Using thousands of primary sources and long-unseen illustrations, The Birth of the American Horror Film examines a history that begins in colonial Salem, taking an interdisciplinary approach to explore the influence of horror-themed literature, theatre and visual culture in America, and how that context established…

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In this volume, leading scholars of photography and media examine photography’s vital role in the evolution of media and communication in the nineteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the introduction of telegraphy, the development of a cheaper and more reliable postal…

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SYNOPTIQUE : An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 6:1 Institutionalizing Moving Image Archival Training: Analyses, Histories, Theories   To speak of moving image archiving as a professional field with practitioners who have completed vocational training is a recent phenomenon. Numerous specialized degrees emerged since the…

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Silent slapstick comedies were not only the playground of male clowns. Comediennes such as Mabel Normand, Marie Dressler, Bebe Daniels, Dorothy Gish, Constance Talmadge, Marion Davies, and Colleen Moore brought riotous laughter to millions around the world, yet their hilarity may seem hidden to…

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Although a major Hollywood studio still bears William Fox’s name, the man himself has mostly been forgotten by history, even written off as a failure. Now, in this biography, Vanda Krefft corrects the record, explaining why Fox’s legacy is central to the history of…

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Who doesn’t know Nadar? In 19th-century France, that was a rhetorical question (repeated in many of his biographies). With this book which is nothing less than the first Nadar’s biography in English, Adam Begley wants to reestablish Nadar’s universal fame. According to Begley, of…

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The articles in this very rich issue of the FIAF Journal of Film Preservation include: the report on the FIAF Winter School in Paris (devoted to the programming of archive materials), management of audiovisual cataloguing and metadata in the 21st century (a report on…

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Tony Fletcher’s last book is dedicated to London’s regulation of early cinema screenings. It is divided in two parts: 1) The first part examines in detail how the Cinematograph Regulations were formulated for London between 1897 to 1899 following the deaths which occurred in Paris…

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This book entitled The Discovery of the Film Actor in Europe: Acting, Film Experience and Osentation during the ‘Seconde Epoque’ portrays the revolution that occurred in production, distribution and performance with Asta Nielsen’s films in 1910. Mattia Lento delineates the characteristic features of the…

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This synthetic book is aimed at the general public as much as students and moviegoers. It tells more than 120 years of film history giving the essential benchmarks – from the origins to the present day. Almost a quarter of the book is dedicated…

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 As early as 1900, spectators described the flickering light effects of the first film screenings in terms of “dancing images.” Since then, the idea that films can not only record dance, but also produce dance-like effects (e.g., through camera movements or editing) has been a…

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This book offers comprehensive accounts of the professional itineraries of three women in the silent film in the Netherlands, France and North America: 1– the long career of Dutch stage and film actress Adriënne Solser; 2– the stage and screen career of French actress and filmmaker…

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This book (“Cartoon in Filmland”) explores the early encounter between animation and live-action. The historical analysis of this tumultuous relationship demonstrates that these two modes of representation have not always been so different from each other. It leads to a better understanding of the…

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Showing and Telling is an academic study portraying how publicly funded film heritage institutes account for their mandate in their public activities. It does that by inspecting and evaluating public presentations and visitor information about these presentations. The research was done by juxtaposing two…

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The book investigates the dispersed emergence of the new visual regime associated with nineteenth-century pre-cinematic spectacles in the literary imagination of the previous centuries. Its comparative angle ranges from the Medieval and Baroque period to the visual and stylistic experimentations of the Romantic age,…

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In his new book, Steven Johnson argues that the pursuit of novelty and wonder has always been a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. He highlights how the overwhelming majority of devices such as the ones portrayed in the ninth-century Book of Ingenious Devices…

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Transbordeur – Photographie, histoire, société / Nr. 1 “Musées de photographies documentaires” Edited by Estelle Sohier, Olivier Lugon & Anne Lacoste   Transbordeur is a new annual review about photography history, edited by Christian Joschke & Olivier Lugon. Instead of a strictly aesthetical approach to photography, Transborder aims to…

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Revue d’études proustiennes 2:4 “Proust au temps du cinématographe: un écrivain face aux médias” Edited by Thomas Carrier-Lafleur & Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan This volume features the famous article in which the Domitor member Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan identifies Marcel Proust in an early film. See here our post on…

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Since cinema has entered the digital era, its very nature has come under renewed scrutiny. Countering the ‘death of cinema’ debate, Film History as Media Archaeology presents a robust argument for the cinema’s current status as a new epistemological object, of interest to philosophers,…

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