Grazia Ingravalle, Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital (Amsterdam University Press, 2023)

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Archival Film Curatorship is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum…

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Vito Adriaensens, Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of European Early Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

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Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames explores the intermedial context of early cinema. It tackles the first European feature films’ intricate relationship with its sister arts to reveal that the period referred to by historians as the “long nineteenth century” was one in which Bourgeois…

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Dimitrios Latsis, How the Movies Got a Past: A Historiography of American Cinema, 1894-1930 (Oxford University Press, 2023)

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How the Movies Got a Past presents a comprehensive survey of the rise of historiographical discourse on cinema in North America as it is reflected in publications, exhibitions, lectures, and films about the cinema as a technology, form of art, and source of entertainment, from…

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Jeremy Brooker, Richard Crangle and Martin Gilbert (eds), The Magic Lantern Dancer: The Choreutoscope and its Place in the History of the Moving Image (Magic Lantern Society, 2023)

This book sheds light on the choreutoscope (pronounced cory-ute-o-scope, the name is based on ancient Greek, meaning dancer viewer), which was a complex mechanical device used in a magic lantern to change quickly between images, giving a projected illusion of basic movement and often used…

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Julie K. Allen, Screening Europe in Australasia: Transnational silent film before and after the rise of Hollywood (University of Exeter Press, 2022)

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Through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century, this book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as having always dominated global film culture. Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous…

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Laura Horak, Maggie Hennefeld, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi (eds), Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022)

Bluray cover representing a woman wearing a cowboy hat

This four-disc set showcase more than fourteen hours of rarely-seen silent films about feminist protest, slapstick rebellion, and suggestive gender play. These women organize labor strikes, bake (and weaponize) inedible desserts, explode out of chimneys, electrocute the police force, and assume a range of identities…

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Deac Rossell, Early Cinema and Optical Media: An Index to Print Anthologies and Exhibition Catalogues, Part I-IV (Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2023)

Film historian Deac Rossell announced that his awaited “Index to Print Anthologies and Exhibition Catalogues” will be published in four parts in the Historical Journal of Film, Media and Television throughout 2023. Rossell’s large scale index to published work in early cinema and its predecessor…

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Mario Slugan & Daniël Biltereyst (eds), New Perspectives on Early Cinema History: Concepts, Approaches, Audiences (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)

In this book, editors Mario Slugan and Daniël Biltereyst present a theoretical reconceptualization of early cinema. To do so, they highlight the latest methods and tools for analysis, and cast new light on the experience of early cinema through the application of these concepts and…

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André Gaudreault & Laurent Le Forestier, De l’assemblage au montage cinématographique. Instauration et standardisation d’une pratique (PUM, 2022)

Using a technically oriented approach, focusing as much on the tools and gestures as on the accompanying discourses, this book aims to show how a series of assembling operations ended up constituting an autonomous phase of the post-production process of so-called silent films. Scattered both…

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Rémy Campos, Alain Carou, Aurélien Poidevin (eds), De la scène à la pellicule: Théâtre, musique et cinéma autour de 1900 (L’œil d’or: 2021)

At the beginning of the 20th century, the emerging cinema had a close relationship with live performance. The processes of theater, opera, fairy tale, ballet or café-concert were used in the shooting theaters, the ancestors of film sets. The artists and technicians who built the…

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Priska Morrissey, Les As de la manivelle. Le métier d’opérateur de prise de vues cinématographiques en France (1895-1930) (AFRHC, 2021)

“Crank turners”, “Aces of the crank”, “Coffee mill turners”: so many expressions that refer to the profession of film camera operator, which this book aims to retrace the unpublished history. What were the possibilities of existence of this profession? What concrete tasks was the operator…

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Matthew Solomon: Méliès Boots. Footwear and Film Manufacturing in Second Industrial Revolution Paris

Before he became an influential cinematic innovator, Georges Méliès (1861–1938) was a maker of deluxe French footwear, an illusionist, and a caricaturist. Proceeding from these beginnings, Méliès Boots traces how the full trajectory of Georges Méliès’ career during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, along with…

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Enfin le cinéma ! Exhibition catalogue

Cover_book enfin le cinema

Like the exhibition it accompanies, the catalogue “Cinema at last!” brings together the French film production of the years 1895-1907 with the history of the arts, from the invention of photography to the first years of the 20th century, through a number of major subjects:…

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Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams and Joshua Yumibe (ed), Provenance and Early Cinema (IUP 2021)

Cover for Provenance and Early Cinema

The 2018 Rochester Conference Committee and the Domitor EC are very happy to announce that the 2018 conference proceedings, Provenance and Early Cinema, published by Indiana University Press is now available! We would like to send a heartfelt thanks to the…

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