The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature theatres, newsreel theatres, and private venues. In the third chapter , "Limited Audience Appeal," Wilinsky discusses the decline of the major studios, as a consequence of anti-trust lawsuits and increased production costs, and the rising popularity of foreign films as "viable screen-time fillers for small suburban houses suffering from product shortages." In "Any Leisure That Looks Easy Is Suspect," the author details how exhibitors used advertising to attract the "lost audience ," viewers over thirty, and to draw an increasingly suburban populace into the urban-based theatres. Wilinsky's fifth chapter, "Demitasse Intermissions and Lobbies Hung with Paintings," is the only one to deal exclusively with the art house itself. In this chapter, the author studies the specific features of the art house including location, size, admission price, length of runs, film schedules, decor, atmosphere, promotions, and marquees. Overall, Sure Seaters is a valuable contribution to film scholarship. Wilinsky's investigative study into an often underexplored area offilm history, the art house cinema, is important. Although the art house aspect of arthouse cinema may be somewhat understated in the text, the author's analysis of art cinema within the context of the postwar years more than compensates for this single oversight. Harvey Young Cornell University hjy4@cornell.edu Nell Shipman. The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart. Hemingway Western Studies Center, 2001. 231 pages; $24.95. Love for Animals " I would get my own wild animal cast and make actors of them without the use ofwhips, shouted commands, charged wires poked into them, or by boring them with tiresome training (i)" This is one, if not the primary belief held by the late silent filmmaking star, Nell Shipman (1892-1970). Her story, however, is much more than love for animals. It is one of adventurous and pioneering movie efforts, all intertwined in her fascinating film and stage autobiography, The Silent Screen and my Talking Heart: An Autobiography (Third Edition). Ms. Shipman recounts her life story in relatively chronological fashion, occasionally straying in a flashback moment, as in the section of her mother's death. Nonetheless, no matter how far she strayed in her thoughts or how far she progressed in her career, she kept returning to her respect for animals on and off the movie set. She even held this belief while other directors in this time period used harsh and violent force to gain the desired reactions from their animals. Ms. Shipman wrote"[animals] did not seem to study their scripts or know they must register rage and pain, orpretend death (i)." This is only one area, though, in which she helped bring change to the movie industry. She was also a forerunner in location filming , which gave her movies a genuine quality, the added bonuses in advertising, and the chance to use her animals For instance, one of her most popular films Back to God's Country (1919), advertised that the cast and crew suffered through 60 degrees below zero temperature and used sixteen different kinds of wild animals to make the motion picture. One ofher favorite locations was the frigid wilderness area of Priest Lake, Idaho, filming Trail of the North Wind (1923), The Light on Lookout (1923), and the White Water (1924) there. However, shooting on location during that time period proved costly and dangerous. However, not in light of these filmmaking innovations, the key element of the book is the opportunity to learn about the early development of the new media ofmoving pictures, through an entertaining first hand account. For instance, Nell Shipman started her career as an actresses working a number of small offBroadway acts. After gaining some experience, she began to write plays and used this background to become a screen writer, a silent screen actress, director and producer. Moreover, in her movie making days it was not uncommon for her to produce, direct, and act in her own films and even negotiate a contract with a distribution company. Eventually, this independent style of film production would evolve and give way to major studios and the development of specialized jobs. Hence, Nell Shipman's life provides readers a glimpse of the industry before this evolution and in a rather informative fashion...