Carceral Fantasies : Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America / Alison Griffiths.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Griffiths, Alison, author.

Series:

Film and culture.

Film and Culture Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prisoners--Recreation--United States.

Prisoners.

Prisoners--United States--Social conditions.

Motion picture audiences--United States.

Motion picture audiences.

Prison films--History and criticism.

Prison films.

Imprisonment in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations (black and white).

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

PDF

Summary:

A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life.Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposés of the 1920s.She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film's psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media's sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public's understanding of the modern prison.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One. The Carceral Imaginary

1. Tableaux Mort: Execution, Cinema, and Carceral Fantasies

2. Prison on Screen: The Carceral Aesthetic

Part Two. The Carceral Spectator

3. Screens and the Senses in Prison

4. "The Great Unseen Audience": Sing Sing Prison and Motion Pictures

Part Three. The Carceral Reformer

5. A Different Story: Recreation and Cinema in Women's Prisons and Reformatories

6. Cinema and Prison Reform

Conclusion: The Prison Museum and Media Use in the Con temporary Prison

Notes

Filmography

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9780231541565

0231541562

OCLC:

971036500