Performing New Media, 1890–1915

Performing New Media, 1890–1915
Author: Kaveh Askari
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2014-05-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0861969103

Essays examining the effects of media innovations in cinema at the turn of the twentieth century affected performances on screen, as well as beside it. In the years before the First World War, showmen, entrepreneurs, educators, and scientists used magic lanterns and cinematographs in many contexts and many venues. To employ these silent screen technologies to deliver diverse and complex programs usually demanded audio accompaniment, creating a performance of both sound and image. These shows might include live music, song, lectures, narration, and synchronized sound effects provided by any available party—projectionist, local talent, accompanist or backstage crew—and would often borrow techniques from shadow plays and tableaux vivants. The performances were not immune to the influence of social and cultural forces, such as censorship or reform movements. This collection of essays considers the ways in which different visual practices carried out at the turn of the twentieth century shaped performances on and beside the screen.

The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality

The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality
Author: Jørgen Bruhn
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 1254
Release: 2024-01-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3031283228

This handbook provides an extensive overview of traditional and emerging research areas within the field of intermediality studies, understood broadly as the study of interrelations among all forms of communicative media types, including transmedial phenomena. Section I offers accounts of the development of the field of intermediality - its histories, theories and methods. Section II and III then explore intermedial facets of communication from ancient times until the 21st century, with discussion on a wide range of cultural and geographical settings, media types, and topics, by contributors from a diverse set of disciplines. It concludes in Section IV with an emphasis on urgent societal issues that an intermedial perspective might help understand.

New Perspectives on Early Cinema History

New Perspectives on Early Cinema History
Author: Mario Slugan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2022-06-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1350181986

In this book, editors Mario Slugan and Daniël Biltereyst present a theoretical reconceptualization of early cinema. To do so, they highlight the latest methods and tools for analysis, and cast new light on the experience of early cinema through the application of these concepts and methods. The international host of contributors evaluate examples of early cinema across the globe, including The May Irwin Kiss (1896), Un homme de têtes (1900), The Terrible Turkish Executioner (1904) and Tom Tom the Piper's Son (1905). In doing so, they address the periodization of the era, emphasizing the recent boon in the availability of primary materials, the rise of digital technologies, the developments in new cinema history, and the persistence of some conceptualizations as key incentives for rethinking early cinema in theoretical and methodological terms. They go on to highlight cutting-edge approaches to the study of early cinema, including the use of the Mediathread Platform, the formation of new datasets with the help of digital technologies, and exploring the early era in non-western cultures. Finally, the contributors revisit early cinema audiences and exhibition contexts by investigating some of the earliest screenings in Denmark and the US, exploring the details of black cinema going in Harlem, and examining exhibition practices in Germany.

Menus for Movieland

Menus for Movieland
Author: Richard Abel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520961889

At the turn of the past century, the main function of a newspaper was to offer “menus” by which readers could make sense of modern life and imagine how to order their daily lives. Among those menus in the mid-1910s were several that mediated the interests of movie manufacturers, distributors, exhibitors, and the rapidly expanding audience of fans. This writing about the movies arguably played a crucial role in the emergence of American popular film culture, negotiating among national, regional, and local interests to shape fans’ ephemeral experience of moviegoing, their repeated encounters with the fantasy worlds of “movieland,” and their attractions to certain stories and stars. Moreover, many of these weekend pages, daily columns, and film reviews were written and consumed by women, including one teenage girl who compiled a rare surviving set of scrapbooks. Based on extensive original research, Menus for Movieland substantially revises what moviegoing meant in the transition to what we now think of as Hollywood.

Beyond the Movie Theater

Beyond the Movie Theater
Author: Gregory A. Waller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2023-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520391519

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Beyond the Movie Theater excavates the history of non-theatrical cinema before 1920, exploring where and how moving pictures of the 1910s were used in ways distinct from and often alternative to typical theatrical cinema. Unlike commercial cinema, non-theatrical cinema was multi-purpose in its uses and multi-sited in where it could be shown, targeted at particular audiences and, in some manner, sponsored. Relying on contemporary print sources and ephemera of the era to articulate how non-theatrical cinema was practiced and understood in the US during the 1910s, historian Gregory A. Waller charts a heterogeneous, fragmentary, and rich field that cannot be explained in terms of a master narrative concerning origin or institutionalization, progress or decline. Uncovering how and where films were put to use beyond the movie theater, this book complicates and expands our understanding of the history of American cinema, underscoring the myriad roles and everyday presence of moving pictures during the early twentieth century.

The Promise of Cinema

The Promise of Cinema
Author: Anton Kaes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 701
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520962435

Rich in implications for our present era of media change, The Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of “theory” not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity’s most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by Béla Balázs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer alongside interventions from the realms of aesthetics, education, industry, politics, science, and technology. The book also features programmatic writings from the Weimar avant-garde and from directors such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Nearly all documents appear in English for the first time; each is meticulously introduced and annotated. The most comprehensive collection of German writings on film published to date, The Promise of Cinema is an essential resource for students and scholars of film and media, critical theory, and European culture and history.

Aeroscopics

Aeroscopics
Author: Patrick Ellis
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2021-07-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520355490

Introduction : spotting the spot -- The panoramic altitude -- The panstereorama -- Vertigo effects -- Observation rides -- The aeroplane gaze -- Conclusion : first flights.

Corporeality in Early Cinema

Corporeality in Early Cinema
Author: Marina Dahlquist
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0253033683

Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity. Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.

Screening Statues

Screening Statues
Author: Steven Jacobs
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2018-04-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 147441091X

A dynamic, scholarly engagement with Susanne Bier's work

Pictures of Poverty

Pictures of Poverty
Author: Lydia Jakobs
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0861969855

From Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist to George Sims's How the Poor Live, illustrated accounts of poverty were en vogue in Victorian Britain. Poverty was also a popular subject on the screen, whether in dramatic retellings of well-known stories or in 'documentary' photographs taken in the slums. London and its street life were the preferred setting for George Robert Sims's rousing ballads and the numerous magic lantern slide series and silent films based on them. Sims was a popular journalist and dramatist, whose articles, short stories, theatre plays and ballads discussed overcrowding, drunkenness, prostitution and child poverty in dramatic and heroic episodes from the lives and deaths of the poor. Richly illustrated and drawing from many previously unknown sources, Pictures of Poverty is a comprehensive account of the representation of poverty throughout the Victorian period, whether disseminated in newspapers, illustrated books and lectures, presented on the theatre stage or projected on the screen in magic lantern and film performances. Detailed case studies reveal the intermedial context of these popular pictures of poverty and their mobility across genres. With versatile author George R. Sims as the starting point, this study explores the influence of visual media in historical discourses about poverty and the highly controversial role of the Victorian state in poor relief.