Öffentlicher Vortrag und Master Class

Dienstag, 28. Oktober 2025 | 18-19:30 | Seminarraum S14 (Seminargebäude 106)

Amuse Them Without Killing Them: Early Film Exhibition, Fire & Public Health

Diana W. Anselmo (ISCTE Lisbon)

This talk focuses on the social and medical anxieties raised by the fast implementation of film exhibition infrastructures in early twentieth century Europe and United States. Structural failure due to fire became both a hazard and a spectacle in early cinema, with the UK and the US producing many successful "firebug" short films in the early 1900s. Simultaneously, fire became a main feature in shoddily constructed and retrofitted exhibition spaces. Flammable nitrate film, electrical short-circuiting, and overturned gas lamps ignited life-threatening blazes all over American movie houses, echoing previously devastating theater fires in France, US, China, and Portugal. In this talk I discuss how the fear of fire in early movie exhibition relates to a broader understanding of commercial cinema as a threat for public health that went beyond fears of structural failure into fears of airborne disease, female empowerment, democratic access, and social contagion.

Der Vortrag ist öffentlich.

Diana W. Anselmo is a social historian. Her research focuses on film reception in the Progressive Era, gender, sexuality, and affective labor in US media history, and most recently the transcontinental intersections of disasters, built environments, and global medical histories in the long nineteenth century.

Begleitend hierzu:

Masterclass: Letters from the Pacific: Race, Gender & Cultural Exchange in Silent Hollywood Fandom

Mittwoch, 29. Oktober 2025 | 10-11:30 | Fachschaftsraum Medienkulturwissenschaft, Meister-Ekkehard-Str. 11, Raum Nr. 0.11

Comparing the fan letters published in US movie magazines in the 1910s with those fans sent privately to early Hollywood stars, students will be asked to think through issues of gender, race, and cultural exchange taking place across different spheres of knowledge-production: the private and the public, the emotional and the commercial, home and abroad. Framed by a reading, a lecture, and in-class activities, students will learn about negative modes of fan participation forged at the onset of Hollywood's celebrity culture—including vitriol, snark, and tribalism—in order to better understand the long history of hostile patterns of engagement and relationality flourishing in online spaces today.

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