The Movies As a World Force : American Silent Cinema and the Utopian Imagination

Throughout the silent-feature era, American artists and intellectuals routinely described cinema as a force of global communion, a universal language promoting mutual understanding and harmonious coexistence amongst disparate groups of people. In the early 1920s, film-industry leaders began to espouse this utopian view, in order to claim for motion pictures an essentially uplifting social function. __The Movies as a World Force__ examines the body of writing in which this understanding of cinema emerged and explores how it shaped particular silent films and their marketing campaigns. The utopian and universalist view of cinema, the book shows, represents a synthesis of New Age spirituality and the new liberalism. It provided a framework for the first official, written histories of American cinema and persisted as an advertising trope, even after the transition to sound made movies reliant on specific national languages. Introduction: motion pictures and modern communion -- Enlightened public opinion: post-reform progressivism, mental science, and Gerald Stanley Lee's "moving-pictures"--"The occult elements of motion and light": Vachel Lindsay's utopia of the mirror screen -- "The motion picture is war's greatest antidote": rescue as release of force in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance -- "Everything wooed everything": the triumph of morale over moralism in Rupert Hughes's Souls for sale -- "Little grains of sand": positive thinking and corporate form in Douglas Fairbanks's The thief of Bagdad -- Conclusion: universal history and the historicity of film entertainment The Movies as a World Force is the first analysis of utopian cinema writing; situating it in its proper intellectual contexts, theology, and political philosophy; and illustrating the ways in which its utopian imagination shapes and is shaped by the era’s most prestigious film genre, the historical crowd epic.