<em>Silent Film and the Triumph of the American Myth</em> connects the rise of film to the rise of America as a cultural center and twentieth-century world power. Silent film, Paula Cohen reveals, allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and answer the call by nineteenth-century writers like Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. Cohen explores the way film emerged as an American medium through its synthesis of three basic elements: the body, the landscape, and the face. Silent film drew on elements developed in popular forms of representation like vaudeville performance, landscape panoramas, and portrait photography to create a medium that more powerfully represented the American experience.
