Moving Americans: Cinematic history and national subjectivity in the United States silent film.

Abstract

The most basic idea of American identity is essentially--and paradoxically--universal. Silent film, conceived as a universal language, offers a propitious combination of features for narrating imaginary resolutions to the contradictions of national identity presented by the perceived absence of a shared history and the persistent salience of difference in modern U.S. culture. The dissertation explores American silent cinema's utopian ideal of universality as it collides with conflicted and segregated social practices. This collision is formally reflected in American film aesthetics and formatively shapes U.S. national consciousness from the period of narrative film's rise (circa 1903) through the solidification of Hollywood classicism (circa 1927). Following Jameson's formulation of the ideology of form, I approach cinema aesthetics as collectively unconscious wish-fulfillments. Thus I analyze the rapidly changing, necessarily experimental nature of silent film's narrative shapes and strategies in order to illuminate the subtleties of the social and cultural conflicts they mask and compensate for. The dissertation focuses on three complex and exemplary texts: Uncle Tom's Cabin--as abolitionist novel, popular theater, and early cinematic inscription of American history; D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation--an infamously racist film about American history that aspires to universal aesthetics; and Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates--an explicitly non-universal 'race film' that offers an alternative inscription of historicity but remains ambivalently invested in American/cinematic ideals of unity and progress. As represented by these texts, the reconceptualization of blackness and whiteness played a role in American self-redefinition in this period that was based largely on recasting the role of history in defining Americanness, reworking nineteenth-century solutions to the dilemmas of real/ideal (in)equality centering symbolically on the Civil War. By examining the relationship between (1) how cinema's changing formal inscriptions of time create a subjective, often emotional viewing experience and (2) how the content of American history takes shape in the putatively universal form of cinema, I conclude that the rise of film was pivotal in reshaping U.S. conceptions of historicity and, relatedly, in forging a racialized and individualized modern national subjectivity.