ABSTRACT
This chapter on silent film’s rapport with stage drama will engage with the work of other theorists, including Ben Brewster’s and Lea Jacobs’s Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film, and A. Nicholas Vardac’s Stage to Screen: Theatrical Origins of Early Film, as well as scholar - ship on silent Shakespeare by Rothwell, Judith Buchanan and others. It will focus on how empirical analysis of the case study drama texts supports, extends or challenges previous critical interventions and positions. The case study films will present a strong argument for positing the intermedial reciprocity between two media, both visual and both word-dependent broadly speaking, but in inverse proportions, particularly before the advent of synchronised sound film. Vardac (1949), Gunning (1986) and Knopf (1999) have explored insightfully early cinema’s relationship with late 19th-and early 20th-century stage vaude - ville, melodramatic spectacle as well as what might be seen as the development of a ‘cinema of attractions’,2 to reference Tom Gunning’s formulation after Eisenstein, and much work has been devoted to actuality cinema as well as to the directorial innovations of seminal directors such as D.W. Griffith and Eisenstein. Nonetheless, the use of stage plays as source material for early film is a relatively under-researched area with regard to intermedial synergy in specific instances, as opposed to the general influence of theatricality on cinema.
