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After the occupation of the Czech lands by Nazi Germany in March 1939, Czechs embraced domestic (and ignored German) movies more vigorously than they had before. This implies that the occupation caused notable changes in the mode of movie reception. After about 1942, however, the popularity of a portion of German production was increasing. This fact raises the question of whether cinemagoers' values and identities were undergoing significant change under the occupation. This paper focuses on Brno, a city with a long history of coexistence and rivalry between those who identified as Germans and as Czechs. I argue that watching a Czech movie became one of the behaviors that defined the Czech national identity. The later embrace of German entertainment by Czechs was accompanied by two strategies that redeemed watching the desired cinematic distraction from being an un-Czech behavior: by indexing the movies as not fully German due to the presence of non-German stars, and by a parallel redefinition of cinemagoers' Czech behavior from choosing Czech movies to choosing cinemas identified as non-German. These strategies represent culturally specific reactions by Czech audiences living in a nationally divided city to the distribution and exhibition practices applied during the occupation. [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 paper posits that the two divergent strategies aiming to legitimize cinema in the transitional and early classical eras—imitation of the established arts, and emphasis on the popular nature and specificity of the new media—can be correlated to different sets of words and expressions used to label moving pictures. It then proceeds to track the fate of these connoted words and expressions through the distant reading of the vast corpuses of digitized historical publications explored by Project Arclight and the Google Books Ngram Viewer. The findings foreground the role played by newspapermen in the institutionalization of cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the problem of lost silent films, an issue that is particularly relevant to the study of Russian cinema. Most early Russian films have not been preserved, and it is nearly impossible to describe the film history of this period without them. Reconstructing films that have been lost or only partially preserved requires using every available source: stills, production photographs, reviews, memoirs, and so on. This article presents one such paper reconstruction using the example of Vladimir Gardin’s Anna Karenina (1914), one of the most important Russian films of the mid-1910s. The results of this reconstruction prove that Anna Karenina was an innovative screen adaptation made in the spirit of the Silver Age that contributed to the development of the so-called Russian style in pre-Revolutionary cinema. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1950s, cinema in Italy blossomed, bringing film entertainment to Italians on an unprecedented scale. This study draws upon the testimony of 325 elderly Romans about their cinemagoing experiences during this period. Their memories are set in the particular context of the film programs that they (and fellow filmgoers) selected-- information that is derived from daily newspapers and supplemented with trade listings of the most popular films screened in Rome. In producing a bottom-up account of cinemagoing, the paper contributes to the general debate about film culture in Italy in the postwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to trace and articulate the extremely rich production and postproduction history of the early Soviet classic, Sergei Eisenstein's Bronenosets Potemkin(The Battleship Potemkin, 1925). By engaging Paolo Cherchi Usai's idea that early films exist as multiple objects, the paper explicates how Eisenstein's film was re-edited in three of its most important versions: the original 1925 cut; the first international cut, produced in 1926; and the 1950 cut. By elucidating the distinctive sociopolitical conditions that crucially informed all three cuts of the film, the article interprets and compares the visual transformation of Potemkinin accordance with editorial and re-editorial alterations, identifying a nexus of contributing factors that regulate the economy of the visible in Eisenstein's film. I argue that the junction at which authoritative social impulses are negotiated with Eisenstein's individual vision takes us to what might be one of the critical moments in Eisenstein's early career in which his early, avant-garde-informed approach to filmmaking is recalibrated with the rules of dramaturgy of film form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on archival materials from the Asia Foundation records at the Hoover Institution Archives and the Robert Blum Papers at Yale University Library, this article focuses on the origins and development of the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia (FPA) by unveiling the existence of the Asia Foundation (TAF) and its forgotten motion-picture projects in Asia. Under the leadership of its first president, Robert Blum (1953-1962), the Asia Foundation, a private nonprofit organization, was actively involved in the motion-picture industries in Cold War Asia. The Asia Foundation covertly supported anticommunist motion-picture industry personnel, ranging from producers, directors, and technicians to critics and writers in Japan, Hong Kong, Burma, and South Korea, as well as American and British motion-picture producers in Malaysia and Thailand through clandestine activities. This study aims to investigate how and to what extent TAF and its field agents furtively acted to construct an anticommunist motion-picture producers' alliance in Asia, responded to local film executives' various needs, and negotiated with the constantly changing political, social, and cultural environments in the region during the project's active periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we define ethnographic objects in media research, and what role do they play in anchoring the process of fieldwork? These two images,—one authorized and one requiring special