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 Film A Very Short Introduction written by Michael Wood and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012-01-26 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film is considered to be the dominant art form of the twentieth century. It can be considered many other things; a record of events, a modern mythology, a career, an industry, an art, a hobby, and much else. Michael Wood explores the history of film, its venture into the digital age, and its role and impact on modern society.

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 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 Early Film History written by and published by . This book was released on with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Moving Pictures written by Nancy Mowll Mathews and published by Hudson Hills. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the complex relationship between American art and the new medium of film.

Download or read book Still written by David S. Shields and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The success of movies like The Artist and Hugo recreated the wonder and magic of silent film for modern audiences, many of whom might never have experienced a movie without sound. But while the American silent movie was one of the most significant popular art forms of the modern age, it is also one that is largely lost to us, as more than eighty percent of silent films have disappeared, the victims of age, disaster, and neglect. We now know about many of these cinematic masterpieces only from the collections of still portraits and production photographs that were originally created for publicity and reference. Capturing the beauty, horror, and moodiness of silent motion pictures, these images are remarkable pieces of art in their own right. In the first history of still camera work generated by the American silent motion picture industry, David S. Shields chronicles the evolution of silent film aesthetics, glamour, and publicity, and provides unparalleled insight into this influential body of popular imagery. Exploring the work of over sixty camera artists, Still recovers the stories of the photographers who descended on early Hollywood and the stars and starlets who sat for them between 1908 and 1928. Focusing on the most culturally influential types of photographs—the performer portrait and the scene still—Shields follows photographers such as Albert Witzel and W. F. Seely as they devised the poses that newspapers and magazines would bring to Americans, who mimicked the sultry stares and dangerous glances of silent stars. He uncovers scene shots of unprecedented splendor—visions that would ignite the popular imagination. And he details how still photographs changed the film industry, whose growing preoccupation with artistry in imagery caused directors and stars to hire celebrated stage photographers and transformed cameramen into bankable names. Reproducing over one hundred and fifty of these gorgeous black-and-white photographs, Still brings to life an entire long-lost visual culture that a century later still has the power to enchant.

Download or read book The Shape of Motion written by Jordan Schonig and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cinematic motion has long been celebrated as an emblem of change and fluidity or claimed as the source of cinema's impression of reality. But such general claims undermine the sheer variety of forms that motion can take onscreen-the sweep of a gesture, the rush of a camera movement, the slow transformations of a natural landscape. What might we learn about the moving image when we begin to account for the many ways that movements move? In The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Jordan Schonig provides a new way of theorizing cinematic motion by examining cinema's "motion forms:" structures, patterns, or shapes of movement unique to the moving image. From the wild and unpredictable motion of flickering leaves and swirling dust that captivated early spectators, to the pulsing abstractions that emerge from rapid lateral tracking shots, to the bleeding pixel-formations caused by the glitches of digital video compression, each motion form opens up the aesthetics of movement to film theoretical inquiry. By pairing close analyses of onscreen movement in narrative and experimental films with concepts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Immanuel Kant, Schonig rethinks longstanding assumptions within film studies, such as indexical accounts of photographic images and analogies between the camera and the human eye. Arguing against the intuition that cinema reproduces our natural perception of motion, The Shape of Motion shows how cinema's motion forms do not merely transpose the movements of the world in front of the camera; they transform them"

Download or read book Early Cinema and the National written by Richard Abel and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-17 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on “how motion pictures in the first two decades of the 20th century constructed ‘communities of nationality’ . . . recommended.” —Choice While many studies have been written on national cinemas, Early Cinema and the “National” is the first anthology to focus on the concept of national film culture from a wide methodological spectrum of interests, including not only visual and narrative forms, but also international geopolitics, exhibition and marketing practices, and pressing linkages to national imageries. The essays in this richly illustrated landmark anthology are devoted to reconsidering the nation as a framing category for writing cinema history. Many of the 34 contributors show that concepts of a national identity played a role in establishing the parameters of cinema’s early development, from technological change to discourses of stardom, from emerging genres to intertitling practices. Yet, as others attest, national meanings could often become knotty in other contexts, when concepts of nationhood were contested in relation to colonial/imperial histories and regional configurations. Early Cinema and the “National” takes stock of a formative moment in cinema history, tracing the beginnings of the process whereby nations learned to imagine themselves through moving images.

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 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 Image in Early Cinema written by Scott Curtis and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-22 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Image in Early Cinema, the contributors examine intersections between early cinematic form, technology, theory, practice, and broader modes of visual culture. They argue that early cinema emerged within a visual culture composed of a variety of traditions in art, science, education, and image making. Even as methods of motion picture production and distribution materialized, they drew from and challenged practices and conventions in other mediums. This rich visual culture produced a complicated, overlapping network of image-making traditions, innovations, and borrowing among painting, tableaux vivants, photography, and other pictorial and projection practices. Using a variety of concepts and theories, the contributors explore these crisscrossing traditions and work against an essentialist notion of media to conceptualize the dynamic interrelationship between images and their context.

