Cinema & Media Studies: Early Cinema

This film reference covers 646 silent motion pictures, starting with Eadweard Muybridge's initial motion photography experiments in 1877. Among the genres included are classics, dramas, Westerns, light comedies, documentaries. Each entry provides credits, critical commentary, and an evaluation of the film's place in motion picture history.

This critical survey of key films, actors, directors, and screenwriters during the silent era of the American cinema offers a portrait of the motion picture production of silent film. Detailed entries include over 100 film titles, brief bibliographies and filmographies.

In this into to early and silent cinema, Keith Withall provides both a comprehensive chronology of the period until the birth of sound and also a series of detailed case studies on the key films from the period - some well known, some perhaps less familiar.

Examine women's contributions to film--in front of the camera and behind it. An A-to-Z reference guide that dispels the myth that men dominated the film industry during its formative years. Whether working behind the scenes as producers or publicists, behind the cameras as writers, directors, or editors, or in front of the lens as flappers, vamps, or serial queens.

Entries examine the figures, trends, and ideas that have contributed most heavily to the history and current state of photography.

Drawing on the extraordinary collection of The Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and memorabilia, Peter Kobel has created the definitive visual history of silent film. From its birth in the 1890s, with the earliest narrative shorts, through the brilliant full-length features of the 1920s, Silent Movies captures the greatest directors and actors and their films. Silent Movies also looks at the technology of early film, the use of color photography, and restoration work.

This award-winning examination of the American film industry has already been acclaimed as a major achievement in film history (American Historical Review) and an indispensable| set (Film Quarterly). The 10-volume, illustrated series considers the film industry from its early roots in the 19th century right up to 1990. It examines the development of film and the film industry, analyzing the genres, themes and technology that defined the earliest days of cinema and the political and economic background of the times.

Alive with the excitement of the old Hollywood, peppered with vivid cinematic and social recollections never before on record, illustrated with 300 rare photographs, this is a unique film history.

Published for the first time in English in 1994 as "Burning Passions," Cherchi Usai's groundbreaking guide to silent film studies has become the indispensable textbook for scholars, researchers, and archivists. Two chapters have been added for this updated edition. The first is an extensive analysis of color technology and aesthetics, from hand-coloring to the dawn of Technicolor. The second is a detailed account of how silent films are saved from destruction, restored, and made accessible by film archives.

The volume of a history of cinema history which picks up after The Emergence of Cinema, noted above.

Before the Movies is the first book about American screen entertainment in the pre-movie era. A groundbreaking study, lavishly illustrated with 330 color pictures, it is a comprehensive survey of the American artists who created early magic-lantern stories and songs for the screen. The book emphasizes the work of Joseph Boggs Beale, a pioneer in the field and demonstrates that Beale almost single-handedly created American-made screen entertainment for the generation before the movies. His lifetime output was 2,073 images in 258 sets--the screen-time equivalent of 14 full-length films--which millions enjoyed every year. The provenance, attribution, and dates of Beale's lantern slides are discussed in detail, and a comprehensive catalog of his lantern images makes Before the Movies an essential reference volume.

Essays exploring how reformers and charities used the "magic lantern" to raise public awareness of poverty.Public performances using the magic or optical lantern became a prominent part of the social fabric of the late nineteenth century. Drawing on a rich variety of primary sources, Screen Culture and the Social Question, 1880-1914 investigates how the magic lantern and cinematograph, used at public lectures, church services, and electoral campaigns, became agents of social change.The essays examine how social reformers and charitable organizations used the "art of projection" to raise public awareness of the living conditions of the poor and the destitute, as they argued for reform and encouraged audiences to work to better their lot and that of others.

The world as we know it today began in California in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit's work. Weaving together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art, technology, landscape, and philosophy, Solnit has created an original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. During a period of creativity starting in 1872, Eadweard Muybridge succeeded for the first time in capturing and reanimating high-speed motion on film--the crucial breakthrough that made movies possible. In Solnit's narrative, Muybridge's life becomes a lens for a larger story about the transformation of time and space in the 19th century. With erudition and a mastery of the interlocking histories of art, technology, politics, and commerce, Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post-Civil War California led directly to the two industries, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, that have most powerfully defined the contemporary world.

