Harrison, R. (2018) From Steam to Screen: Cinema, the Railways and Modernity. Series: Cinema and society. I.B. Tauris. ISBN 9781784539153
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Abstract
Between 1895 and 1948, British media were fascinated by the technological transformations of modernity. Films, newspapers, illustrations and literature told stories about technology that astonished the senses, from locomotives breaking land-speed records and moving images springing into life onscreen, to the wreckage of train crashes and the disaster of cinema fires. And, whether in films about train travel, or in newspaper articles about movie theatres on trains, stories about the convergence of the railway and cinema were especially prominent. Together, the two technologies radically transformed how people interacted with the world around them, and the train and the cinema became crucial to how British media perceived the nation’s modernity and role within the empire. From Steam to Screen: Cinema, the Railways and Modernity draws on archival sources and an extensive corpus of films to trace the intertwined histories of the train and the screen. In doing so, the book contextualises cinema in a constellation of new technologies and media, which not only includes the railway, but also electricity, advertising, radio and television, to produce a new history of film and consumerism in Britain. Moreover, while recognising that the train and cinema both facilitated mass consumption, From Steam to Screen reveals how gender, race, age and class all impacted people’s encounters with modernity in carriages, auditoriums and the spaces represented onscreen.
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