aesthetic beauty and ideological complexity of the film travelogue to life on every page. She asks the right questions of these films and their viewing contexts and offers theoretically sophisticated answers that will have an impact on historians of travel writing, geography, visual education, and the social sciences. --Alison Griffiths, author of Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View Author InformationJennifer Lynn Peterson is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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