Blondes Have More Fun: Anita Loos and the Language of Silent Cinema

Alongside the well-known controversy about the coming of sound, the history of early cinema also includes a debate about titling: words printed on the silent screen. Anita Loos, a screenwriter and author of the best-selling 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, developed a mode of writing in which literature and cinema unmoored the conventional relationship of the image to the word. Taken together, Loos’s titles and her novel show a cross-genre relationship of exchange that has the effect of reconceiving language and image. At a transitional moment when literary institutions were changing and the cinema was being born, Loos invents new forms of vernacular pleasure: the literary cinema, and the cinematic novel.