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The first edition of the Daily Mail on May 4, 1896, included an advertisement for the "latest scientific marvel," the Lumiere Cinematograph. While historians have acknowledged the concurrent rise of film and the popular press, this article explores the varied and often-innovative ways in which British newspapers produced film and visual media. From the use of Daily Mail screens to relay election results, to the production and promotion of the newspaper's own film in 1910, these early interactions allow us to understand better the emergence, evolution, and endurance of Britain's modern media system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconstructs levels of cinemagoing in Britain over the two decades preceding the first accepted estimates of the national audience, which were produced in 1934. It uses the receipts from the tax on entertainments, levied by British governments starting in 1916, to examine the impact of broader developments, from war to major economic downturns, and radical changes within the industry itself with the introduction of sound technology. A significant discontinuity is identified in the emergence of the talking picture, which worked to broaden and deepen support for the cinema, confirming it as the dominant mass entertainment form of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the exhibition and reception of Kinemacolor in Russia from 1910 to 1916. Kinemacolor was a British method of filming and projecting in natural color invented by George Albert Smith and financed by Charles Urban, a US-born entrepreneur; film historians generally regard it as the most commercially viable color process before the outbreak of war in 1914. The article investigates Urban's interest in Russia as a potential market for Kinemacolor and as a source of interesting filmic material. In addition to identifying the extent of Kinemacolor's exhibition and distribution in Russia between 1910 and 1916, it also examines the Russian subjects filmed by Urban's companies in black and white and color, and identifies two occasions (1909 and 1913) on which Tsar Nikolai II and Tsarina Aleksandra Fedorovna were filmed in Kinemacolor. The article argues that the reception of Kinemacolor was widespread and diverse, and included members of the Russian imperial family and the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. It references the specialist film-trade press in Britain, Russia, Europe, and North America; theater listings in Britain and Russia; and contemporary reports on Kinemacolor exhibitions in the British and Russian media. The article also draws upon the extensive archive of Urban's private papers, which is currently preserved in Bradford's National Science and Media Museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary introduces the "Cinema Programmes" of the British Public Relations Office in Bahrain from 1944 to 1948. In addition to propaganda-based newsreels and information films, the programs included Hollywood feature films that were borrowed from Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO). BAPCO rented the films from distributors in India for screening in its employees-only cinema in Awali. Following screenings in the company cinema, the films were exhibited in a range of nontheatrical venues and for different audiences. These programs, which were collected and archived in the India Office Records, provide us with one of the few sources to track the formative years of film culture in the Gulf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section reprints two rare early texts about the craft of film coloring, dating from 1898 and 1908, by Duncan Mitchell in Britain and Elizabeth Martine in the United States. Mitchell and Martine each describe the meticulous nature of their work as colorists and discuss specific techniques and aesthetic issues that they believe are important in the process of coloring films by hand. The accompanying overview article by Stephen Bottomore summarizes and analyzes the points made by this pair of colorists and compares their accounts with what existing sources tell us about early film coloring. Brief biographies of Mitchell and Martine are also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers the first comprehensive examination of the cinema train in Britain, arguing that the history of the movie coach expands our understanding of exhibition and distribution networks in twentieth-century Britain, particularly with regard to news consumption. Using contemporary press reports, archived documents, and the newsreels shown in the carriages, this article also articulates how narratives about the nation's empire and self-projected modernity influenced the cinema train's construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]