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

"Recommended."- Choice
"The Movies as a World Force is a significant contribution to the historical study of the American cinema of the silent era, charting an expansive but largely unacknowledged utopian discourse about history, social progress, and the massification of culture that was central to the screen practices of early Hollywood and to various middlebrow projects of linking commercialized culture to the progress of democracy. Friedman does an outstanding job of making visible the contours of this expansive and decidedly anti-modern historical tendency, describing how the cinema was its inspiration and a principal site for its articulation. This book challenges us to rethink our understanding of the emergent studio system and the function of public relations in relation to what were undoubtedly widespread beliefs in the cinema as a spiritual force of global transformation."- Mark Lynn Anderson, author of Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America