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Early titling on films and Pathé’s innovative and multilingual strategies in 1903

Claire Dupré La Tour

in The Translation of Films, 1900-1950

The shift from titles on lantern slides to the practice of titling on the film itself dates to the turn of the 20th century. Early examples of preserved filmed titles are rare, but occasional ... More

The shift from titles on lantern slides to the practice of titling on the film itself dates to the turn of the 20th century. Early examples of preserved filmed titles are rare, but occasional advertisements can be found in the UK in catalogues of James Williamson (1899) and Robert William Paul (1901), and in France in a catalogue of the Parnaland film company (1901). Although evidence shows that Pathé was using this technique in 1901, catalogues from its British branch reveal that it advertised it from May 1903. The advertisements highlighted positive outcomes for producers and exhibitors, and promoted titles in a variety of languages. This early titling strategy allowed Pathé to get ahead of its competitors in terms of industrialisation, control over its product, and domestic and foreign market share. This chapter focuses on early filmed titling and intertitling practices, Pathé’s innovative offer in 1903, and its evolution until 1908.Less

Early Cinema and National Identity in Brazil: Mapping Out a Space of Analysis

Maite Conde

in Foundational Films: Early Cinema and Modernity in Brazil

This chapter presents an overview and critique of theories of Brazil’s cinematic belle epoque, which have depicted the early film period as a golden age of Brazilian filmmaking in contrast to later ... More

This chapter presents an overview and critique of theories of Brazil’s cinematic belle epoque, which have depicted the early film period as a golden age of Brazilian filmmaking in contrast to later decades that were dominated by Hollywood’s hegemony. The chapter shows how these utopian discourses regarding the belle epoque have obscured the cinematic period’s intrinsic link to Rio de Janeiro and its modernizing reforms, reforms that were inextricably linked to the development and expansion of global capitalism.Less

Prison on Screen: The Carceral Aesthetic

Alison Griffiths

in Carceral Fantasies: Cinema and Prison in Early Twentieth-Century America

Chapter 2: “Prison on Screen: The Carceral Aesthetic” examines how actuality, reconstruction, and fictional films representing prisons and prisoners made before cinema’s transitional era in the mid ... More

Chapter 2: “Prison on Screen: The Carceral Aesthetic” examines how actuality, reconstruction, and fictional films representing prisons and prisoners made before cinema’s transitional era in the mid teens construct a carceral imaginary that was indebted to precinematic visions of imprisonment at the same time they established new conventions around visualizing incarceration. Beyond identifying the visual tropes used in prison dramas to signify the imprisonment, this chapter examines conventional and subversive narrative spaces carved out for prison trick films and dramas and asks whether films made prior to the transitional era open up alternative ways of theorizing carcerality.Less

Professional Lecturing in Early British Film Shows

Joe Kember

in The Sounds of the Silents in Britain

Adding a magic-lantern-style educative lecturer to moving pictures was one way of addressing emerging concerns in the 1900s that moving pictures themselves did not fix attention. By delving into the ... More

Adding a magic-lantern-style educative lecturer to moving pictures was one way of addressing emerging concerns in the 1900s that moving pictures themselves did not fix attention. By delving into the detail of exhibition practices at St James’s Hall Plymouth, the chapter argues that town-hall shows there and elsewhere structured the manipulation of audience attention within new institutional configurations, and did so as early as 1901, not only after 1908 as previously understood. Shows at St James’s Hall serve to demonstrate that lecturers could contribute to the creation of new patterns of audience attention, mediating and modulating the various effects involved in moving-picture exhibition, and adapting a wide range of oral practices in doing so.Less

Overture

Julie Brown and Annette Davison

in The Sounds of the Silents in Britain

The Introduction outlines the rationale for the book: the relative dearth of studies of the sonic environment of British cinemas in the period before the development of synchronized sound. It ... More

The Introduction outlines the rationale for the book: the relative dearth of studies of the sonic environment of British cinemas in the period before the development of synchronized sound. It highlights the key factors that affected the production of this particular cultural, economic, institutional environment, and its difference from that of the United States, for example. It offers a brief summary of each of the collection’s chapters, and present a useful introduction to the resources available to the researcher at this time.Less

