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/9780231161060.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Chapter 3: “Screens and the Senses in Prison” examines how film exhibition in prisons across the US and UK was covered in the popular press, trade publications, prisoner-written magazines, books, and ...
More
Chapter 3: “Screens and the Senses in Prison” examines how film exhibition in prisons across the US and UK was covered in the popular press, trade publications, prisoner-written magazines, books, and articles, and how incarceration’s recalibration of space and time affected the senses in curiously proto-cinematic ways. These accounts reveal a great deal about the distinctive nature of non-theatrical film exhibition in cinema’s earliest decades and the special journalistic attention that the prison as exhibition venue attracted. Documenting some of the earliest uses of film in penitentiaries across the United States, I explore the introduction of prison libraries, illustrated lectures, and vaudeville shows as reformist measures creating the conditions of possibility for cinema; the popular press’s imagining of film spectatorship in prison as a social experiment akin to avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s idea of the “untutored eye”; film as a portal to the outside word; and the cell and prison chapel as over-determined, metaphorical spaces of projection.Less
Chapter 3: “Screens and the Senses in Prison” examines how film exhibition in prisons across the US and UK was covered in the popular press, trade publications, prisoner-written magazines, books, and articles, and how incarceration’s recalibration of space and time affected the senses in curiously proto-cinematic ways. These accounts reveal a great deal about the distinctive nature of non-theatrical film exhibition in cinema’s earliest decades and the special journalistic attention that the prison as exhibition venue attracted. Documenting some of the earliest uses of film in penitentiaries across the United States, I explore the introduction of prison libraries, illustrated lectures, and vaudeville shows as reformist measures creating the conditions of possibility for cinema; the popular press’s imagining of film spectatorship in prison as a social experiment akin to avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s idea of the “untutored eye”; film as a portal to the outside word; and the cell and prison chapel as over-determined, metaphorical spaces of projection.
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 ...
More
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.
