Women Film Pioneers ProjectThe Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP) is a digital publication and resource that advances research on the hundreds of women who worked behind the scenes during the silent film era. Always expanding, WFPP publishes original scholarship on women who worked all around the world as directors, producers, screenwriters, editors, and more.
You'll find films by Porter, Chaplin, Guy Blache, Micheaux, Lumiere Brothers, etc. just type their names in the search box.
Charlie Chaplin
Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses by Lawrence HoweWidely recognized in his character of the Tramp, Charlie Chaplin transcended the role of actor to become screenwriter, director, composer, producer, and finally studio head. The subject of numerous biographical studies, Chaplin has been examined as both myth and man, but these treatments fail to adequately address the often-overlooked complexity of his filmmaking. Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses features essays that examine the actor and director through various theoretical perspectives--including Marxism, feminism, gender studies, deconstruction, psychoanalytic criticism, new historicism, performance studies, and cultural criticism. Complementing this range of intellectual inquiry is the wide reach of films discussed, from The Circus (1928), The Gold Rush (1925), and City Lights (1931) to Modern Times (1936), The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952). Shorter films, such as "The Pawnshop" (1916), "The Rink" (1916), and "A Dog's Life" (1918) are also examined. These essays analyze the tensions between the carefully constructed worlds of Chaplin's films and their cultural contexts. The varied approaches and range of materials in this volume not only comprehensively assess the screen icon but also foster a conversation that exemplifies the best of intellectual exchange. Refocusing Chaplin provides a unique view into the work of one of cinema's most important and influential artists.
Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography by Roland Barthes; Richard Howard (Translator)A graceful, contemplative volume,Camera Lucidawas first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach establishedCamera Lucidaas one of the most important books of theory on the subject, along with Susan Sontag'sOn Photography.
Call Number: TR642 .B3713 2010
ISBN: 9780374532338
Publication Date: 2010-10-12
The Cine Goes to Town: French cinema, 1896-1914 by Richard AbelRichard Abel's magisterial new book radically rewrites the history of French cinema between 1896 and 1914, particularly during the years when Path??-Fr??res, the first major corporation in the new industry, led the world in film production and distribution. Based on extensive investigation of rare archival films and documents, and drawing on recent social and cultural histories of turn-of-the-century France and the United States, his book provides new insights into the earliest history of the cinema. Abel tells how early French film entertainment changed from a cinema of attractions to the narrative format that Hollywood would so successfully exploit. He describes the popular genres of the era?comic chases, trick films and f??eries, historical and biblical stories, family melodramas and grand guignol tales, crime and detective films?and shows the shift from short subjects to feature-length films. Cinema venues evolved along with the films as live music, color effects, and other new exhibiting techniques and practices drew larger and larger audiences. Abel explores the ways these early films mapped significant differences in French social life, helping to produce thoroughly bourgeois citizens for Third Republic France. The Cin?? Goes to Town recovers early French cinema's unique contribution to the development of the mass culture industry. As the one-hundredth anniversary of cinema approaches, this compelling demonstration of film's role in the formation of social and national identity will attract a wide audience of film scholars, social and cultural historians, and film enthusiasts.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0520079361
Publication Date: 1998
D. W. Griffith's the Birth of a Nation by Philip B. HeymannIn this deeply researched and vividly written volume, Melvyn Stokes illuminates the origins, production, reception and continuing history of this ground-breaking, aesthetically brilliant, and yet highly controversial movie.By going back to the original archives, particularly the NAACP and D. W. Griffith Papers, Stokes explodes many of the myths surrounding The Birth of a Nation (1915). Yet the story that remains is fascinating: the longest American film of its time, Griffith's film incorporated many new features, including the first full musical score compiled for an American film. It was distributed and advertised by pioneering methods that would quickly become standard. Through the high prices charged for admission and the fact that it was shown, at first, only in "live" theaters with orchestral accompaniment, Birth played a major role in reconfiguring the American movie audience by attracting more middle-class patrons. But if the film was a milestone in the history of cinema, it was also undeniably racist. Stokes shows that the darker side of this classic movie has its origins in the racist ideas of Thomas Dixon, Jr. and Griffith's own Kentuckian background and earlier film career. The book reveals how, as the years went by, the campaign against the film became increasingly successful. In the 1920s, for example, the NAACP exploited the fact that the new Ku Klux Klan, which used Griffith's film as a recruiting and retention tool, was not just anti-black, but also anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, as a way to mobilize new allies in opposition to the film.This crisply written book sheds light on both the film's racism and the aesthetic brilliance of Griffith's filmmaking. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the cinema.
