The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media by Sara Pesce Paolo Noto

Author:Sara Pesce, Paolo Noto [Sara Pesce, Paolo Noto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138857926
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

“Talker Remakes” as Sites of Film-Historical Memory: Paratextual Constructions of a Cinematic Past

When Cecil B. DeMille remade The Squaw Man as a talkie in 1931, editor Frederick James Smith wrote in The New Movie Magazine:

This is Mr. De Mille’s [sic] third production of The Squaw Man. It was the first film he ever made, back in 1912 [sic]. Dustin Farnum played the title role then. In 1919 he made it again, with Elliott Dexter as the Englishman who married an Indian girl. Both these versions of the old Edwin Milton Royle melodrama were silent films, of course. Now, in 1931, comes The Squaw Man as a talkie.48

In his short review, Smith listed key dates and facts about The Squaw Man, chronologically following the three different cinematic incarnations of the movie, all of which can (quite curiously) be traced back to the same director and his sentimental attachment to the movie with which he started his Hollywood career. What changed, then, were the actors starring in each version, and, of course, the fact that the latest Squaw Man was a “talker remake.” Strictly speaking, however, Smith did not say anything about DeMille’s new picture in these lines, which constituted no less than half of the entire review. Instead, he distinguished himself as a connoisseur of the cinematic past with ample knowledge about actors and directors of twenty years ago, and he passed this knowledge on to the readers of The New Movie Magazine.

If Donald Crafton states that fan magazines “‘fanned’ consumers’ desires to learn more about movies and to become ‘fanatic’ about their screen favorites,”49 one can add that they also fostered film-historical knowledge about those favorites, especially when “talker remakes” were involved. Such practices of knowledge transfer counteracted the ephemeral nature of film (as described above), and transformed the remakes and their paratexts into agents of remembrance work. Toward the mid-1930s and the end of the decade, remembering what had quickly been labeled the “silent era” became, in fact, a regular feature of fan magazines, as I will illustrate with the following two examples from Modern Screen and Photoplay.

In the February 1936 issue of the popular fan magazine Modern Screen, readers found a double page with the heading “Yesterday—Today.” The serif typeface used for “Yesterday,” printed at the top of the left page, lent a vintage appearance to the word and stressed its semiotic relationship to a time already past. On the right page, the word “Today” was printed in a modern-looking Art Deco typeface, whose sans-serif letters consisted of stylized and geometric shapes. The opposition between past and present expressed by the words and fonts was further emphasized on the left and right margins, where decorative drawings of two female figures dressed in different fashion styles embellished the double page. The woman on the left wore a long, heavily draped, corseted outfit of the late Victorian era, finished with a broad feathered hat and an umbrella. Her counterpart on the right margin had a much simpler and streamlined silhouette, wearing a fashionable 1930s clutch coat with wide shoulders and a narrow waist.

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