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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2016
• VerfasserIn: Griffiths, Alison,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2016]; ©2016
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Film and Culture Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (472 p.) :; 120 b&w illustrations

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.

Table of 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