Film History: An Introduction by Kristin Thompson, David BordwellWritten by two of the leading scholars in film studies, 'Film History' is a comprehensive, global survey of the medium that covers the development of every genre in film, from drama and comedy to documentary and experimental.
The History of Film by Nicholas Croce (Editor)This comprehensive guide offers cinema enthusiasts everything they need to know about the history of film. The book covers the film industry's most epic periods, including the early years of film starting in the 1830s, the silent years in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the pre-World War II sound era, the rise and fall of the Hollywood studios, and the transition into the twenty-first century. Along the way, readers learn about the most iconic films and directors from around the world, as well as how history, politics, and the cultural zeitgeist influenced cinema.
History of Narrative Film by David A. CookThis volume combines a comprehensive and chronologically organized film history with an introduction to the theory and aesthetics of the cinema. The focus of the book is the study of motion pictures as the complex product of both institutional forces - economic, technological, social and political - and individual artistic vision.
Call Number: PN1993.5 .A1 C65 1990
ISBN: 9780393955538
Publication Date: 1990-04-01
Keaton's Silent Shorts: Beyond the Laughter by Gabriella OldhamFilling a major gap in the critical canon, Keaton's Classic Shorts: Beyond the Laughter chronicles the rapid growth in the filmmaker's understanding of what makes both comedy and film successful. Keaton developed his major themes in these nineteen silent short films shot between 1920 and 1923, creating his persona "Buster" with his trademark stone face. These short films clearly indicate Keaton's love of the camera and his concern for composition, symmetry, and images that delight the eye and startle the mind. Oldham reconstructs each of these rarely seen films to enable the reader to "watch" Keaton's performance, devoting a separate chapter to each. She analyzes each film's strengths, weaknesses, and prevalent themes and threads. She also enables readers to plumb the depths of what seems to be surface comedy through philosophical, biographical, historical, and critical commentary, thus linking the shorts together into a cohesive study of Buster Keaton's growth through his three-year independent venture as a filmmaker. Beyond the laughter and beyond the great stone face, Oldham presents a treasure of cinema comedy and a unique philosophy of life as captured by a great filmmaker.
Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies by Deac RossellA history of the near-simultaneous emergence of moving pictures in several countries in the mid-1890s and a thorough reevaluation of the development of the technology.CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book 1999
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 0791437671
Publication Date: 1998-04-30
The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché by Roberta BlachéProvides an original, first-hand view of the potential that motion pictures offered women from the Victorian era, and how, ultimately, the industry rejected one of its first and most important pioneers. Alice Guy Blach was not only the world's first female director, but in 1896, she became the first of either sex to direct a fictional film. As the first director with the Gaumont Company in Paris, Alice Guy Blach served as an influential figure in French film history, making more than 300 films, including some of the earliest sound subjects from the turn of the century. She continued her career in the United States, founding the Solax Company in 1910, and producing and directing 350 more films. Complementing the text are reprints of contemporary articles on Alice Guy Blach from the American trade press, a reminiscence by her daughter, a brief evaluation of the career of her husband, Herbert Blach and a complete filmography.
