Charles Barr
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780197266434
- eISBN:
- 9780191884191
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- British Academy
- DOI:
- 10.5871/bacad/9780197266434.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Silent films were commonly adapted for foreign markets not simply by translation of intertitles but, when desired, by more radical change, both to the titles and to the whole structure and thrust of ...
More
Silent films were commonly adapted for foreign markets not simply by translation of intertitles but, when desired, by more radical change, both to the titles and to the whole structure and thrust of the narrative. The young Soviet Union systematically transformed films from the West in order to make them ideologically acceptable for its own public, as well as to train filmmakers in the craft of editing. The discovery in Moscow of the re-edited version of the 1922 Anglo-American production Three Live Ghosts—on which Alfred Hitchcock worked as title designer—enables an unprecedentedly full case study of this transformation process. Characters and their Great War context are ruthlessly reworked, in the service of a fresh anti-capitalist story. Finally, the same process is traced in reverse, in the sound period, through Hollywood’s own re-editing, for Cold War audiences, of its pro-Soviet wartime feature North Star into an anti-Soviet narrative.Less
Silent films were commonly adapted for foreign markets not simply by translation of intertitles but, when desired, by more radical change, both to the titles and to the whole structure and thrust of the narrative. The young Soviet Union systematically transformed films from the West in order to make them ideologically acceptable for its own public, as well as to train filmmakers in the craft of editing. The discovery in Moscow of the re-edited version of the 1922 Anglo-American production Three Live Ghosts—on which Alfred Hitchcock worked as title designer—enables an unprecedentedly full case study of this transformation process. Characters and their Great War context are ruthlessly reworked, in the service of a fresh anti-capitalist story. Finally, the same process is traced in reverse, in the sound period, through Hollywood’s own re-editing, for Cold War audiences, of its pro-Soviet wartime feature North Star into an anti-Soviet narrative.