The photographs of Muybridge may be familiar to us, but less so the dramatic personal story of this seminal and eccentric Victorian pioneer, now brought to life for the first time in this engaging and entertaining biography. His work is iconic: the first icons of the modern visual age. Men, women, boxers, wrestlers, racehorses, elephants and camels frozen in time, captured in the act of moving, fighting, galloping, living. And if most of us have seen Muybridge's distinctive stop-motion photographs, all of us have seen the fruit of his extraordinary technological innovation: today's cinema and television. But it is his personal life that possesses the ingredients of a non-fiction best-seller: a driven man struggling against the odds; treachery and betrayal; a cast of characters set against a backdrop of San Francisco and the Far West in a turbulent and dangerous era; a profusion of scientific and artistic advances and discoveries; the intensity of two spectacular courtroom dramas (one pitting Muybridge against the richest man in the land, the other sees him fighting for his life). And for the opening act, a murder on a dark and stormy night. Author Brian Clegg combines ingredients from science and biography to create an eminently readable and surprising story.

Best known for his contribution to the development of the motion picture, Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was a pioneering photographer during his lifetime. Alongside his remarkable photographic achievements, his personal life was riddled with melodrama--including a near-fatal stagecoach accident and a betrayal by his wife that ended with Muybridge being tried for the murder of her lover. Marta Braun's revealing biography traces the sensational events of Muybridge's life and his personal reinventions as artist, photographer, researcher, and showman. In the 1870s, Muybridge's photography skills were enlisted by Leland Stanford, a racehorse breeder who later founded Stanford University, to prove the "unsupported motion controversy"--the theory that during a horse's stride, there was a moment when all four of its legs left the ground. The resulting collection of motion studies, as Braun explains, inspired Muybridge to take photography beyond landscapes to the realm of science. He went on to invent the zoopraxiscope, which captures movement too quick for the human eye to record. Most importantly, simulating motion through a series of stills, his pioneering use of sequence photography served as a forerunner to the introduction of cinematography in the 1890s. This illuminating study examines a man whose influence has resounded through generations. In Eadweard Muybridge, Braun firmly establishes Muybridge's central contributions to the history of art, science, photography, and motion pictures.

Eadweard Muybridge, one of the great pioneer-innovators of the 19th century, is a familiar figure to students of art history, photography, and cinema. Muybridge is best known for the photographs of horses and other animals in motion, which he made in the 1870s and 80s. The first person to use photography to freeze rapid action for analysis and study, he devised a method for photographing episodes of behavior using a series of cameras, producing some of the most famous sequential photographs ever made. These pictures, the first successful photographs of rapidly moving subjects, revolutionized expectations of what photography could reveal about the natural world. Time Stands Still is the catalogue to accompany a major exhibition celebrating the work of Eadweard Muybridge, one of the most influential photographers of the 19th century. The exhibition, opening Spring 2003 and touring through 2004, will combine an examination of the artists' career in motion photograph with a survey of early attempts to photograph moving subjects. The catalogue is primarily written by guest curator Phillip Prodger, but includes an additional essay on the earliest experiments in cinema by Tom Gunning, an expert on early film at the University of Chicago. The exhibition will display Muybridge's zoopraxiscope and other equipment, drawings, ephemera, and photographs made from the invention of photography in the 1830s to the end of Muybridge's career, which culminated with the publication of his encyclopedic work, Animal Locomotion, in 1887. The photographs and objects are drawn largely from the collection of the Cantor Center and supplemented with a selection of stop-action photographs from other private and public collections. Represented will be the work of, among others, Talbot, Rejlander, Maray, Eakins, Edison, and the Lumiere Frères.

