Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film

Rating:
Summary: Invaluable
Review: This book is a tough read. Ms. Hanson has certainly done her research, but her prose is barely understandable because she uses many words that are unfamiliar to the common reader and her sentences are a mile long. This book is only for hard-core fans of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance and Rudolph Valentino. Be warned, you will need help staying awake while you read it...

Rating:
Summary: Bring your Thesaurus
Review: This book is a tough read. Ms. Hanson has certainly done her research, but her prose is barely understandable because she uses many words that are unfamiliar to the common reader and her sentences are a mile long. This book is only for hard-core fans of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance and Rudolph Valentino. Be warned, you will need help staying awake while you read it...

Rating:
Summary: Invaluable
Review: This is one of the best books on early cinema written by one of the best film theorists/historians on spectatorship.

Rating:
Summary: Superb tour-de-force of early cinema
Review: While some of the academic language may not be familiar to all readers, this is a superb account of early cinema that bridges the divide between film history and film theory. Hansen's argument that early cinema possessed a fundamentally different model of spectatorship--an interactive and collective one--is lucidly articulated, in addition to being wholly provocative for understanding what it means to go to the movies now. This book altered my sense of my own viewing and moviegoing practices today. An excellent book that discusses film in new ways, Babel and Babylon is both an absorbing and a fascinating reading experience.