Ian Christie, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 2019) and Time Traveller: Robert Paul and the Invention of Cinema (with ILYA, graphic novel)

The early years of film were dominated by competition between inventors in America and France, especially Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers . But while these have generally been considered the foremost pioneers of film, they were not the only crucial figures in its inception.…

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Doron Galili, Seeing by Electricity: The Emergence of Television, 1878-1939 (Duke University Press, 2020)

Already in the late nineteenth century, electricians, physicists, and telegraph technicians dreamed of inventing televisual communication apparatuses that would “see” by electricity as a means of extending human perception. In Seeing by Electricity Doron Galili traces the early history of television, from fantastical image transmission…

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Giovanna Fossati, Victoria Jackson, Bregt Lameris, Elif Rongen-Kaynakci, Sarah Street & Joshua Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018)

Sparked by a groundbreaking Amsterdam workshop titled “Disorderly Order: Colours in Silent Film,” scholarly and archival interest in colour as a crucial aspect of film form, technology and aesthetics has enjoyed a resurgence in the past twenty years. In the spirit of the workshop,…

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Sarah Dellmann, Images of Dutchness: Popular Visual Culture, Early Cinema, and the Emergence of a National Cliché, 1800-1914 (Amsterdam University Press, 2018)

Why do early films present the Netherlands as a country full of canals and windmills, where people wear traditional costumes and wooden shoes, while industries and modern urban life are all but absent? Images of Dutchness investigates the roots of this visual repertoire from diverse…

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Charlie Keil, ed. A Companion to D. W. Griffith (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018)

This volume offers an exhaustive look at the first acknowledged auteur of the cinema and provides an authoritative account of the director’s life, work, and lasting filmic legacy. The numerous contributions (most authored by Domitor members) explore how Griffith’s style and status advanced along with cinema’s…

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