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…
Considering the chronological period 1908-1919 as a pivotal moment in the history of cinema in France, this exhibition catalog explores the different aspects of the production, distribution and reception of moving images at the end of the “Belle Époque”. It is a history of images,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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turners”: so many expressions that refer to the profession of film camera operator, which this book aims to retrace the unpublished history.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…
Musidora is considered one of the first female stars of French cinema. Her autographed photograph on the cover of this book, in the tight-fitting costume of the heroine of Louis Feuillade’s episodic film Les Vampires (1915), straight out of André Breton’s cabinet of curiosities, has…
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…
In recent decades, special effects have become a major new area of research in cinema studies. For the most part, they have been examined as spectacles or practical tools. In contrast, Special Effects and German Silent Film, foregrounds their function as an expressive device and their…
At the end of the 19th century, Charles Pathé’s company was in its infancy. But with the technological explosion and the European conquest of the world, the Compagnie générale des cinématographes, phonographes et pellicules – known as Pathé frères in the Far East – will…
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:…
The Bug Trainer: Vladislav Starevich Creates Animation is the first book in Russian about the life and work of film director Vladislav (Ladislas) Starevich (1882-1965), who made innovative films using puppet animation. The figure of Starevich occupies a special place in the history of early…
In 1900, Paris had no skyscrapers, no tourist helicopters, no drones. Yet well before aviation made aerial views more accessible, those who sought such vantages had countless options available to them. They could take in the vista from an observation ride, see a painting of…
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…
Any archivists who have held a piece of film in their hands, wondering how to go about identifying it, recognize the true value of film preservationist Harold Brown’s work. In 1967 Brown delivered a pioneering lecture on the identification of early films at the annual…
No living person has seen the earliest films of pioneering cinema magician, Georges Méliès. All that remain are his catalogs and a few archival images. The 2013 discovery of a flip book manufactured by an obscure Parisian bimbelotier, Léon Beaulieu, promised a glimpse of an…
In the early 20th century, the American film producer Charles Urban, who had founded his company in London, sent two of his camera operators out to the Balkans. The Englishman Charles Rider Noble recreated moments from the uprising that had broken out in Macedonia (part…
The kaleidoscope, the stereoscope, and other nineteenth-century optical toys analyzed as “new media” of their era, provoking anxieties similar to our own about children and screens. In the nineteenth century, the kaleidoscope, the thaumatrope, the zoetrope, the stereoscope, and other optical toys were standard accessories of…