Lighting performs essential functions in Hollywood films, enhancing the glamour, clarifying the action, and intensifying the mood. Examining every facet of this understated art form, from the glowing backlights of the silent period to the shaded alleys of film noir, Patrick Keating affirms the role of Hollywood lighting as a distinct, compositional force. Closely analyzing Girl Shy (1924), Anna Karenina (1935), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and T-Men (1947), along with other brilliant classics, Keating describes the unique problems posed by these films and the innovative ways cinematographers handled the challenge. Once dismissed as crank-turning laborers, these early cinematographers became skillful professional artists by carefully balancing the competing demands of story, studio, and star. Enhanced by more than one hundred illustrations, this volume counters the notion that style took a backseat to storytelling in Hollywood film, proving that the lighting practices of the studio era were anything but neutral, uniform, and invisible. Cinematographers were masters of multifunctionality and negotiation, honing their craft to achieve not only realistic fantasy but also pictorial artistry.

In one of the first books of its kind to focus on the aesthetic and emotional impact of lighting in cinema, Lara Thompson looks at the way light informs the cinematic experience, from constructing star identities, sculpting natural light and creating imaginary worlds, to the seductive power of darkness, fading representations of the past and arresting twilight encounters. This introductory study offers insight into the way illumination has transcended functional boundaries and been elevated to a position of narrative and emotional importance, transforming it from an unobtrusive element of film style to an expressive and essential component. It includes analyses of over fifty renowned international films, from cinema's earliest moments to recent digital manifestations.

Newly revised and updated, Film Lighting is an indispensible sourcebook for the aspiring and practicing cinematographer, based on extensive interviews with leading cinematographers and gaffers in the film industry. Film lighting is a living, dynamic art influenced by new technologies and the changing styles of leading cinematographers. A combination of state-of-the-art technology and in-depth interviews with industry experts, Film Lighting provides an inside look at how cinematographers and film directors establish the visual concept of the film and use the lighting to create a certain atmosphere.

Aesthetic 3D Lighting: History, Theory, and Application delves into the history, the theory, and the practical and aesthetic application of lighting in the fine arts and 3D animation. In this book, animation industry veteran and lighting expert Lee Lanier examines the importance of lighting and its ability to communicate information to the viewer. Lee examines the history of lighting as applied to the fine arts, film, photography, and 3D animation. He discusses the use of light color, light location and direction, and light shadow types to recreate specific locations and to generate moods.

More than any other set of films from the classical era, the Hollywood film noir is known for its lighting: the cast shadows, the blinking street signs, the eyes sparkling in the darkness. Each effect is rich in symbolism, evoking a world of danger and doppelgangers. This book offers a new account of film noir lighting, grounded in a larger theory of Hollywood cinematography as emotionally engaging storytelling--dynamic, switching from darkness to brightness and back again as characters change, locations shift, and fates unfold.

Lighting and shadows are used within a range of art forms to create aesthetic effects. Piotr Sadowski's study of light and shadow in Weimar cinema and contemporaneous visual arts is underpinned by the evolutionary semiotic theories of indexicality and iconicity. These theories explain the unique communicative and emotive power of light and shadow when used in contemporary indexical media including the shadow theatre, silhouette portraits, camera obscura, photography and film. In particular, Sadowski highlights the aesthetic and emotional significance of shadows.

Widely regarded by historians of the early moving picture as the best work yet published on pre-cinema, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema throws light on a fascinating range of optical media from the twelfth century to the turn of the twentieth. First published in French in 1994, Laurent Mannoni's account projects a broad picture of the subject area now known as 'pre-cinema'. Starting from the earliest uses of the camera obscura in astronomy and entertainment, Mannoni discusses, among many other devices, the invention and early years of the magic lantern in the seventeenth century, the peepshows and perspective views of the eighteenth century, and the many weird and wonderful nineteenth-century attempts to recreate visions of real life in different ways and forms.

Describes the development of the history of photography from an international viewpoint, especially later than Daguerre. Includes chapters on the development of various photochemical processes, the theory of color and light, the invention of cameras and projection apparatus, and prominent figures in the field.

