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From its earliest days, the cinema has enjoyed a special kinship with the railroad, a mutual attraction based on similar ways of handling speed, visual perception, and the promise of a journey. PARALLEL TRACKS is the first book to explore and explain this relationship in both historical and theoretical terms, blending film scholarship with railroad history.
This highly original work reveals the profound impact that the railroad and the cinema have had on Western society and modern urban industrial culture. It will be eagerly received by those involved in film studies, American studies, feminist theory and the cultural study of modernity. It will also have appeal to general readers interested in silent films or in the history of the railroad.
The triumph of this book is in bringing film theory and social history together to form a powerful collective that makes this examination of these two key industries compulsive reading.
Lynne Kirby is a Senior Producer at Court Television Network. Her articles on the railroad and cinema have appeared in major American film journals.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Inventors and Hysterics: The Train in the Prehistory and Early History of Cinema
2. Romances of the Rail in Silent Film
3. The Railroad in the City
4. National Identity in the Train Film
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index