Download or read book The Sounds of Early Cinema written by Richard Abel and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-03 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sounds of Early Cinema is devoted exclusively to a little-known, yet absolutely crucial phenomenon: the ubiquitous presence of sound in early cinema. "Silent cinema" may rarely have been silent, but the sheer diversity of sound(s) and sound/image relations characterizing the first 20 years of moving picture exhibition can still astonish us. Whether instrumental, vocal, or mechanical, sound ranged from the improvised to the pre-arranged (as in scripts, scores, and cue sheets). The practice of mixing sounds with images differed widely, depending on the venue (the nickelodeon in Chicago versus the summer Chautauqua in rural Iowa, the music hall in London or Paris versus the newest palace cinema in New York City) as well as on the historical moment (a single venue might change radically, and many times, from 1906 to 1910). Contributors include Richard Abel, Rick Altman, Edouard Arnoldy, Mats Björkin, Stephen Bottomore, Marta Braun, Jean Châteauvert, Ian Christie, Richard Crangle, Helen Day-Mayer, John Fullerton, Jane Gaines, André Gaudreault, Tom Gunning, François Jost, Charlie Keil, Jeff Klenotic, Germain Lacasse, Neil Lerner, Patrick Loughney, David Mayer, Domi-nique Nasta, Bernard Perron, Jacques Polet, Lauren Rabinovitz, Isabelle Raynauld, Herbert Reynolds, Gregory A. Waller, and Rashit M. Yangirov.

Download or read book Fort Lee written by and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A favorite locale of such film pioneers as D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford, the historic borough of Fort Lee was the first center of the American motion picture industry. Studios lined both sides of Main Street, and enormous film laboratories fed the nickelodeon market with thousands of reels of comedies and cliffhangers. Broadway stars and producers came here to make many of their first feature-length films; but by the 1920s, Theda Bara, Fatty Arbuckle, and Douglas Fairbanks were gone. Yet even after the studios closed down, the film industry was still the backbone of the local economy, with hundreds working behind the scenes in the printing, storage, and distribution of movies being made in Hollywood.

Download or read book Fight Pictures written by Dan Streible and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-04-11 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1897 a filmed prize-fight became one of cinema's first major attractions, and such films continued to enjoy great popularity for many years to come. This work chronicles the story of how legitimate bouts, fake fights, comic sparring matches, and other forms of boxing came to dominate the screens of the silent-era.

Download or read book Networks of Entertainment written by Frank Kessler and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-02-05 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by prominent scholars examining film distribution in the early years of cinema. This collection of essays explores the complex issue of film distribution from the invention of cinema into the 1910s. From regional distribution networks to international marketing strategies, from the analysis of distribution catalogs to case studies on individual distributors, these essays written by well-known specialists in the field discuss the intriguing question of how films came to meet their audiences. Contributors include Richard Abel, Marta Braun, Joseph Garncarz, André Gaudreault, François Jost, Charlie Keil, Martin Loiperdinger, Viva Paci, Wanda Strauven, Gregory Waller, and many more.

Download or read book Medicine s Moving Pictures written by Leslie J. Reagan and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original essays by leading media scholars and historians of medicine that explore the rich history of health-related films. This groundbreaking book argues that health and medical media, with their unique goals and production values, constitute a rich cultural and historical archive and deserve greater scholarly attention. Original essays by leading media scholars and historians of medicine demonstrate that Americans throughout the twentieth century have learned about health, disease, medicine, and the human body from movies. Heroic doctors and patients fighting dread diseaseshave thrilled and moved audiences everywhere; amid changing media formats, medicine's moving pictures continue to educate, entertain, and help us understand the body's journey through life. Perennially popular, health and medicalmedia are also complex texts reflecting many interests and constituencies including, notably, the U.S. medical profession, which has often sought, if not always successfully, to influence content, circulation, and meaning. Medicine's Moving Pictures makes clear that health and medical media representations are "more than illustrations," shows their power to shape health perceptions, practices, and policies, and identifies their social, cultural, andhistorical contexts. Contributors: Lisa Cartwright, Vanessa Northington Gamble, Rachel Gans-Boriskin, Valerie Hartouni, Susan E. Lederer, John Parascandola, Martin S. Pernick, Leslie J. Reagan, Naomi Rogers, Nancy Tomes, Paula A. Treichler, Joseph Turow Leslie J. Reagan is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Nancy Tomes is a Professor at Stony Brook University; Paula A. Treichler is a Professor atthe University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.