Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space ed. by Jennifer M. Bean, Anupama Kapse, and Laura Horak (review)

Film scholars have revised, deepened, and remapped silent cinema during the last two odd decades. The scholarship has drawn on new theoretical perspectives to explore silent cinema as an art form that articulates intriguing negotiations and constructions of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class, and that involves far-reaching cultural, social, and political connections. These theoretical revisions have coincided with a renewal of interest in silent cinema among the general public; screenings of silent cinema on the festival circuit, as well as in regular cinema theaters, are becoming relatively plentiful. One of the latest contributions to this silent cinema efflorescence is the edited volume Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space by film scholars Jennifer M. Bean, Anupama Kapse, and Laura Horak, a trio that, during the preparation of the book, were geographically spread across North America and Europe—in Seattle, New York, and Stockholm, respectively.

This spatial dispersal, albeit including only in the Western world, is a fitting metaphor for the theme of the volume, which—according to the blurb on the book’s cover—is to “explore the transnational crossings and exchanges that occurred in early cinema between the two world wars.” This aim encompasses a wide range of themes that are examples of what Jennifer Bean in her introduction calls “the messiness of cinema’s dispersed existence in these years: by the cross-pollination of images in diverse parts of the globe; by the international penchant for piracy (and piracy’s cheeky cousins, modification and appropriation); by the recycling of obsolete or junk prints in so-called peripheral markets; and by the refashioning of iconic identities and events as they cross media forms and geographic borders” (p. 1). The editors’ broader purpose encompasses more than historical revision, however. Their ambition is “to provide an introduction to some of the efforts to lay the groundwork for a philosophical and methodological shift in the writing of film history and geography” (p. 8). This goal is met by some of the articles in the volume.

Because this review is intended for readers with an interest in Scandinavian studies, I focus on the three articles in the book dealing with this region, and discuss them in the order they appear in the volume. Nevertheless, other articles in this interesting and highly readable collection may be of interest to a broader audience than silent film scholars and fans. The volume explores countries, regions, and motifs that seldom receive adequate attention in scholarly works on silent film studies. Examples include Kaveh Askari’s informative chapter on the recycling and appropriation of other nations’ serials and films in the shape of damaged or “junk” prints in 1920s Tehran, and Laura Isabel Serna’s inspiring exploration of the translation of intertitles in American films exported to Mexico. A significant and engaging example of the volume’s “bound-less” approach is Priya Jaikumar’s strong analysis of the Edison film The Relief of Lucknow (1912), produced in the United States and set in India in 1857, but shot in Bermuda.

Related to Jaikumar’s discussion is Mark Sandberg’s knowledgeable, insightful, and entertaining article “Location, ‘Location’: On the Plausibility of Place Substitution.” Among the three articles focusing on Scandinavian cinema, Sandberg’s article most literally anchors its reasoning in space as locality. He presents interesting theoretical discussions firmly established in wonderful empirical examples, and elegantly connects personal and modern experiences of how film works with and transforms localities with a discussion of how silent cinema’s contemporary audience understood the concept of place authenticity.

Tying his discussion to a modern film worker’s statement—“All you have to do is change the sign,” made during the filming of The Kite Runner (2007), shot in China as a stand-in for Afghanistan—Sandberg observes that cinematic location is “nonessential” and that “the distinctiveness of place is assumed to reside in a thin, superficially visual layer of culture that...