Still
from The Crowd (1928)
John's prize-winning advertising slogan is: "SLEIGHT O' HAND - The Magic Cleaner." Visually, the ad uses the motif of the clown that recurs in the film.
| The Crowd critiques the modern crowd | |||||
| In contrast to most popular film, advertising, and journalism, King Vidor's 1928 film The Crowd depicted the "indignities of scale" of modernization without trying to perform the cultural work of appeasing its audience's anxieties and frustrations of being subsumed by the crowd. Although Metro, the studio that produced the film, tried to tack on a happy ending, the film concludes on a disturbing tone. | |||||
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Still
from The Crowd (1928)
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Max Weber, Rush Hour, New York (1915) | ||||
| Like Weber's Rush Hour and other modernist images of the jostling, depersonalizing crowds, The Crowd captures both the energy of the modern tempo and the fear of being swallowed by the new masses that modernity created. As an intertitle from the film summarizes, "We do not know how big the crowd is, and what opposition it is...until we get out of step with it." | |||||
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John's prize-winning advertising slogan is: "SLEIGHT O' HAND - The Magic Cleaner." Visually, the ad uses the motif of the clown that recurs in the film. |
TO examples of 1920s advertising | |
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| The poster reaches up hopefully, but does the film? | |||||
| RESOURCES | |||||
| Wilfred Beaton was editor of The Film Spectator, a small Hollywood-based weekly for the production community. Beaton reviewed films with a skeptical eye and railed against the perceived shortsightedness of studio executives. Friends with numerous directors and stars, Beaton attended and reported on preview screenings of films before their release. (http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/bookshelf/) | |||||
| "Crowd" Subjected to Too Much Supervision (1927) | |||||
| Average Man Rather Poor Screen Material (1928) | |||||
| "The Crowd" a Picture That Dampens Enthusiasm (1928) | |||||
| Promoting Different Endings Is Confession of Studio Stupidity (1928) | |||||
| Study page for The Crowd from CSI-CUNY | |||||
| The Crowd: review | |||||
| The Crowd: summary | |||||
| AFI OnLine Cinema Archive | |||||
| The Silents Majority On-line Journal of Silent Film | |||||
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| Movie-going created--and defied--the experience of being in the crowd. Both the movie palaces and the films highlighted individualism. | |||||
| Prof. Lori Landay | |
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- modernism - paintings & sculpture - photographs - film - advertising - music - |