Download or read book EDISON MOTION PICTURES written by MUSSER CHARLES and published by Smithsonian Books (DC). This book was released on 1997 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book provides essential documentation of all known Edison films made between 1890 and 1900. Thomas Edison and his associates at the Edison Laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, invented the first system of commercial motion pictures." "Making the historical framework predominant while retaining traditional cataloging features, Edison Motion Pictures, 18901900 is of value to a wide range of scholars interested in American life at the turn of the century - those working in performance studies, film and media studies, cultural history, ethnic studies, and social and political history. Documentary filmmakers, film programmers, archivists, and librarians can also benefit from using this catalog." "Edison films from the end of the nineteenth century offer a unique visual record of American entertainment and popular culture - moving images that become much more interesting and useful when they can be examined in conjunction with pertinent documentation." "Scholars concerned with portrayals of war, depictions of the American presidency, and many other topics in the nation's political history will find much useful information."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book Thomas A Edison and His Kinetographic Motion Pictures written by Charles Musser and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much controversy has surrounded Thomas A. Edison's role in the birth of motion pictures. His earliest biographers gave all honor to him; later historians gave credit to his assistants or to foreign inventors whose recognition Edison stole. Charles Musser provides a balanced assessment, arguing that while Edison left the day-to-day experimentation to his talented employees, he provided the ideas and encouragement as well as financial support. Without him, the technical hurdles would not have been overcome so quickly. As time went on, and innovations in the motion picture business shifted from improving machines to improving the moving pictures themselves and the meyhods of exhibiting them, Edison's Laboratory lost its advantage. After three decades of patent wars and attempted monopolization of cameras and projectors, the battle moved away from the inventor and toward the producers and nickelodeon owners. Edison briefly experimented with a home movie projector, to steal a march on his rivals, but he was way ahead of his time. After thirty years, he closed down his movie studio and moved on to other projects. This brief, informative story of Edison's key contributions to the invention of motion pictures is heavily illustrated and beautifully designed.

Download or read book Who Invented the Movie Camera written by Karen Latchana Kenney and published by Lerner Classroom. This book was released on 2018 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn the exciting story of how Thomas Edison and William Friese-Greene went head-to-head to make the first working movie camera!

Download or read book The Flickering Mind written by Todd Oppenheimer and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 523 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Flickering Mind, by National Magazine Award winner Todd Oppenheimer, is a landmark account of the failure of technology to improve our schools and a call for renewed emphasis on what really works. American education faces an unusual moment of crisis. For decades, our schools have been beaten down by a series of curriculum fads, empty crusades for reform, and stingy funding. Now education and political leaders have offered their biggest and most expensive promise ever—the miracle of computers and the Internet—at a cost of approximately $70 billion just during the decade of the 1990s. Computer technology has become so prevalent that it is transforming nearly every corner of the academic world, from our efforts to close the gap between rich and poor, to our hopes for school reform, to our basic methods of developing the human imagination. Technology is also recasting the relationships that schools strike with the business community, changing public beliefs about the demands of tomorrow’s working world, and reframing the nation’s systems for researching, testing, and evaluating achievement. All this change has led to a culture of the flickering mind, and a generation teetering between two possible futures. In one, youngsters have a chance to become confident masters of the tools of their day, to better address the problems of tomorrow. Alternatively, they can become victims of commercial novelties and narrow measures of ability, underscored by misplaced faith in standardized testing. At this point, America’s students can’t even make a fair choice. They are an increasingly distracted lot. Their ability to reason, to listen, to feel empathy, is quite literally flickering. Computers and their attendant technologies did not cause all these problems, but they are quietly accelerating them. In this authoritative and impassioned account of the state of education in America, Todd Oppenheimer shows why it does not have to be this way. Oppenheimer visited dozens of schools nationwide—public and private, urban and rural—to present the compelling tales that frame this book. He consulted with experts, read volumes of studies, and came to strong and persuasive conclusions: that the essentials of learning have been gradually forgotten and that they matter much more than the novelties of technology. He argues that every time we computerize a science class or shut down a music program to pay for new hardware, we lose sight of what our priority should be: “enlightened basics.” Broad in scope and investigative in treatment, The Flickering Mind will not only contribute to a vital public conversation about what our schools can and should be—it will define the debate.

