Slapstick Comedy (AFI Film Readers) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415801788 ISBN 13: 9780415801782

Publisher: Routledge, 2010

Synopsis

From Chaplin’s tramp to the Bathing Beauties, from madcap chases to skyscraper perils, slapstick comedy supplied many of the most enduring icons of American cinema in the silent era. This collection of fourteen essays by prominent film scholars challenges longstanding critical dogma and offers new conceptual frameworks for thinking about silent comedy’s place in film history and American culture. The contributors discuss a broad range of topics including the contested theatrical or cinematic origins of slapstick; the comic spectacle of crazy technology and trick stunts; the filmmakers who shaped the style of early slapstick; and comedy’s implications for theories of film form and spectatorship.

This volume is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the origins and continued importance of a film genre at the heart of American cinema from its earliest days to today.

About this title

About the Author:

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).

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0415801788
• ISBN 13: 9780415801782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Paulus Tom, King Rob