Domitor invites the submission of short written pieces (~1000 words) to publish on our new online platform, Snapshots. We encourage members, scholars, students, and cinephiles to submit short pieces commenting on current happenings in the field of early cinema: research updates, events announcements or reviews, publication reviews, debates, ideas for further consideration, work in progress, preservation projects, and the like.

Snapshots is intended to be a web user-friendly publication, open to comments and questions—we ask that you keep your submission concise and conversational. Images are welcomed and encouraged. Submissions are reviewed by members of the Domitor EC.

For more information and submissions, please contact Clara Auclair (cauclair@ur.rochester.edu), Patrick Ellis (pellis@ut.edu) or Hugo Ljungbäck (hugo@ljungback.se), Snapshots editors.

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Domitor est heureux de vous présenter sa nouvelle plateforme en ligne, Snapshots. Sont sollicités de courts écrits (~1000 mots) commentant l’actualité de la recherche en cinéma des premiers temps: annonces et revues critiques d’évènements, nouvelles de la recherche, nouvelles éditoriales, publications, débats, idées à creuser, travaux en cours, projets de restauration/conservation, etc…

Snapshots est une publication en ligne dont l’interface se veut de rester simple et facile à parcourir, ouverte aux commentaires et aux questions – nous vous invitons à proposer des textes concis dans un style plus conversationnel qu’académique. Les illustrations sont bienvenues et encouragées. Les propositions seront revues par les membre du comité exécutif de Domitor avant publication.

Vous pouvez soumettre vos questions et contributions à Clara Auclair (cauclair@ur.rochester.edu), Patrick Ellis (pellis@ut.edu) ou Hugo Ljungbäck (hugo@ljungback.se), éditeur·rices de Snapshots.

 

 

Teaching Early Cinema Today

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…

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Copy/Rights and Early Cinema: Notes from the 2022 Culpeper Conference

By Conorr Norquay For Domitor’s seventeenth international conference, scholars were invited to consider copyright’s legal, political and sociocultural relevance throughout the first two decades of cinema’s inception. Questions of who owns the rights to copy film, and the ways in which these rights determine the legality…

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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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New Audiences for Old Cinema: The Silent Comedy Watch Party

Silent Comedy watch party

By Rosie Rowan Taylor A 2020 film screening – courtesy of Rosie Taylor Who would have imagined that cinema exhibition would have gone almost exclusively online in a matter of months? This turn of events is, for archival film exhibition, a double-edged sword. On the one hand…

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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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