Movie History: A Survey by Douglas GomeryCovering everything from Edison to Avatar, Gomery and Pafort-Overduin have written the clearest, best organized, and most user-friendly film history textbook on the market. It masterfully distills the major trends and movements of film history, so that the subject can be taught in one semester. And each chapter includes a compelling case study that highlights an important moment in movie history and, at the same time, subtly introduces a methodological approach. This book is a pleasure to read and to teach. Peter Decherney, University of Pennsylvania, USA In addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the development of film around the world, the book gives us examples of how to do film history, including organizing the details and discussing their implications.Hugh McCarney, Western Connecticut State University, USA Douglas Gomery and Clara Pafort-Overduin have created an outstanding textbook with an impressive breadth of content, covering over 100 years in the evolution of cinema. Movie History: A Survey is an engaging book that will reward readers with a contemporary perspective of the history of motion pictures and provide a solid foundation for the study of film. Matthew Hanson, Eastern Michigan University, USA How can we understand the history of film? Historical facts don't answer the basic questions of film history. History, as this fascinating book shows, is more than the simple accumulation of film titles, facts and figures. This is a survey of over 100 years of cinema history, from its beginnings in 1895, to its current state in the twenty-first century. An accessible, introductory text, Movie History: A Survey looks at not only the major films, filmmakers, and cinema institutions throughout the years, but also extends to the production, distribution, exhibition, technology and reception of films. The textbook is divided chronologically into four sections, using the timeline of technological changes: Section One looks at the era of silent movies from 1895 to 1927; Section Two starts with the coming of sound and covers 1928 until 1950; Section Three runs from 1951 to 1975 and deals with the coming and development of television; and Section Four focuses on the coming of home video and the transition to digital, from 1975 to 2010. Key pedagogical features include: timelines in each section help students to situate the films within a broader historical context case study boxes with close-up analysis of specific film histories and a particular emphasis on film reception lavishly illustrated with over 450 color images to put faces to names, and to connect pictures to film titles margin notes add background information and clarity glossary for clear understanding of the key terms described references and further reading at the end of each chapter to enhance further study. A supporting website is available at www.routledge.com/textbooks/moviehistory, with lots of extra materials, useful for the classroom or independent study, including: additional case studies - new, in-depth and unique to the website international case studies - for the Netherlands in Dutch and English timeline - A movie history timeline charting key dates in the history of cinema from 1890 to the present day revision flash cards - ideal for getting to grips with key terms in film studies related resources - on the website you will find every link from the book for ease of use, plus access to additional online material students are also invited to submit their own movie history case studies - see website for details Written by two highly respected film scholars and experienced teachers, Movie History is the ideal textbook for students studying film history.
Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only by Patrick McGilliganOscar Micheaux was the Jackie Robinson of film, the black D. W. Griffith--a bigger-than-life American folk hero whose important life story has been nearly forgotten today. The son of freed slaves, he roamed America as a Pullman porter before making his first mark as a homesteader in South Dakota--and going on from there to become the king of the "race cinema" industry, producing and/or directing nearly forty films during a time of Jim Crow segregation when African-American artists were not welcome in Hollywood. In this groundbreaking new biography, award-winning film historian Patrick McGilligan offers a vivid and fascinating portrait of a true pioneer of American culture who was equal parts visionary, hustler, huckster, innovator, and raffish Barnum-like showman--and the first great African-American filmmaker.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780060731403
Publication Date: 2007
Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era by Charles Musser (Editor)Oscar Micheaux--the most prolific African American filmmaker to date and a filmmaking giant of the silent period--has finally found his rightful place in film history. Both artist and showman, Micheaux stirred controversy in his time as he confronted issues such as lynching, miscegenation, peonage and white supremacy, passing, and corruption among black clergymen. In this important collection, prominent scholars examine Micheaux's surviving silent films, his fellow producers of race films who alternately challenged or emulated his methods, and the cultural activities that surrounded and sustained these achievements. The relationship between black film and both the stage (particularly the Lafayette Players) and the black press, issues of underdevelopment, and a genealogy of Micheaux scholarship, as well as extensive and more accurate filmographies, give a richly textured portrait of this era. The essays will fascinate the general public as well as scholars in the fields of film studies, cultural studies, and African American history. This thoroughly readable collection is a superb reference work lavishly illustrated with rare photographs.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780253021557
