Jennifer Graber
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- July 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780807834572
- eISBN:
- 9781469603339
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of North Carolina Press
- DOI:
- 10.5149/9780807877838_graber.7
- Subject:
- Religion, Religious Studies
This chapter is about a young minister who sat in on a conversation between Auburn Prison's resident chaplain, the Reverend Jared Curtis, and an African American inmate, Jack Hodges. Hodges was ...
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This chapter is about a young minister who sat in on a conversation between Auburn Prison's resident chaplain, the Reverend Jared Curtis, and an African American inmate, Jack Hodges. Hodges was serving a ten-year sentence for his role in a murder plot. According to the visitor's account, Hodges considered himself a sinner and an unbeliever upon his arrival at Auburn. After many visits from Chaplain Curtis and a long period of spiritual suffering, however, he experienced conversion. The visitor listened to Hodges recount his movement from repentance toward belief and moral living. “In the providence of God, you have a long sentence,” Curtis observed. “Can you say, Thy will be done?” Hodges answered, “That is my prayer.” Moved by this exchange, the visiting minister asked Hodges again to reflect on his prison experience. “Yes sir,” Hodges began, “I feel grateful that I was brought here.”Less
This chapter is about a young minister who sat in on a conversation between Auburn Prison's resident chaplain, the Reverend Jared Curtis, and an African American inmate, Jack Hodges. Hodges was serving a ten-year sentence for his role in a murder plot. According to the visitor's account, Hodges considered himself a sinner and an unbeliever upon his arrival at Auburn. After many visits from Chaplain Curtis and a long period of spiritual suffering, however, he experienced conversion. The visitor listened to Hodges recount his movement from repentance toward belief and moral living. “In the providence of God, you have a long sentence,” Curtis observed. “Can you say, Thy will be done?” Hodges answered, “That is my prayer.” Moved by this exchange, the visiting minister asked Hodges again to reflect on his prison experience. “Yes sir,” Hodges began, “I feel grateful that I was brought here.”
Alison Griffiths
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231161060
- eISBN:
- 9780231541565
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231161060.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 5: “A Different Story: Recreation and Cinema in Women’s Prisons and Reformatories” explores how women incarcerated in prisons and reformatories at the turn-of-the-last century first ...
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Chapter 5: “A Different Story: Recreation and Cinema in Women’s Prisons and Reformatories” explores how women incarcerated in prisons and reformatories at the turn-of-the-last century first encountered modern media such as magic lantern slides, phonographs, and motion pictures and why film exhibition began later in the women’s prison than in male institutions. Using New York State Prison for Women in Auburn and Bedford Hills Women’s Reformatory as case studies, the chapter considers what alternative models of women’s recreation were deemed suitable and what happened on occasions when women were shown motion pictures.Less
Chapter 5: “A Different Story: Recreation and Cinema in Women’s Prisons and Reformatories” explores how women incarcerated in prisons and reformatories at the turn-of-the-last century first encountered modern media such as magic lantern slides, phonographs, and motion pictures and why film exhibition began later in the women’s prison than in male institutions. Using New York State Prison for Women in Auburn and Bedford Hills Women’s Reformatory as case studies, the chapter considers what alternative models of women’s recreation were deemed suitable and what happened on occasions when women were shown motion pictures.
Alison Griffiths
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780231161060
- eISBN:
- 9780231541565
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231161060.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