Download or read book The Man Who Made Movies written by Paul Spehr and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-11-17 with total page 713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of W.K.L. Dickson—assistant to Edison, inventor, and key figure in early cinematography: “Valuable and comprehensive.” —Communication Booknotes Quarterly W.K.L. Dickson was Thomas Edison’s assistant in charge of the experimentation that led to the Kinetoscope and Kinetograph—the first commercially successful moving image machines. In 1891–1892, he established what we know today as the 35mm format. Dickson also designed the Black Maria film studio and facilities to develop and print film, and supervised production of more than one hundred films for Edison. After leaving Edison, he became a founding member of the American Mutoscope Company, which later became the American Mutoscope & Biograph, then Biograph. In 1897, he went to England to set up the European branch of the company. Over the course of his career, Dickson made between five hundred and seven hundred films, which are studied today by scholars of the early cinema. This well-illustrated book offers a window onto early film history from the perspective of Dickson’s own oeuvre.

Download or read book The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures written by Paul Fischer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times Best True Crime of 2022 A “spellbinding, thriller-like” (Shelf Awareness) history about the invention of the motion picture and the mysterious, forgotten man behind it—detailing his life, work, disappearance, and legacy. The year is 1888, and Louis Le Prince is finally testing his “taker” or “receiver” device for his family on the front lawn. The device is meant to capture ten to twelve images per second on film, creating a reproduction of reality that can be replayed as many times as desired. In an otherwise separate and detached world, occurrences from one end of the globe could now be viewable with only a few days delay on the other side of the world. No human experience—from the most mundane to the most momentous—would need to be lost to history. In 1890, Le Prince was granted patents in four countries ahead of other inventors who were rushing to accomplish the same task. But just weeks before unveiling his invention to the world, he mysteriously disappeared and was never seen or heard from again. Three and half years later, Thomas Edison, Le Prince’s rival, made the device public, claiming to have invented it himself. And the man who had dedicated his life to preserving memories was himself lost to history—until now. The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures pulls back the curtain and presents a “passionate, detailed defense of Louis Le Prince…unfurled with all the cliffhangers and red herrings of a scripted melodrama” (The New York Times Book Review). This “fascinating, informative, skillfully articulated narrative” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) presents the never-before-told history of the motion picture and sheds light on the unsolved mystery of Le Prince’s disappearance.

Download or read book The Edison Motion Picture Myth written by Gordon Hendricks and published by Berkeley : University of California Press. This book was released on 1961 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Kinetoscope written by Richard Brown and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of how the motion-picture device was developed, and its role in Victorian society and early cinema. The position of the kinetoscope in film history is central and undisputed; indicative of its importance is the detailed attention American scholars have given to examining its history. However, the Kinetoscope’s development in Britain has not been well documented and much current information about it is incomplete and out of date. This book, for the first time, presents a comprehensive account of the unauthorized and often colorful development of British kinetoscopes, using many previously unpublished sources. The commercial and technical backgrounds of the kinetoscope are looked at in detail; the style and content of the earliest British films analyzed; and the device’s place in the wider world of Victorian popular entertainment examined. In addition, a unique legal case is revealed and a number of previously unrecorded film pioneers are identified and discussed.

Download or read book The Man Who Made the Movies written by Vanda Krefft and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 1501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting story of ambition, greed, and genius unfolding at the dawn of modern America. This landmark biography brings into focus a fascinating brilliant entrepreneur—like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, a true American visionary—who risked everything to realize his bold dream of a Hollywood empire. 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 fascinating biography, Vanda Krefft corrects the record, explaining why Fox’s legacy is central to the history of Hollywood. At the heart of William Fox’s life was the myth of the American Dream. His story intertwines the fate of the nineteenth-century immigrants who flooded into New York, the city’s vibrant and ruthless gilded age history, and the birth of America’s movie industry amid the dawn of the modern era. Drawing on a decade of original research, The Man Who Made the Movies offers a rich, compelling look at a complex man emblematic of his time, one of the most fascinating and formative eras in American history. Growing up in Lower East Side tenements, the eldest son of impoverished Hungarian immigrants, Fox began selling candy on the street. That entrepreneurial ambition eventually grew one small Brooklyn theater into a $300 million empire of deluxe studios and theaters that rivaled those of Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, and the Warner brothers, and launched stars such as Theda Bara. Amid the euphoric roaring twenties, the early movie moguls waged a fierce battle for control of their industry. A fearless risk-taker, Fox won and was hailed as a genius—until a confluence of circumstances, culminating with the 1929 stock market crash, led to his ruin.

Download or read book Edison s Kinetoscope and Its Films written by Ray Phillips and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1997-11-13 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motion pictures were first seen in 1894, when Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetoscope, a device for individually looking at film through a viewer. Over the next three years, Edison manufactured almost 1,000 Kinetoscopes and produced some 250 films to show in them. A million people worldwide first saw motion pictures through these devices. This book describes in detail how Kinetoscopes worked and how they were sold, and describes the parlors to which the public flocked, fascinated by the novelty of moving images. It examines how the machines were copied by others and later eclipsed by the advent of projection. It also indicates where surviving machines can be found in the United States and Europe. The book concludes with an index to Edison's films between 1892 and 1896, and presents titles, filming dates, subject descriptions, and information on the location of surviving copies. Copiously illustrated, the book is a vital research tool for all students of motion picture history.

