Early Cinema Space Frame Narrative

Author : Thomas Elsaesser
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1838715479
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Cinema written by Thomas Elsaesser and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the twenty years preceding the First World War, cinema rapidly developed from a fairground curiosity into a major industry and social institution, a source of information and entertainment for millions of people. Only recently have film scholars and historians begun to study these early years of cinema in their own right and not simply as first steps towards the classical narrative cinema we now associate with Hollywood. The essays in this collection trace the fascinating history of how the cinema developed its forms of storytelling and representation and how it evolved into a complex industry with Hollywood rapidly acquiring a dominant role. These issues can be seen to arise from new readings of the so-called pioneers - Melies, Lumiere, Porter, and Griffith - while also suggesting new perspectives on major European filmmakers of the 1910s and 20s. Editor Thomas Elsaesser complements the contributions from leading British, American, and European scholars with introductory essays of his own that provide a comprehensive overview of the field. The volume is the most authoritative survey to date of a key area of contemporary film research, invaluable to historians as well as to students of cinema.

Author : Thomas Elsaesser
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early Cinema written by Thomas Elsaesser and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Noël Burch
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 9780520071445
Total Pages : 328 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Life to Those Shadows written by Noël Burch and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1990-11-21 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noel Burch's new book is a critique of the assumptions underlying 'classical' approaches to film history: the assumption that what we call the language of film was a natural, organic development, that it lay latent from the outset in the basic technology of the camera, waiting for the prescient pioneers to bring it into being; and the assumption that this language was a universal, neutral medium, innocent of any social or historical meaning in itself." "His major thesis is that, on the contrary, film language has a social and economic history, that it evolved in the way it did because of when and where it was constructed -- in the capitalist and imperialist west between 1892 and 1929." "The book examines the chronology of the emergence of what it defines as cinema's Institutional Mode of Representation and the socio-historical circumstances in which this took place. It examines the principles of visualisation -- camera placement and movement, lighting, editing, mise-en-scene -- that film-makers and audiences came to internalize over the first three decades. Special emphasis is laid on the allimportant change that occurred in the imaginary placing of the spectator, from a position of exteriority to the film image, implicit in both film-form and viewing conditions during the primitive era (pre-1909), to the imaginary centering of the spectator-subject, completed only with the generalisation of lip-synch sound after 1929. It is the contention of this book that this imaginary centering of a sensorily isolated spectator is the keystone of the cinematic illusion of reality, still achieved today by the same means as it was sixty years ago.

Author : Jonathan Auerbach
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520941195
Total Pages : 214 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Body Shots written by Jonathan Auerbach and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original and compelling book 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. Instead, as Jonathan Auerbach argues, it was the human form in motion that most profoundly shaped early cinema. Situating his discussion in a political and historical context, Auerbach begins his analysis with films that reveal striking anxieties and preoccupations about persons on public display—both exceptional figures, such as 1896 presidential candidate William McKinley, and ordinary people caught by the movie camera in their daily routines. The result is a sharp, unique, and groundbreaking way to consider the turn-of-the-twentieth-century American incarnation of cinema itself.

Author : Tom Gunning
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252063664
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.6X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film written by Tom Gunning and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The legendary filmmaker D. W. Griffith directed nearly 200 films during 1908 and 1909, his first years with the Biograph Company. While those one-reel films are a testament to Griffith's inspired genius as a director, they also reflect a fundamental shift in film style from "cheap amusements" to movie storytelling complete with characters and narrative impetus. In this comprehensive historical investigation, drawing on films preserved by the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, Tom Gunning reveals that the remarkable cinematic changes between 1900 and 1915 were a response to the radical reorganization within the film industry and the evolving role of film in American society. The Motion Picture Patents Company, the newly formed Film Trust, had major economic aspirations. The newly emerging industry's quest for a middle-class audience triggered Griffith's early experiments in film editing and imagery. His unique solutions permanently shaped American narrative film.

