Towards the legitimation of cinema : coverage of urban entertainment in the Toronto World and the Globe, 1896-1920

• Main Author: Mahdaviani, Bita.
• Other Authors: Straw, Will (advisor)
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: McGill University 2001
• Subjects: Film criticism > Ontario > Toronto > History.; Motion pictures > Ontario > Toronto > History.
• Online Access: http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=33913

This thesis stems from a general interest in press coverage of culture industries and products and the ways in which it links them to contemporary social and political concerns. The present project specifically takes The Globe and The Toronto World, two of the major daily newspapers of Toronto, as its combined object of analysis. It selects particular events and periods during the emergence of early film as popular amusement as the contexts for the study of articles, reports, columns, and editorials that centred around urban cultural issues as well as cinema. It explores the extent to which these particular events and periods figured in the papers' attention upon the new medium and its place in the everyday life of the city. These contexts were selected with an assumption of their newsworthiness for the daily press. However, upon examination it became evident that, while the majority of them did produce a concentrated attention in both dailies, not all of them did. Still, because they instantiated profound shifts in urban entertainment at the turn of the century, they were kept as historical backgrounds for the analysis of the newspapers's construction of modern culture. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)