Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
The Cinema and Its Shadow
Race and Technology in Early Cinema
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
The Cinema and Its Shadow argues that race has defined the cinematic apparatus since the earliest motion pictures, especially at times of technological transition. In particular, this work explores how racial difference became central to the resolving of cinematic problems: the stationary camera, narrative form, realism, the synchronization of image and sound, and, perhaps most fundamentally, the immaterial image—the cinema’s “shadow,” which figures both the material reality of the screen image and its racist past.
Discussing early “race subjects,” Alice Maurice demonstrates that these films influenced cinematic narrative in lasting ways by helping to determine the relation between stillness and motion, spectacle and narrative drive. The book examines how motion picture technology related to race, embodiment, and authenticity at specific junctures in cinema’s development, including the advent of narratives, feature films, and sound. In close readings of such films as The Cheat, Shadows, and Hallelujah!, Maurice reveals how the rhetoric of race repeatedly embodies film technology, endowing it with a powerful mix of authenticity and magic. In this way, the racialized subject became the perfect medium for showing off, shoring up, and reintroducing the cinematic apparatus at various points in the history of American film.
Moving beyond analyzing race in purely thematic or ideological terms, Maurice traces how it shaped the formal and technological means of the cinema.
See the publisher website: University of Minnesota Press
> From the same author:
> On a related topic:
Finding Birt Acres (2025)
The Rediscovery of a Film Pioneer
by Deac Rossell, Barry Anthony and Peter Domankiewicz
Subject: Silent Cinema
Screening Europe in Australasia (2024)
Transnational Silent Film Before and After the Rise of Hollywood
Subject: Silent Cinema
New Perspectives on Early Cinema History (2024)
Concepts, Approaches, Audiences
Dir. Mario Slugan and Daniel Biltereyst
Subject: Silent Cinema
Transnational Trailblazers of Early Cinema (2023)
Sarah Bernhardt, Gabrielle Réjane, Mistinguett
Subject: Silent Cinema
Back