Negative/Positive begins with the negative, a foundational element of analog photography that is nonetheless usually ignored, and uses this to tell a representative, rather than comprehensive, history of the medium. This book considers a number of related issues crucial to any understanding of photography, from the business practices of professional photographers to the repetition of pose and setting. Ranging from the daguerreotype to the digital image, the end result is a kind of little history of photography, partial and episodic. This book represents a summation of Batchen's work to date, making it be essential reading for anyone interested in photography.

The Miracle of Analogy is the first of a two-volume reconceptualization of photography. It argues that photography originates in what is seen, rather than in the human eye or the camera lens, and that it is the world's primary way of revealing itself to us. Neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy. The present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny. It begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form.

When was photography invented, in 1826 with the first permanent photograph? If we depart from the technologically oriented accounts and consider photography as a philosophical discourse an alternative history appears, one which examines the human impulse to reconstruct the photographic or "the evoking of light". This alternative history is not a replacement of other narratives of photographic history but rather offers a way of rethinking photography's fluidity in the modern world.

The first detailed study of what filmic images can tell us about iconic photographs, No Power Without an Image reveals the multifaceted connections between seven celebrated photographs of political struggles, taken between 1936 and 1968, and cinema in all its forms. Moving from the 'paper cinema' of magazines via newsreels and film journals, to documentary, fiction and experimental films, this fascinating book draws on original archival research and multidisciplinary icon theory to explore new ways of thinking about the confluence of still and moving images.

In addition to detailing the life and career of Siegmund Lubin of Philadelphia, this work explores the complex character of America's first Jewish movie mogul and separates his accomplishments as a film pioneer from the myths he himself helped create. Along with descriptions of his studios in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

A chronicle of the histories of well-known trade papers (Variety, Motion Picture Herald) alongside important yet forgotten publications (Film Spectator, Film Mercury, and Camera!), and challenges the canon of film periodicals, offering new interpretative frameworks for understanding print journalism's relationship with the motion picture industry and creative industries today.

Published in conjunction with the film exhibition Before Hollywood, turn-of-the-century film from American archives.

Pairing significant research with primary documents, Moviegoing in America charts the evolution of film exhibition and reception as a function of changing patterns of American community, identity, consumption, and the fabric of everyday life. "Waller assembles an impressive collection that should become a key resource in the teaching of film exhibition history." -- Screen

This work examines a film distribution system paralleling the rise of early features and persisting until 1972, when Man of La Mancha was the final roadshow to require reservations. Synonymous with Hollywood's star-studded premieres, roadshows were longer and cost more than regular features, making the experience similar to attending the legitimate theater. Roadshows, often epic in subject matter, played selected (usually only one) theaters in major urban centers until demand decreased. De rigueur by the 1960s were musical overtures, intermissions, entre'acte and exit music and souvenir programs for sale in the lobby. Throughout the text are recollections by people who attended roadshows. Included are plots, contemporary critical reaction, premiere dates, production background, and methods of promotion--i.e., the ballyhoo.

The entrepreneur of phonograph concerts and motion-picture programs Lyman H. Howe was the leading traveling exhibitor of his time and the exemplar of an important but until now little examined aspect of American pop culture. This work, with its numerous and lively illustrations, uses his career to explore the world of itinerant showmen, who exhibited all motion pictures seen outside large cities during the 1890s and early 1900s. They frequently built cultural alliances with genteel city dwellers or conservative churchgoers. Bridging the fields of American studies and film history, the book reveals the remarkable sophistication with which exhibitors created their elaborate, evening-length programs to convey powerful ideological messages, whether depicting the Spanish-American War or the 1900 Paris Exposition.

In this innovative book, Julian Hanich explores the subjectively lived experience of watching films together, to discover a fuller understanding of cinema as an art form and a social institution that matters to millions of people worldwide. Combining recent scholarly interest in viewers' emotions and affects with insights from the blossoming debate about collective emotions in philosophy and social psychology, this study makes viewers more aware of their own experience in the cinema, and simultaneously opens up a new line of research for film studies.

Draws our eye to the role of scientific, medical, educational, and aesthetic observation in shaping modern conceptions of spectatorship