The Birth of Cinema

Keith Withall

in Studying Early and Silent Cinema

This chapter discusses the technical and inventive basis for cinema, and briefly describes the important pioneers. It covers the developments prior to the invention of cinema and the first decade of ... More

This chapter discusses the technical and inventive basis for cinema, and briefly describes the important pioneers. It covers the developments prior to the invention of cinema and the first decade of its development, approximately 1895 to 1905. This is a distinct period in film, sometimes characterised by the term ‘primitives and pioneers’. Not all scholars are happy with the term primitive. The films seem simple compared with the complexities of late silent features, but they are also sophisticated in their own way. The screening of a good quality copy of a Georges Méliès' film would emphasise this point of view. There are three clear avenues for study: the technology itself, technique and language, and the idea of the ‘cinema of attractions’. It should be clear that even though these early films are not strictly narratives in the accustomed sense, they are full of opportunities for the study of representations and value systems.Less

Primitive Diversity

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

in Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

This chapter looks at the dialogue between Christian Schulte and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about primitive diversity. “Primitive diversity” is an expression from the American East Coast for ... More

This chapter looks at the dialogue between Christian Schulte and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about primitive diversity. “Primitive diversity” is an expression from the American East Coast for early film. The one- to two-minute films demonstrate the early form of cinema. Meanwhile, pre-Hollywood cinema is closely tied to the inventors of the film camera, who were also scientists. Primitive diversity encompasses the entire spectrum ranging from sensationalism, curiosity, and old greed to the abilities cameras themselves possess. Ultimately, this early cinema responds to the needs of migrant workers in the United States who come from many countries, are in need, and create their own public sphere themselves in the silent movies. Kluge claims that “astonishment as means of knowledge—that is primitive diversity.” The dialogue between Schulte and Kluge also ruminates on Kluge's indebtedness to the cinema of attraction.Less

Introduction: Dietrich’s Face and the Talking Picture

James Phillips

in Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle

Sternberg’s films are famous for their close-ups of the female face. This Introduction discusses the way in which Dietrich’s face functions in his early sound films. Whereas silent cinema charged the ... More

Sternberg’s films are famous for their close-ups of the female face. This Introduction discusses the way in which Dietrich’s face functions in his early sound films. Whereas silent cinema charged the human face with carrying the plot or at least with taking up the narrative slack between intertitles, sound film with its additional resources for expounding the narrative opens a space for a face that is inscrutable. Sternberg’s films release the face for spectacle without thereby surrendering it to the gaze of the moviegoer: in its independence of the enclosed world of a narrative, Dietrich’s face is in a position to look out and back at the spectator. Contrasting Morocco with An American Tragedy (in which Dietrich does not appear), the Introduction argues that there is thus an image of autonomy that Sternberg and Dietrich construct and that contributes an (often overlooked) ethical dimension to their cinema of spectacle.Less

The Film Business That Unites: Early US Cinema in Havana, 1897–1928

Megan Feeney

in Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959

This chapter covers film distribution, exhibition, and reception in Havana during the era of silent cinema and of Cuba’s first republic, which roughly overlapped. At the turn-of-the-century, moving ... More

This chapter covers film distribution, exhibition, and reception in Havana during the era of silent cinema and of Cuba’s first republic, which roughly overlapped. At the turn-of-the-century, moving pictures arrived in Havana just as Cubans achieved independence from Spain and founded their own nation. But, by forcing the Platt Amendment into Cuba’s constitution, the United States assured that Cuba was only “semi-sovereign” in relation to US power, exerted in the form of military occupations, political tinkering, trade policies, investors, and a flood of US-made goods. Among those goods were US-made films, which began to monopolize Havana’s multiplying moving picture halls especially during World War I, which saw the rise of Hollywood’s studio system and its global dominance. The big Hollywood studios had each opened a distribution office in Havana by the early 1920s, and a number operated their own “picture palaces,” to the dismay of local distributors and exhibitors. This chapter finds that Havana’s early cinemas—and the business and print cultures emerging around them—were sites where Cubans continued to forge their national identity through complex negotiations with US power. They were not just sites for the conveyance of US influence but also for the continued promotion of revolutionary Cuban nationalism.Less

