Overview

Slapstick comedy and its cast of film stars--Charlie Chaplin, the Keystone Cops, Fatty Arbuckle, and Buster Keaton among them--has long been viewed as central to the early formal development of narrative cinema generally, and of American cinema in particular. This new volume in the AFI Film Readers series presents 14 essays exploring the enduring debates and questions surrounding slapstick's role in the origins of cinema, as well as its place in movies today. A star-studded group of international film scholars discuss a broad range of topics including the contested theatrical or cinematic origins of slapstick, the links between comic spectacle and modernity, slapstick in a global context, and comedy's implications for theories of film form and spectatorship.

Full Product Details

Author:   Tom Paulus ,  Rob King ,  Rob King ,  Charles C. Wolfe (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.80cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.690kg
ISBN:  

9780415801782

ISBN 10:   0415801788
Pages:   288
Publication Date:   19 April 2010
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Introduction: Restoring Slapstick to the Historiography of American Film Tom Paulus and Rob King Part One: Originality and Adaptation 1. The Good Thieves: On the Origins of Situation Comedy in the British Music Hall Bryony Dixon 2. D. W. Griffith Shapes Slapstick Barry Salt 3. Genre Parody and Comedic Burlesque: Keystone’s Meta-Cinematic Satires Simon Joyce 4. Both Sides of the Camera: Roscoe ""Fatty"" Arbuckle’s Evolution at Keystone Joanna E. Rapf 5. Mud Pies and Tears: Little Mary’s Funny Side Anke Brouwers Part Two: Mechanics and Modernity 6. Mack Sennett vs. Henry Ford Eileen Bowser 7. ""Uproarious Inventions"": The Keystone Film Company, Modernity, and the Art of the Motor Rob King 8. Mechanisms of Laughter: The Devices of Slapstick Tom Gunning 9. Slapstick Skyscrapers: An Architecture of Attractions Steven Jacobs 10. California Slapstick Revisited Charles Wolfe Part Three: Bodies and Performance 11. Dancing on Fire and Water: Charlot and L’Esprit Nouveau Amy Sargeant 12. Splashes of Fun and Beauty: Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties Hilde D’Haeyere 13. Back to the ""Slap"": Slapstick’s Hyperbolic Gesture and the Rhetoric of Violence Muriel Andrin 14. The Art of Imitation: The Originality of Charlie Chaplin and Other Moving-Image Myths Jennifer M. Bean

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Author Information

TOM PAULUS is Assistant Professor in Cinema and Theater Studies at the University of Antwerp and the organizer of ""(Another) Slapstick Symposium."" ROB KING is Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies and History at the University of Toronto and the author of The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009).

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