permission—collected during fieldwork in India and the United Arab Emirates, show how the exchange of media objects and infrastructures between South Asia and the Middle Eastern Gulf are frequently mediated through the regional space of Kerala. Emerging from explorations of the transit zones created through diasporic media practices, this reflective piece situates a television publicity poster and an instance of airport signage within a praxis of media ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates a lost film titled Mill or Mazdoor (1934/1939) and its history of proscription at the intersection of three arguments: (1) that the loss of the film artifact should not preclude attempts for historiographic engagement and interpretation; (2) that site-specific histories of film censorship tell a significant story about the meanings and emotions generated by a film; and (3) that the repeated return of the censored, proscribed, or lost film complicates approaches to origins, authorship, and provenance. Through archival research, analysis of publicity materials, and engagement with scholarship on film censorship, urban and industrial history, and geography, I embed the story of Mill within a dense history of local industrial unrest, transnational fears of filmic communism, and wranglings with a colonial censor regime. The singular travails of a proscribed film thus embody the stories of a specific place whose specificity is wrought out of its links with other places in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a historical analysis of Ed's Coed (1929), one of the earliest and most accomplished feature-length films made by college students in the United States. Student-made films of the silent era have received little critical attention, but they should be understood within the diverse overlapping categories that encompass amateur local filmmaking. Engaging the underexplored resource of student newspapers, the authors document how Ed's Coed ,a 35mm college-life romantic comedy, was produced by University of Oregon students working alongside a professional Hollywood second-unit cameraman. The resulting production history reveals the film crew's sophisticated approach to publicity, fund-raising, and cinematography that beneficially extends our understanding of the range of amateur local practices in the 1920s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ebbs and flows of German, Italian, French, and Japanese cinemas in Brazil in order to shift attention away from European producers and toward the local distribution gatekeepers who shaped the itineraries of these cinemas and to demonstrate how trade and monetary policy, changing film distribution practices, and regional exhibition monopolies shaped the historical trajectories of cinema. By reconstructing the pre- and postwar circulation of European and Japanese cinemas in Brazil, this essay proposes an odographic approach to film history. Expanding on the transnational turn in film and media studies, this is a film history attuned to the flows and friction of commodity circulation, industrial exchange, and infrastructures of film and media circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the uncertainties surrounding the advertising of science fiction when it was still a relatively new player among film genres in the 1950s. Because it was sourced in the science-fiction pulp magazines—based on John W. Campbell Jr.'s story "Who Goes There?"—and was the first science-fiction film advertised in the pulps, The Thing from Another World (1951), as well as RKO studio's unconventional ad campaign for it, offers some insight into this uncertainty. While science fiction was starting to powerfully emerge in various media, as evidenced by the new television space operas, comic books, and a growing number of pulp magazine platforms, RKO seemed unsure of how best to frame The Thing. Instead of presenting it in a science-fiction context, RKO mounted a campaign that framed this work, even for the pulp audience, in various non-science-fiction ways: as a horror movie, as an exploitation effort, and even as a mystery or suspense narrative. The approach of this curious campaign, the essay argues, reveals the film industry's indecision about the box-office potential of science fiction, even as the genre was poised to explode in popularity during the decade. That uncertainty underscores the extent to which science fiction has followed what Rick Altman describes as a "process" route in its perception as a genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the seemingly compliant reception of old corporate films by former workers in a deindustrialized Portuguese town. The analysis identifies a particular, memory-focused mode of film reception among those workers, prompting joint consideration of convergent acquisitions from memory studies and film reception theory. This sheds light on the ways in which these workers reshape corporate film as their own relevant memory tool, the specific features of corporate film that support its memory value from a worker's point of view, and the workers' crafting, even so, of a lucid, class-bound relationship to the films as (corporate) discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cycles were a useful profit-making strategy within the high output of the Hollywood studio system where recycling and imitation were built into production practices and the reproductions of recent successes helped mitigate risk. While the growing research on cycles has identified their usefulness for situating films within their industrial and historical context, this research largely remains focused on production practices and cultural trends. This article offers a broader survey and analysis of the industry discourse about cycles across the classical Hollywood era. It provides insight into the specific commercial strategies cycles enacted by Hollywood while pointing to distribution and exhibition as key forces in cycle formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: Drawing on archival materials from the Asia Foundation records at the Hoover Institution Archives and the Robert Blum Papers at Yale University Library, this article focuses on the origins [...]

