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Note: thesis: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
Genre (aat): theses
Abstract: The rhetoric of textual stability tends to inform much of the scholarly writing about moving images, especially those manufactured by Hollywood studios. Analytical and historical works alike commonly approach films as perfectly reproducible and stable texts that always circulate in identical copies, fostering the impression that they are unaffected by the passage of time and so have no history of change or transformation. This dissertation aims to challenge the dominant rhetoric by examining the historical role of textual variation in the American film industry’s adoption of synchronized sound (1926-1931), widescreen (1953-1956), premium cable and video (1983-1989), and finally DVD (1997-2005). Each chapter offers an account of a transitional period that details how the diffusion of new technology prompted the production, distribution, and exhibition of multiple versions of the same picture, which in turn could help sell and legitimize new technology. In connection with this, it utilizes a specific film as a case study, tracing its internal revision history and illustrating how textual differences between versions can reflect not just technological, but also economical and other distinctions between the various contexts, time periods, or markets through which they circulate. By reinterpreting the technological history of the film industry and linking it to the internal history of an individual film, this dissertation will argue that, as cinema gradually adapts new standards, conventions, and norms, so do the texts that represent it. Their instability in this regard signifies that the film industry has a history, meaning they could only be stable texts if the industry itself were forever fixed and unchanging. By illustrating this, the study intends to incite a scholarly redefinition of a film as an inherently variable text and so promote a conception of film history as a history of how and why film texts collectively change over time. In the process, it hopes to provide new insight into prominent discourses in film and media studies, including preservation, censorship, auteurism, cultural legitimation, and obsolescence, as well as to increase scholarly interest in the variation of films and other media texts as a whole.
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Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"): In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access: Collection is open for research.
Identifier: DOI: 10.26300/g1p1-3h87
Type of Resource (primo): dissertations