A Space Apart: Animation and the Spatial Politics of Conversion
Reading cartoons and associated exhibition practices in the silent and early sound eras, this essay examines the expression of the black/white racial binary in American animation of the 1920s and 1930s. It treats cartoons as a case study in the visual representation of the intersection of spatial practice, aesthetics, and labor/management relations in the reorganization of the American film industry during the transition to sound film..
Hollywood in the Neighborhood: Historical Case Studies of Local Moviegoing
PART I: INTRODUCTION-SETTING THE CONTEXTS 1. Introduction: Researching and Writing the History of Local Moviegoing Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley and George Potamianos 2. Decentering Historical Audience Studies: A Modest Proposal Robert C. Allen PART II: ORIGINS-CASE STUDIES 3. The Itinerant Movie Show and the Development of the Film Industry Calvin Pryluck 4. Early Film Exhibition in Wilmington, North Carolina Anne Morey 5. Building Movie Audiences in Placerville, California, 1908-1915 George Potamianos 6. Cinema Virtue, Cinema Vice: Race, Religion, and Film Exhibition in Norfolk, Virginia, 1908-1922 Terry Lindvall PART III: INTEGRATION AND VARIATIONS-CASE STUDIES 7. The Movies in a "Not So Visible Place": Des Moines, Iowa, 1911-1914 Richard Abel 8. Digging the Finest Potatoes from Their Acre: Government Film Exhibition in Rural Ontario, 1917-1934 Charles Tepperman 9. At the Movies in the "Biggest Little City in Wisconsin" Leslie Midkiff DeBauche PART IV: MATURITY AND CRISIS IN THE 1930S-CASE STUDIES 10. Imagining and Promoting the Small-Town Theater Gregory A. Waller 11. "What the Picture Did for Me": Small-Town Exhibitors' Strategies for Surviving the Great Depression Kathryn H. Fuller-Seeley 12. "Something for Nothing": Bank Night and the Refashioning of the American Dream Paige Reynolds PART V: LOOKING BACKWARD, LOOKING FORWARD 13. Bad Sound and Sticky Floors: An Ethnographic Look at the Symbolic Value of Historic Small-Town Movie Theaters Kevin Corbett 14. Conclusion: When Theory Hits the Road Ronald G. Walters Contributors Selected Bibliography Index
Scene Shift, Metalepsis, and the Metaleptic Mode
When Gerard Genette coined the term "metalepsis" in the fifth chapter (on "Voice") of his Discours du recit, he defined it as "any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse (as in Cortazar) [...]" (Narrative Discourse 234-35; Figures IH 244). Genette had already given an example of metalepsis in the second chapter ("Duration") when he refers to a typically Balzacian narrative pause in La Vieille Fille in which narrator and reader together "enter" the Cormon townhouse in order to gain a view of the scene: But we know that the Balzacian novel, on the contrary, established a typically extratemporal descriptive canon [...], a canon where the narrator, forsaking the cause of the story [...], makes it his business, in his own name and solely for the information of his reader, to describe a scene that at this point in the story no one, strictly speaking, is looking at. For example, as the sentence in the Vieille Fille that opens the scene at the Cormon townhouse certainly indicates: "Now, however, it will be necessary to enter the household of that elderly spinster toward whom so many interests converge, and within whose walls the actors in this Scene are to meet this very evening." This "entering" is obviously the doing of the narrator and reader alone, who are going to wander over the house and the garden while the real "actors in this Scene" continue to attend to their business elsewhere, or rather wait to go back to their business until the narrative agrees to return to them and restore them to life.(100-01; 134-35) In this passage the narrator accompanied by the "reader" seemingly moves into the world of the fiction, pointing out to the narratee the setting of events to be described in the following pages. This technique is very similar to one common in Fielding's novels, first pointed out in his doctoral dissertation by Wilhelm Fuger, one of the doyens of German narratology: "But we will be more courteous to our reader than he [the coachman] was to Mrs Slipslop, and leaving the coach and its company to pursue their journey, we will carry our reader on after Parson Adams [...]" (Joseph Andrews 2.7). In these examples, two characteristic features are to be noted. First, the discourse level and story level in an authorial narrative (heterodiegetic narrative with zero focalization) seem to merge ontologically or existentially (the narrator and narratee seem to have entered the story world at least in imagination if not in real fact). Second, this curious imaginative transgression of narrative levels occurs in a pause of the story, as a narratorial insertion corresponding to no action on the plot level. The term "transgression," actually, is quite inadequate to the effect of these passages since they tend to enhance the realistic illusion of storyworld representation, aiding the narratee's (as well as the reader's) imaginative immersion into the story rather than foregrounding the metafictional and transgressive (nonrealistic) properties of such an imaginative stepping into the story world. In the footnote attached to the paragraph in chapter 2 of Narrative Discourse from which I began by quoting, Genette in fact compares the device to a metaphoric Gygean ring--a figure that Genette borrows from Theophile Gautier--that allows narrator and narratee to be present but invisible on the scene: Gautier will use this technique to the point of a flippancy that "bares" it, as the Formalists would say: "The Marquise inhabited a separate suite, which the Marquis did not enter unless he was announced. We will commit this impropriety that authors of all times have allowed themselves, and without saying a word to the buttons who would have forwarned the lodger, we will penetrate into the bedroom, sure of disturbing no one. …