The politicized paradigm that has historically informed discourses on African cinema has been seriously challenged, and, since the recent intervention of transnational corporations into the production and distribution of Nigerian media, the model of the African popular arts is still necessary but no longer sufficient for framing the study of Nollywood. The corporate intervention is related to a shift in media platforms: the sale of discs is being overshadowed by internet distribution and television broadcasting, and smartphones and multiplex cinemas supplement home viewing. New inequalities and class divisions have opened up. A formal sector now coexists alongside Nollywood's older, informal sector. The levels, kinds, and accessibility of information about these sectors are spectacularly uneven, and the intellectual paradigms and disciplines to be brought to bear on them and the wider field of African screen media remains an unsettled issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1870s, Leland Stanford allegedly wagered $25,000 to prove the theory that all four of a horse's hooves leave the ground when it travels at a gallop. While the anecdote is largely considered to be untrue, the wager has been repeatedly refuted across close to a century of writing on Stanford and Eadweard Muybridge's role in the development of motion pictures. In examining the disavowal of the wager myth, this article argues the refutations illustrate contradictions between science and representation that remain central to the history of motion-picture technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay applies a scaled data set of archival cost ledgers from the Majestic plant at 4500 Sunset Boulevard to the question of macroscale production control in the American film industry during the late one-reel/early feature period. The documents show that Majestic budgeted multiple-reel features according to cost percentages very similar to those of its one- and two-reel shorts, making them substantially cheaper than the films on competing feature programs. Mutual then marketed its features in distribution by advertising nationally and offering flexible, nonprogram booking arrangements. These findings suggest that with the aid of distribution strategies, program-oriented producers like Mutual could scale up shorts production to feature length in order to compete on the nascent market for program features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to this special issue on topics of silent films in Mexico is presented with considers the film trade between the U.S. and Europe, the impact of the Mexican Revolution, and film in relationship to culture, literature, and politics.