Publication Date: 2016-03-28
The Oxford History of World Cinema by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Editor)The Oxford History of World Cinema is the most authoritative, up-to-date history of the Cinema ever undertaken. It traces the history of the twentieth-century's most enduringly popular entertainment form, covering all aspects of its development, stars, studios, and cultural impact. The book celebrates and chronicles over one hundred years of diverse achievement from westerns to the New Wave, from animation to the Avant-Garde, and from Hollywood to Hong Kong,with an international team of distinguished film historians telling the story of the major inventions and developments in the cinema business, its institutions, genres, and personnel. Other chapters outline the evolution of national cinemas round the world - the varied and distinctive filmic traditions thathave developed alongside Hollywood. Also included are over 140 special inset features on the film-makers and personalities - Garbo and Godard, Keaton and Kurosawa, Bugs Bunny and Bergman - who have had an enduring impact in popular memory and cinematic lore.With over 300 illustrations, a full bibliography, and an extensive index, The Oxford History of World Cinema is an invaluable and entertaining guide and resource for the student and general reader.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780191518188
Publication Date: 1997
Perspective As Symbolic Form by Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modern intellectual history, the legendary text that has dominated all art-historical and philosophical discussions on the topic of perspective in this century. Finally available in English, this unrivaled example of Panofsky's early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change. Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over ancient philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of "archaeology" of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies. Perspective in Panofsky's hands becomes a central component of a Western "will to form," the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. He demonstrates how the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is unique and how each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world. Panofsky articulates these distinct spatial systems, explicating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780942299533
Publication Date: 1991
Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) by Marta BraunEtienne-Jules Marey was an inventor whose methods of recording movement revolutionized our way of visualizing time and motion. Best remembered for his chronophotography, Marey constructed a single-camera system that led the way to cinematography. Picturing Time, the first complete survey of Marey's work, investigates the far reaching effects of Marey's inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists. Braun offers a fascinating look at how Marey's chronophotography was used to express the profound transformation in understanding and experiencing time that occurred in the late nineteenth century. Featuring 335 illustrations, Picturing Time includes many unpublished examples of Marey's chronophotographs and cinematic work. It also contains a complete bibliography of his writings and the first catalog of his films, photographic prints, and recently discovered negatives.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780226071756
Publication Date: 1992
The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907--1933 by Anton Kaes (Editor)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.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780520962439
Publication Date: 2016-03-01
Sergei M. Eisenstein: Notes for a General History of Cinema by Naum Kleiman (Editor)One of the iconic figures of the twentieth-century cinema, Sergei Eisenstein is best known as the director of The Battleship Potemkin. His craft as director and film editor left a distinct mark on such key figures of the Western cinema as Nicolas Roeg, Francis Ford Coppola, Sam Peckinpah and Akiro Kurosawa. This comprehensive volume of Eisenstein's writings is the first ever English-language edition of his newly discovered notes for a general history of the cinema, a project he undertook in 1946-47 before his death in 1948. In his writings, Eisenstein presents the main coordinates of a history of the cinema without mentioning specific directors or films: what we find instead is a vast genealogy of all the media and of all the art forms that have preceded cinema's birth and accompanied the first decades of its history, exploring the same expressive possibilities that cinema has explored and responding to the same, deeply rooted urges cinema has responded to. Cinema appears here as the heir of a very long tradition that includes death masks, ritual processions, wax museums, diorama and panorama, and as a medium in constant transformation, that far from being locked in a stable form continues to redefine itself. The texts by Eisenstein are accompanied by a series of critical essays written by some of the world's most qualified Eisenstein scholars.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9789089642837
Publication Date: 2016-07-05
A Short History of Film by Wheeler Winston Dixon; Gwendolyn Audrey FosterWith more than 250 images, new information on international cinema--especially Polish, Chinese, Russian, Canadian, and Iranian filmmakers--an expanded section on African-American filmmakers, updated discussions of new works by major American directors, and a new section on the rise of comic book movies and computer generated special effects, this is the most up to date resource for film history courses in the twenty-first century.
