By Tristan Ettleman It all started with A Trip to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902), as it probably did for many now invested in some form or another in early cinema. Inspired by a newfound cinephilia in my later high school years, and my tendency to…
By Jean-Claude Seguin Vergara The platform The Origins of Cinema (1896–1906) is a virtual space created in 2015 by the Research Group on The Image in the Hispanic World (GRIMH). It aims to be participatory and altruistic by nature. Access to it is free, and…
By Aurore Spiers When the announcement for the Eighteenth International Domitor Conference, “A Long Early Cinema?” was released in fall 2023, I felt immediate excitement at the prospect of “reinterrogat[ing],” as the call for papers put it, “the meanings of ‘early cinema’ today, at a…
By Hugo Ljungbäck Over the past three years, popular interest in early film and moving image culture has seen quite a revival on social media, and YouTube especially, as it has become the home of hundreds, if not thousands, of “artificial intelligence restorations,” as they have…
By Rebecca Ora This is a big year for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. 2022 marks the 25th anniversary of the festival that started as a one-day event in the effort to introduce the splendor of silent films to audiences–or reintroduce them in their full…
Par Coraline Refort Durant l’édition 2021, malgré des projections réduites à quatre rendez-vous quotidiens pour permettre la désinfection des lieux et un théâtre ne pouvant accueillir que la moitié de ses spectateurs, pas moins de 75 films ont été proposés à un public présent au rendez-vous,…
Birkbeck University London, image source: www.london.ac.uk Remapping Early British Cinema: A Symposium 26-27 May 2021, Birkbeck University of London A series of major publications in recent years have shed fresh light on the early British film business, from the 19th century pioneers up to the boom in cinema…
By Hugo Ljungbäck Media studies and its many sub-fields have over the past decade borne witness to an influx of thinking about matter: between “new materialism,” media forensics, infrastructure studies, and “new media” history, media scholars are increasingly turning their attention away from media texts and…
By Grazia Ingravalle It’s again that time of the year—we’ve reviewed materials from our most recent trip to the archive, organized our findings, and submitted our proposals. Submissions have rolled in and the program for the 12th edition of the Orphan Film Symposium, to be…
By Allyson Nadia Field Something Good-Negro Kiss (William Selig, 1898) In January 2017, I received an email from Dino Everett, the film archivist at the University of Southern California, with an image from an unidentified 50ft nitrate print from c.1900. Dino was struck by what appeared to be “a…
By Martin L. Johnson For historians of early and silent cinema, the specter of firstness haunts our work. For last year’s Domitor conference, the theme of “provenance” placed these concerns at the center of the conversation, even as many presenters took up the opportunity to question notions of firsts, originals,…
Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, Matthew Solomon et Anne-Marie Quévrain, Paris, 2 Décembre 2015 (Photo courtesy of Matthew Solomon) Domitorians continue to mourn the death last year of Madeleine Malthête-Méliès (née Madeleine Fontaine), who died in her sleep in Paris on July 8, 2018. Malthête-Méliès was working hard to…
La Rivista Cinematografica (Italy, 1920) The Domitor Film Journals Project has been growing since last summer. Now under the guidance of Patrick Ellis and myself, the site started as a project to update and expand Luke McKernan’s list for the Bioscope website from 2012.…
If our last post was all about staying “woke” (come on, millennials, read this blog), then this is an encouragement to dream a little more. Every year at the Giornate, long lost films pop up, unearthed from a New Zealand hayloft, a Pordenone…
To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub, for a succession of trans- and intercontinental flights make for a poor sleeping pattern at the Giornate. For many of us it must be inevitable to spend at least a few days in a state…
The gentle notes emanating from Antonio Coppola’s pianoforte softened the harsh reality that was depicted in Febo Mari’s L’Emigrante (1915). The film couldn’t have been more different than the one it accompanied in the splendid Febo Mari double bill that graced the Teatro Verdi’s screen…
Those of us who recently joined the elated masses in movie palaces to behold the sight of a magical clown dancing, prancing, and biting his way about the silver screen might have noticed that the child-devouring jester had a few familiar tricks up his sleeve.…
Werner Nekes in Film Before Film. Reproduced from Media Magica I, directed by Werner Nekes (1986), DVD. Newer, more glamorous technologies still glimmer with mysterious and sensual ancestors. -Barbara Stafford, Devices of Wonder (2001) In a recent article published in The Moving Image, Meredith Bak…
Birmingham, England, 28–30 April 2017—A Magic Lantern Convention is first and foremost a projected affair. As an event organized around a variety of lantern-based presentations—from entertainments, to scholarly research, to combinations of the two—its arguments happen on the screen. To the traditional features of a…