This essay examines the conception of Hollywood stardom within the US Mexican press of the silent era, presenting a case study of Hollywood's transnational reception while proposing a reconsideration of the conception of Mexican in silent film. Critics and fans selectively Mexicanized Hollywood via stars like Ramón Novarro, framing them as positive emissaries of the nation. Nonetheless, journalists persistently reminded readers that their own aspirations of stardom were futile, discouraging them from migrating to Hollywood. The tensions evident in this distance between ordinary readers and exceptional stars hinged precisely upon stratifications within concurrent conceptions of the transnational Mexican community: gender, race, and class. [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 essay examines the rivalry between cosmetics firms Max Factor and Elizabeth Arden in 1930s Hollywood as they competed for dominance in the field of Technicolor cosmetics. This rivalry, dubbed 'the Hollywood Powder Puff War' by the press, was far from a trivial skirmish but is discussed here as the site where labor practices, racial constructions, and female identity were contested. Against a backdrop of industrial action in studio makeup departments, I argue that Factor's Technicolor cosmetics line ultimately triumphed over Arden's by reinforcing whiteness as a beauty ideal during the transition from black-and-white to color film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motion-picture house organs, or theater programs, were notoriously ephemeral in the silent period. Among the rare few that survive are the Weekly Film News, published by J. H. Kunsky Theatrical Enterprises in Detroit and given out to patrons of Kunsky's circuit of downtown and neighborhood theaters. The fifty or more issues extant, from May 1916 to April 1919, offer a unique opportunity to deepen our knowledge of early cinema history. This unique ephemera illuminates the weekly programming of a major theater circuit in an unexamined metropolis, what that circuit assumed its patrons wanted to read and why, and perhaps even who those patrons were. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chicagoan Mary Alcaide was Orson Welles's secretary for over a year between October 1949 and December 1950. Her letters from that time, along with a recent interview (the only one in her life), cast a new light on the hectic production of Othello and on the personality of its director: a superstitious man who was a terrific dancer as well as a genius. Her words and writing also fill in some gaps about the troubled story of the film, which may be useful to historians who are trying to reconstruct the entire venture and also discover some traces of the filmmaker's other projects. Alcaide additionally offers a fascinating glimpse of film production in Italy, as seen from an American perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholarly literature on the ciné-club Objectif 49 (1948-50) tends to focus on its institutional history. For this reason, historians have yet to account for the development of its aesthetic outlook. Objectif 49 attempted to launch a nouvelle avant-garde, and at its signature event, the Festival du Film Maudit of 1949, Jean Cocteau, one of the club's coprésidents, stated that in today's avant-garde, "boldness" presents itself "under the auspices of simplicity." Using previously unexamined materials, I argue that the club's aesthetics owe much to the critic and filmmaker Roger Leenhardt, whose postwar career has never been exposed to systematic study. In the essays he published between 1945 and 1949 and in his debut feature, Les dernières vacances (The Last Vacation, 1948), he showed how French cinema could overcome a crisis of content and "aestheticized" style. Not only did this new realism position him as a leading figure in the club, it also sheds light on his role in the founding of Cahiers du cinéma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even during the Depression and World War II, the use of electric light by domestic consumers and industry was growing, and it rose sharply in the postwar years. Yet this brightly lit historical period produced a set of films famous for darkness: the film noir. This essay examines General Electrics own publications to show how the electricity industry had developed an optimistic new iconography of artificial light, endowing illumination technologies with connotations of progress, science, and glamour-cultural meanings that noirs like Call Northside 777, The Set-Up, and The Asphalt Jungle would adopt, reshape, and invert. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eagle-Lion,an independent film producer and distributor from 1946 to 1951, attempted to compete with the major Hollywood studios by releasing inexpensive films known as programmers that had a unique marketing angle. One of the most successful of these was Destination Moon (1950), which initiated the 1950s boom in science-fiction cinema. The film's semidocumentary mode was intended to broaden its appeal by differentiating it from more juvenile and fantastic examples of the genre. Despite Destination Moon's strong performance, Eagle-Lion was unable to achieve sustained success, due in part to the major studios' continued control of distribution and exhibition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During a time when the word nigger was casually used behind the scenes in Hollywood, the industry was deciding whether or not the term could be used onscreen. The MPPDA's shifting policy on antiblack epithets was driven less by respectful consideration of Black spectators than by concern about state censors and the specter of Black revolt. It tells us much about how industry self-censors sought to mask American race relations through encoded textual signification. Thus, the industry's limited conception of Black humanity can be seen not only in its onscreen stereotypes but also in its inconsistent attempts to acknowledge Black spectators' offense as it did with other groups. [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]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including digital shifts in production affect aspects of the cinematographic medium; reframing African cinema along the lines of a philosophy of relationality; and views on process of imaging.