The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture

by King, Rob

• ISBN13: 9780520255371
• ISBN10: 0520255372
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-12-15
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

From its founding in 1912, the short-lived Keystone Film Company--home of the frantic, bumbling Kops and Mack Sennett's Bathing Beauties--made an indelible mark on American popular culture with its high-energy comic shorts. Even as Keystone brought "lowbrow" comic traditions to the screen, the studio also played a key role in reformulating those traditions for a new, cross-class audience. InThe Fun Factory,Rob King explores the dimensions of that process, arguing for a new understanding of working-class cultural practices within early cinematic mass culture. He shows how Keystone fashioned a style of film comedy from the roughhouse humor of cheap theater, pioneering modes of representation that satirized film industry attempts at uplift. Interdisciplinary in its approach,The Fun Factoryoffers a unique studio history that views the changing politics of early film culture through the sociology of laughter.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

"Satire In Overalls": The Keystone Film Company And Popular Culture

"The Fun Factory": Class, Comedy, and Popular Culture, 1912-1914

"Funny Germans" and "Funny Drunks": Clowns, Class, and Ethnicity at Keystone, 1913-1915

"The Impossible Attained!" Tillie's Punctured Romance and the Challenge of Feature-Length Slapstick, 1914-1915

"More Clever And Less Vulgar": The Keystone Film Company And Mass Culture

"Made for the Masses with an Appeal to the Classes": Keystone, the Triangle Film Corporation, and the Failure of Highbrow Film Culture, 1915-1917

"Uproarious Inventions": Keystone, Modernity, and the Machine, 1915-1917

From "Diving Venus" to "Bathing Beauties": Reification and Feminine Spectacle, 1916-1917

Conclusion

Notes

Filmography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.