Paradise for the young: Youth spectatorship in the American silent film era, 1904-1933

This dissertation presents an alternative historical and theoretical consideration of film spectatorship as a rejuvenating, mimetic, and playful experience through an examination of the figure of the adolescent youth spectator in the American silent era. I approach the issue of the American youth spectator from three different angles. I examine conceptions of youth spectatorship put forth by social scientists G. Stanley Hall and Herbert Blumer, constructions of youth spectators produced by the American film industry in 1920s flapper and collegiate films such as Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Harold Lloyd's The Freshman (1925), and the reception of these films by American youth, including their own efforts at amateur filmmaking. In the process, I locate the silent-era youth spectator at the nexus of these three views well before the advent of the 1950s teenpic. As I detail, in this period cinema reinforced the notion and promotion that in the modern era, youth was not only localized in the bodies of the young, it had become a quality of experience, a part of the mass cultural imaginary.This dissertation further considers the way in which academics, the American film industry, and even young people themselves understood youth spectatorship in mimetic terms. In the early twentieth century, the American youth spectator represented a potent market, potential threat to middle-class society, and a synecdoche for all social groups considered suggestible to the power of images, including women, immigrants, and the lower class. Youth spectators were cast as both voluntary and involuntary imitators of what they saw at the cinema, consciously emulating the fashions and conduct of young stars but also unconsciously mimicking the movements of those same youthful bodies. I define the youth spectator as more than the early twentieth-century adolescent moviegoer, but also as inclusive of the viewer of any age who experienced revitalization and rejuvenation from watching young bodies on the screen. Beginning with Hall's redefinition of youth as linked to play at the turn of the century through the commodification of youthfulness in the 1920s, youth spectatorship represented an embodied, participatory mode of engagement with modern visual culture that was open to all.