Download or read book Flickering Empire written by Michael Glover Smith and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-20 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Flickering Empire tells the fascinating yet little-known story of how Chicago served as the unlikely capital of American film production in the years before the rise of Hollywood (1907–1913). As entertaining as it is informative, Flickering Empire straddles the worlds of academic and popular nonfiction in its vivid illustration of the rise and fall of the major Chicago movie studios in the mid-silent era (principally Essanay and Selig Polyscope). Colorful, larger-than-life historical figures, including Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Micheaux, and Orson Welles, are major players in the narrative—in addition to important though forgotten industry titans, such as "Colonel" William Selig, George Spoor, and Gilbert "Broncho Billy" Anderson.

Download or read book The Transformation of Cinema 1907 1915 written by Eileen Bowser and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1994-05-04 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Transformation of Cinema chronicles the history of the American film business from the days of storefront nickelodeons to the premiere of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, complete with full symphony orchestra. Eileen Bowser here redresses the imbalance of the "Griffith did it all" cliché by discussing the efforts of countless lesser-known figures who also helped to create Hollywood and shape the growing film industry. The effect of the surroundings -- the size of the hall; whether the film was shown alone or along with vaudeville entertainment; and the size, quality, and relevance of the musical background -- are all examined for their impact on the filmgoing experience. Bowser documents the emergence of the star system, which set the stage for the classic silent-film era. By 1915 the silent film is seen as a full-fledged art form with its own style and place in the world of business."--Back cover.

Download or read book Before the Nickelodeon written by Charles Musser and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991-01-01 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Vitagraph written by Andrew A. Erish and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Peter C. Rollins Book Award and the 2022 Browne Best Edited Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular and American Culture Award In Vitagraph: America's First Great Motion Picture Studio, Andrew A. Erish provides a comprehensive examination and reassessment of the company most responsible for defining and popularizing the American movie. This history challenges long-accepted Hollywood mythology that Paramount and Fox invented the feature film, that Universal created the star system, and that these companies, along with MGM and Warner Bros., developed motion pictures into a multimillion-dollar business. In fact, the truth about Vitagraph is far more interesting than the myths that later moguls propagated about themselves. Established in 1897 by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, Vitagraph was the leading producer of motion pictures for much of the silent era. Vitagraph established America's studio system, a division of labor utilizing specialized craftspeople and artists and developed fundamental aspects of American movies, from framing, lighting, and performance style to emphasizing character-driven comedy and drama in stories that respected and sometimes poked fun at every demographic of Vitagraph's vast audience. For most of its existence America's most influential studio was headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, before relocating to Hollywood. A historically rigorous and thorough account of the most influential producer of American motion pictures during the silent era, Erish draws on valuable primary material long overlooked by other historians to introduce readers to the fascinating, forgotten pioneers of Vitagraph.

Download or read book History of the Kinetograph Kinetoscope And Kinetophonograph written by W. K. L. Dickson and published by . This book was released on 2000-08-30 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a facsimile ed. of the first history of the cinema by W.K.L. Dickson & Antonia Dickson, & was reproduced from W.K.L. Dickson's own annotated copy of the book. When this book was first published in 1895, practical moving pictures were barely two years old, & film projection was yet to be perfected. Dickson had begun to work with Edison in 1883; within 5 years, he was leader of the team that was attempting to build an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the Ear.Ó The results of their labor were the kinetograph (the camera used for photographing motion pictures) & the kinetoscope (the means for viewing them). This book allows the reader to experience the wonder & promise of the cinema in its infancy. Illustrations.

Download or read book The Survival of American Silent Feature Films 1912 1929 written by David Pierce and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Commissioned for and sponsored by the National Film Preservation Board."

Download or read book Motion Picture Photography written by H. Mario Raimondo-Souto and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1891, William Dickson, a researcher at Thomas Edison's firm, developed the Kinetograph, a motion picture camera that used Eastman Kodak's new celluloid film. Almost immediately, an industry was born. The new artistic and technical discipline of motion picture photography matured as the film industry grew. From the beginnings of the movie camera, developments in film production and exhibition have been inextricably linked to the evolution of motion picture photography. This work traces the history of motion picture photography from the late 19th century through the year 1960, when color photography became the accepted standard. Generously illustrated, it covers each decade's cameras, lenses, cameramen, film processing methods, formats, studios, lighting techniques and major cinematographic developments. Each chapter concludes with examples of the decade's outstanding cinematography. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.