You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
In this vivid and accessible new account of the dawn of film in Britain, internationally respected film historian and curator Bryony Dixon introduces us to Britain's first cinematic pioneers an eclectic mix of chemists, engineers, photography enthusiasts, fairground showmen and magicians who in a few short years built a vibrant new industry. As she chronicles the emergence of the first embryonic film forms and genres, she reveals often surprising innovations, from cutting-edge science to ingeniously witty tricks and comedies, with filmmakers reflecting existing entertainment forms as well as advancing editing and cinematography in ways that shaped the art of film for many decades after. Dixon offers fresh insights by focusing on the films themselves many of them only recently available to view while building on the work of generations of scholars. In the process, Dixon makes a compelling case for the British filmmakers of the era as inventive and creative figures, every bit as influential as their more celebrated contemporaries in France and the US.
100 Silent Films provides an authoritative and accessible history of silent cinema through one hundred of its most interesting and significant films. As Bryony Dixon contends, silent cinema is not a genre; it is the first 35 years of film history, a complex negotiation between art and commerce and a union of creativity and technology. At its most grand – on the big screen with a full orchestral accompaniment – it is magnificent, permitting a depth of emotional engagement rarely found in other fields of cinema. Silent film was hugely popular in its day, and its success enabled the development of large-scale film production in the United States and Europe. It was the start of our fascinati...
Early cinemas were noisy places with pianos, organs, ensembles of all varieties and sometimes full orchestras accompanied films. Britain, a key cultural player in the entertainment world both at the time and now, has a different history than the USA of musical cultures and film production.
From Chaplin's tramp to the Bathing Beauties slapstick comedy supplied many of the most enduring icons of American cinema in the silent era. This collection of fourteen essays by film scholars challenges longstanding critical dogma and offers new conceptual frameworks for thinking about silent comedy's place in film history and American culture.
The first systematic attempt to focus on the instrumental role of silent cinema in early twentieth-century conceptualizations of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East. It is located at the intersection of film studies, classics, Bible studies and cultural studies.
A comprehensive treatment of the Classical World in film and television, A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on Screen closely examines the films and TV shows centered on Greek and Roman cultures and explores the tension between pagan and Christian worlds. Written by a team of experts in their fields, this work considers productions that discuss social settings as reflections of their times and as indicative of the technical advances in production and the economics of film and television. Productions included are a mix of Hollywood and European spanning from the silent film era though modern day television series, and topics discussed include Hollywood politics in film, soundtrack and sou...
While Jesus has attracted the sporadic interest of film-makers since the epics of the Sixties, it is often forgotten that between the advent of motion pictures in the 1890s and the close of the "silent" era at the end of the 1920s, some of the longest, most expensive and most watched films on both sides of the Atlantic were focused on the Life and Passion of the Christ. Drawing upon rarely seen archival footage and the work of both the era’s most important directors (e.g. Alice Guy, Ferdinand Zecca, Sidney Olcott, D.W. Griffith, Carl Dreyer, and C.B. DeMille) and others who have been all but forgotten, this collection of essays offers a representative survey of the Silents of Jesus, illust...
Giorgio Bertellini traces the origins of American cinema's century-long fascination with Italy and Italian immigrants to the popularity of the pre-photographic aesthetic—the picturesque. Once associated with landscape painting in northern Europe, the picturesque came to symbolize Mediterranean Europe through comforting views of distant landscapes and exotic characters. Taking its cue from a picturesque stage backdrop from The Godfather Part II, Italy in Early American Cinema shows how this aesthetic was transferred from 19th-century American painters to early 20th-century American filmmakers. Italy in Early American Cinema offers readings of early films that pay close attention to how landscape representations that were related to narrative settings and filmmaking locations conveyed distinct ideas about racial difference and national destiny.
Color was used in film well before The Wizard of Oz. Thomas Edison, for example, projected two-colored films at his first public screening in New York City on April 23, 1896. These first colors of early cinema were not photographic; they were applied manually through a variety of laborious processes—most commonly by the hand-coloring and stenciling of prints frame by frame, and the tinting and toning of films in vats of chemical dyes. The results were remarkably beautiful. Moving Color is the first book-length study of the beginnings of color cinema. Looking backward, Joshua Yumibe traces the legacy of color history from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the cinema of the early twentieth century. Looking forward, he explores the implications of this genealogy on experimental and contemporary digital cinemas in which many colors have become, once again, vividly unhinged from photographic reality. Throughout this history, Moving Color revolves around questions pertaining to the sensuousness of color: how color moves us in the cinema—visually, emotionally, and physically.
This volume explores the historical novel Quo vadis written by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, examining how Sienkiewicz recreated Neronian Rome so vividly and the reasons why his novel was so avidly consumed and reproduced in new editions, translations, visual illustrations, and adaptations to the stage and screen.