Christina G. Petersen

Famous for its image of silent comedian Harold Lloyd hanging from the hands of a giant clock while attempting to scale the outside of a skyscraper for the entertainment of crowds below, Safety Last! (1923) explores the role of the independent filmmaker-star as both dependent on and critical of the structure of the established industry in the 1920s. In addition to a discussion of the industrial context of the film and its place in Lloyd's career, this chapter examines Safety Last! as an early engagement with cultural and aesthetic aspects of American independent film usually dated to the Sundance Film Festival era, including character-focused realism, formal play, and opposition to mainstream Hollywood. Much like the post-1978 indie film, Safety Last! valorizes independence as a form of individualism in a society increasingly marked by the mass production of commodities and conformity to the crowd.

This chapter analyses a different spatial trajectory in which the Female Gothic’s use of special effects highlights the Gothic heroine’s inability to move past such boundaries through the fantastic impossible spaces created by the films. In Mary Ann Doane’s formulation, the Female Gothic protagonist and the Female Gothic spectator are never allowed enough detachment from the image to occupy a position of power. In addition to special effects such as miniatures and painted mattes, deep focus cinematography further works to contain the Female Gothic protagonist and spectator to a single plane of the image. In the Gothic woman’s film, the female protagonist is contained in the foreground and kept separate from the narrative action as another indication of her imprisonment. In addition to the use of mattes to create the trompe l’oeil of Manderley on fire at the end of the film, Rebecca and Dragonwyck used painted mattes to create the cavernous aristocratic spaces that dwarf their protagonists.

While studies of early cinema’s relationship to the spectator’s body have long engaged with issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality, early cinema spectatorship and embodiment in relation to age, particularly adolescence and youth, continues to be a developing area of study. As this essay will discuss, the concept of adolescence as a distinct life stage between childhood and adulthood came of age with the emergence of cinema. First defined in detail by child psychologist G. Stanley Hall, modern adolescence came to represent the most embodied period of life, marked by a mimetic relationship to one’s environment.

This unique volume examines the representation of college and campus life in movies, with particular focus on scholarship that examines the relationship between cinematic portrayals of campus life and the lived experience of real college students. Chapters discuss the extent to which movies about college inform the expectations, perceptions, and attitudes of students, faculty, and the public. Cinema U : Representations of Higher Education in Popular Film includes close analysis of individual films as well as broader examinations of the manner in which college films have addressed issues such as race, class, gender, technology, sexuality, and cultural difference.