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A history of film preservation and restoration, telling the story from the earliest days of the cinema to the modern days of digital restorations. The cinema was invented in the Victorian era, but for the first four decades of its existence almost no effort was made to preserve the millions of feet of celluloid which rolled through the cameras and projectors of the world. As a result, thousands of movies were lost forever. In the 1930s, the first concerted attempts at film preservation were begun by pioneering individuals such as Iris Barry at New York's Museum of Modern Art; Ernest Lindgren at the British Film Institute, and the indomitable Henri Langlois at the Cinémathèque française, a man who performed heroics in occupied France to save the world's cinematic heritage from destruction by the Nazis. The 1980s video boom encouraged the studios finally to instigate asset protection programmes and in the digital age new methods of producing, exhibiting and restoring motion pictures emerged.
The essays in American Cinema 1890-1909 explore and define how the making of motion pictures flowered into an industry that would finally become the central entertainment institution of the world. Beginning with all the early types of pictures that moved, this volume tells the story of the invention and consolidation of the various processes that gave rise to what we now call "cinema."
A COMPANION TO EARLY CINEMA “This collection of essays by early cinema scholars from Europe and North America offers manifold perspectives on early cinema fiction which perfectly reflect the state of international research.” – Martin Loiperdinger, Universitaet Trier “A fabulous selection of first-rate articles!” – Rick Altman, University of Iowa “One of the most challenging books in recent film studies: in it, early cinema is both a historical object and a contemporary presence. As in a great novel, we can retrace the adventures of the past – the films, styles, discourses, and receptions that made cinema the breakthrough reality it was in its first decades. But we can also co...
J.P. McGowan (1880ndash;1952) was one of Hollywood's most prolific pioneers: actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and industrial advocate for the motion picture industry. Known as the "Railroad Man" for his specialization in action movies involving railroads, he made common the image of the terrified beauty tied to a track-his first wife was Helen Holmes of his iconic silent series The Hazards of Helen. This work, the first biography of the Australian-born adventurer, covers a screen career spanning 30 years and over 600 productions from the dawn of the Silent Era. It chronicles his entire life and places him within the context of the times in which he lived and worked. Previously unknown details are unearthed on his family background and early life as well as his participation in the Boer War and his move to the United States. The work concludes with a comprehensive filmography of McGowan's work.
Fade In, Crossroads is a history of the relations between black and white southerners and films from the silent era to midcentury. It illustrates how the rise and fall of the American film industry coincided with that of the South's most important modern product and export: Jim Crow segregation.
El proyecto de recuperación de películas históricas Unseen Cinema explora en detalle los logros, desconocidos hasta la fecha, de los cineastas pioneros que desarrollaron su labor dentro y fuera de las fronteras de Estados Unidos durante el periodo formativo del cine americano. Con la colaboración de innumerables instituciones, desde los archivos de la Academia de Cine de Hollywood, el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York (MOMA), el British Film Institute, el Deustchen Film museum hasta el Gosfilmofond de Russia, la recuperación de estas películas y su posterior organización en 7 discos postula una visión innovadora del cine experimental. Un buen número de estas películas no había e...
Auerbach places the body at the center of cinema's first decade of emergence and challenges the idea that for early audiences, the new medium's fascination rested on visual spectacle for its own sake.
In The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1848-1920, Karen E. Laird alternates between readings of nineteenth-century stage and twentieth-century silent film adaptations to investigate the working practices of the first adapters of Victorian fiction. Laird’s juxtaposition between stage and screen brings to life the dynamic culture of literary adaptation as it developed throughout the long nineteenth-century. Focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Laird demonstrates how adaptations performed the valuable cultural work of expanding the original novel’s readership across class and gender divides, exporting the English novel to America, and commemorating the novelists through adaptations that functioned as virtual literary tourism. Bridging the divide between literary criticism, film studies, and theatre history, Laird’s book reveals how the Victorian adapters set the stage for our contemporary film adaptation industry.
Media history is his subject, and, as this memoir makes so delightfully clear, it has also been Erik Barnouw's life. Barnouw's story, told with wit and charm in Media Marathon, is the story of American culture adjusting to the twentieth century, of new media repeatedly displacing the old in a century-long competitive upheaval.