“Teaching Early Cinema Today”

By Aurore Spiers aspiers@tamu.edu          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…

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Remapping Early British Cinema: A Symposium

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…

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No blackface… just #BlackLove

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…

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Field Notes from Women and the Silent Screen (Amsterdam, May 2019)

Jane Gaines at Women and the Silent Screen 2019 (Amsterdam). Photo by Ben Solovey.

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,…

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In memoriam: Madeleine Malthête-Méliès (1923-2018)

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…

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Art, Metamorphosis, and Le Giornate del Cinema Muto

  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.…

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From Werner Nekes: Object Lessons in Wonder

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…

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The Tenth International Convention of the Magic Lantern Society

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…

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