This open access book seeks answers to a series of questions about the little studied subject of prologues or theatrical presentations in American movie theaters from the late 1910s to the mid-1920s. How did prologues emerge out of prior practices? Who were the exhibitors most…
The edited volume Digital Kříženecký: The New Life of the First Czech Films focuses on the “first Czech films,” shot by Jan Kříženecký between 1898 and 1911 in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Their digitization from original nitrate prints and negatives has not only made the…
Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us…
Historical Turns (University of California Press, 2024) reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the “crisis of historicism” widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm…
Operating between film theory, media philosophy, archival practice, and audiovisual research, Jiří Anger focuses on the relationship between figuration and materiality in early films, experimental found footage cinema, and video essays. Building on his theoretical as well as practical experience with the recently digitized corpus of…
This study traces the evolution of early film societies in Germany and Austria, from the emergence of mass movie theaters in the 1910s to the turbulent years of the late Weimar Republic. Examining a diverse array of groups, it approaches film societies as formations designed…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