Resisting Arrest: Imagining Motion in Film and Photography

Louise Hornby

in Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film

This chapter examines how early filmmakers had to invent what motion looked like on screen, imagining it as distinct from stillness, legibility, or clarity. The images of motion in early film are ... More

This chapter examines how early filmmakers had to invent what motion looked like on screen, imagining it as distinct from stillness, legibility, or clarity. The images of motion in early film are blurred and impressionistic—ocean waves, clouds of dust, puffs of steam and smoke—which render motion itself a kind of obscurity and reveal how film is itself an ephemeral medium of dust and smoke. The precursor to film’s absent materiality is found in photography’s own representation of motion as blur in Etienne-Jules Marey’s strange late nineteenth-century photographs of smoke fillets and the movements of air. These images, lesser known than his other motion studies, reveal how film casts back to its still antecedent to imagine motion in blurred terms of smoke and dust, even as it resists photographic arrest.Less

Exploding Boys and Hungry Girls

Katherine Roeder

in Wide Awake in Slumberland: Fantasy, Mass Culture, and Modernism in the Art of Winsor McCay

Chapter two focuses ona groundbreaking, self-reflexive episode of Little Sammy Sneeze, a comic which follows a boy whose potent sneezes leave mayhem in his wake. Sammy's sneezes even shatter the ... More

Chapter two focuses ona groundbreaking, self-reflexive episode of Little Sammy Sneeze, a comic which follows a boy whose potent sneezes leave mayhem in his wake. Sammy's sneezes even shatter the frame that contains him, dismantling the divide between viewer and subject. Here McCayexplores time and motion within the narrative space of the comic strip, as well as sneezing as a disruptive social practice, that acts on the body much the way the comic strip interrupts the sober narrative of the newspaper. While employing humor as a strategy for critiquing societal norms, McCay drew upon assorted popular visual art forms, including vaudeville and early film, to create an anarchic response to consumer culture. With Sammy Sneeze and The Story of Hungry Henrietta, McCay was instrumental in creating an audience for comics, by both acclimating them to the visual language of comics, and dismantling these selfsame conventions before their eyes.Less

In the Selznick Family Tradition

Nathan Platte

in Making Music in Selznick's Hollywood

This chapter begins with David Selznick’s apprenticeship in silent cinema under his father, Lewis J. Selznick, in New York. As with other directors and producers who learned film in the silent era, ... More

This chapter begins with David Selznick’s apprenticeship in silent cinema under his father, Lewis J. Selznick, in New York. As with other directors and producers who learned film in the silent era, Selznick’s early experiences shaped his attitude to cinema, even long after the introduction of sound. This chapter argues that musical traces from Lewis J. Selznick’s films, such as sheet-music tie-ins from War Brides (directed by Herbert Brenon, 1916), and the father’s tense relationship with New York’s musically effusive exhibitor, Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, are critical for understanding David Selznick’s use of music in later films as means for reconciling aesthetic and commercial aims. The chapter concludes with Selznick’s work at Paramount, the studio at which Selznick gleaned many important lessons concerning music in early sound films. A discussion of Selznick’s Four Feathers and The Dance of Life prepares the stage for the producer’s bolder musical operations at RKO.Less

The Eternal Boy

Julia Lee

in Our Gang: A Racial History of The Little Rascals

“The Eternal Boy” is a brief history of Hal Roach, the creator of Our Gang, from his birth in Elmira, New York in 1892 to the opening of his eponymous film studio in Culver City, California in the ... More

“The Eternal Boy” is a brief history of Hal Roach, the creator of Our Gang, from his birth in Elmira, New York in 1892 to the opening of his eponymous film studio in Culver City, California in the early 1920s. It provides an account of Roach’s experiences as a cowboy and muleskinner, as well as an early history of Los Angeles’s film industry.Less