Author : Alison McMahan
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 150130268X
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Alice Guy Blaché written by Alison McMahan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-08-22 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alice Guy BlachT (1873-1968), the world's first woman filmmaker, was one of the key figures in the development of narrative film. From 1896 to 1920 she directed 400 films (including over 100 synchronized sound films), produced hundreds more, and was the first--and so far the only--woman to own and run her own studio plant (The Solax Studio in Fort Lee, NJ, 1910-1914). However, her role in film history was completely forgotten until her own memoirs were published in 1976. This new book tells her life story and fills in many gaps left by the memoirs. Guy BlachT's life and career mirrored momentous changes in the film industry, and the long time-span and sheer volume of her output makes her films a fertile territory for the application of new theories of cinema history, the development of film narrative, and feminist film theory. The book provides a close analysis of the one hundred Guy BlachT films that survive, and in the process rewrites early cinema history.

Author : Wanda Strauven
Publisher : Amsterdam University Press
ISBN 13 : 9789053569443
Total Pages : 500 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded written by Wanda Strauven and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years ago, noted film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault introduced the phrase “cinema of attractions” to describe the essential qualities of films made in the medium’s earliest days, those produced between 1895 and 1906. Now, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded critically examines the term and its subsequent wide-ranging use in film studies. The collection opens with a history of the term, tracing the collaboration between Gaudreault and Gunning, the genesis of the term in their attempts to explain the spectacular effects of motion that lay at the heart of early cinema, and the pair’s debts to Sergei Eisenstein and others. This reconstruction is followed by a look at applications of the term to more recent film productions, from the works of the Wachowski brothers to virtual reality and video games. With essays by an impressive collection of international film scholars—and featuring contributions by Gunning and Gaudreault as well—The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded will be necessary reading for all scholars of early film and its continuing influence.

Author : Wanda Strauven
Publisher : Amsterdam University Press
ISBN 13 : 9053569456
Total Pages : 464 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded written by Wanda Strauven and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years ago, noted film scholars Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault introduced the phrase “cinema of attractions” to describe the essential qualities of films made in the medium’s earliest days, those produced between 1895 and 1906. Now, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded critically examines the term and its subsequent wide-ranging use in film studies. The collection opens with a history of the term, tracing the collaboration between Gaudreault and Gunning, the genesis of the term in their attempts to explain the spectacular effects of motion that lay at the heart of early cinema, and the pair’s debts to Sergei Eisenstein and others. This reconstruction is followed by a look at applications of the term to more recent film productions, from the works of the Wachowski brothers to virtual reality and video games. With essays by an impressive collection of international film scholars—and featuring contributions by Gunning and Gaudreault as well—The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded will be necessary reading for all scholars of early film and its continuing influence.

Author : Charlie Keil
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN 13 : 0299173631
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Early American Cinema in Transition written by Charlie Keil and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2001-12-10 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period 1907–1913 marks a crucial transitional moment in American cinema. As moving picture shows changed from mere novelty to an increasingly popular entertainment, fledgling studios responded with longer running times and more complex storytelling. A growing trade press and changing production procedures also influenced filmmaking. In Early American Cinema in Transition, Charlie Keil looks at a broad cross-section of fiction films to examine the formal changes in cinema of this period and the ways that filmmakers developed narrative techniques to suit the fifteen-minute, one-reel format. Keil outlines the kinds of narratives that proved most suitable for a single reel’s duration, the particular demands that time and space exerted on this early form of film narration, and the ways filmmakers employed the unique features of a primarily visual medium to craft stories that would appeal to an audience numbering in the millions. He underscores his analysis with a detailed look at six films: The Boy Detective; The Forgotten Watch; Rose O’Salem-Town; Cupid’s Monkey Wrench; Belle Boyd, A Confederate Spy; and Suspense.

Author : Joanne Bernardi
Publisher : Indiana University Press
ISBN 13 : 0253053021
Total Pages : 561 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Provenance and Early Cinema written by Joanne Bernardi and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remnants of early films often have a story to tell. As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film archives to ask, "How did these moving images get here for me to see them?" This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.