A groundbreaking contribution to the study of nontheatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, Alison Griffiths explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life. Griffiths considers a diverse mix of cinematic genres, from early actualities and reenactments of notorious executions to reformist exposes of the 1920s.She connects an early fascination with cinematic images of punishment and execution, especially electrocutions, to the attractions of the nineteenth-century carnival electrical wonder show and Phantasmagoria (a ghost show using magic lantern projections and special effects). Griffiths draws upon convict writing, prison annual reports, and the popular press obsession with prison-house cinema to document the integration of film into existing reformist and educational activities and film's psychic extension of flights of fancy undertaken by inmates in their cells. Combining penal history with visual and film studies and theories surrounding media's sensual effects, Carceral Fantasies illuminates how filmic representations of the penal system enacted ideas about modernity, gender, the body, and the public, shaping both the social experience of cinema and the public's understanding of the modern prison.

A groundbreaking contribution to the study of non-theatrical film exhibition, Carceral Fantasies tells the little-known story of how cinema found a home in the U.S. penitentiary system and how the prison emerged as a setting and narrative trope in modern cinema. Focusing on films shown in prisons before 1935, the book explores the unique experience of viewing cinema while incarcerated and the complex cultural roots of cinematic renderings of prison life.

About the Author
Alison Griffiths is professor of film and media studies at Baruch College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her Columbia University Press books are Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (2008) and Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (2002).

Reviews
Alison Griffiths's examination of how movie exhibition came into prisons is truly groundbreaking. No one has studied the culture of movie-going behind bars in this fashion before. A unique and absolutely exciting work! -- Dana Polan, author of Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film Carceral Fantasies is a complex and highly original book that attends the intersections between various early cinema images of prisons and the real thing. Griffiths has a fascinating story to tell, in which she argues that we can view execution films as a kind of attraction-and in doing so are led to ponder: what constitutes an attraction? -- Jon Lewis, author of American Film: A History



Book Information
ISBN 9780231161060
Author Alison Griffiths
Format Hardback
Page Count 472
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press