Straight Lick by J. Ronald GreenA critical examination of the films of Oscar Micheaux. One of the most original and successful filmmakers of all time, Oscar Micheaux was born into a rural, working-class, African-American family in mid-America in 1884, yet he created an impressive legacy in commercial cinema. Between 1913 and 1951 he wrote, directed, and distributed some forty-three feature films, more than any other black filmmaker in the world, a record of production that is likely to stand for a very long time. Micheaux's work was founded upon the concern for class mobility, or uplift, for African Americans. Uplift provided the context for Micheaux's extensive commentary on racist cinema, such as D. W. Griffith's 1915 blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, which Micheaux "answered" with his very early films Within Our Gates and Symbol of the Unconquered. Uplift explains Micheaux's use of "negative images" of African Americans as well as his multi-pronged campaign against stereotype and caricature in American culture. His campaign produced a body of films saturated with a nuanced intertexual "signifying," boldly and repeatedly treating controversial topics that face white censorship time after time, topics ranging from white mob and Klan violence to light-skin-color fetish to white financing of black cultural productions.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780253337535
Publication Date: 2000-09-22
Towards a Theory of Montage by Sergei EisensteinI.B.Tauris is delighted to announce the reissue in paperback in three volumes of the definitive, most comprehensive edition, in the finest translations and fully annotated, of the writings of this great filmmaker, theorist and teacher of film - and one of the most original aesthetic thinkers of the twentieth century. The name of Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) is synonymous with the idea of montage, as exemplified in his silent classics such as "The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) and "October" (1927). In the 1930s his style changed, partly to accommodate the arrival of sound, and his ideas on audio-visual counterpoint developed. Between 1937 and 1940 he elaborated his ideas on montage in a series of essays, most of which remained unpublished until after his death and which are published in English for the first time in this volume. They present the essence of Eisenstein's thinking on cinema and aesthetics more generally and reveal him as one of the most significant philosophers of art of the twentieth century.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780857717436
Publication Date: 2010-06-30
A Viewer's Guide to Film by Richard M. GollinThis handbook of film terms and issues is intended as a supplement for basic film history courses, but it may also be used as a text for film appreciation courses.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780070237001
Publication Date: 1992
What Is Cinema? Volume I by André BazinAndré Bazin's What Is Cinema? (volumes I and II) have been classics of film studies for as long as they've been available and are considered the gold standard in the field of film criticism. Although Bazin made no films, his name has been one of the most important in French cinema since World War II. He was co-founder of the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, which under his leadership became one of the world's most distinguished publications. Championing the films of Jean Renoir (who contributed a short foreword to Volume I), Orson Welles, and Roberto Rossellini, he became the protégé of François Truffaut, who honors him touchingly in his forword to Volume II. This new edition includes graceful forewords to each volume by Bazin scholar and biographer Dudley Andrew, who reconsiders Bazin and his place in contemporary film study. The essays themselves are erudite but always accessible, intellectual, and stimulating. As Renoir puts it, the essays of Bazin "will survive even if the cinema does not."
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780520931251
Publication Date: 2005
Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern by Anne FriedbergDeparting from those who define postmodernism in film merely as a visual style or set of narrative conventions, Anne Freidberg develops a sustained account of the cinema's role in postmodern culture. She explores the way in which 19th-century visual experiences - photography, urban strolling, panorama and diorama entertainments - anticipated contemporary pleasures provided by cinema, video and emerging virtual reality technologies.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9780585299822
Publication Date: 1994
With a Crooked Stick: The Films of Oscar Micheaux by J. Ronald GreenWith a "crooked stick," filmmaker Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951) sought to hit a "straight lick" by stressing the strategic importance of class mobility, or "uplift," for African Americans. A theme in all of his more than 40 feature-length, black-produced, black-directed, black-cast, and black-audience films, uplift would allow for the better things in life: fast cars and fancy clothes, freedom of belief, financial security, and an unencumbered intellectual life. Although racism was an impediment to uplift for Micheaux and other African Americans, race as a category was of a secondary order for him in the larger game of class. In With a Crooked Stick, J. Ronald Green pursues this seeming contradiction in a detailed analysis of each of Micheaux's 15 surviving films. He presents critical commentary on each film's plot and action and its contribution to the overall theme of uplift. Readers will also find this an invaluable guide to the preoccupations and features of Micheaux's remarkable career and the insight it provides into the African American experience of the 1920s and 30s.