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In 1896 'the Nethersole kiss' revolutionized the stage kiss and made legitimate-stage actress Olga Nethersole a household name. This article considers Olga Nethersole's queer influence on the early erotic genres of the kissing film and the 'stag' film, arguing that she originated the mainstream Sapphic tropes of the twentieth century. Leaning on foundational texts by Shelley Stamp, Charles Musser and Linda Williams and drawing on recent work by Susan Potter and Russell Sheaffer, this article intervenes in the presumed 'male only' discourse of 'stag' during the early silent film era (1896–1907). Using original archival research including newspapers, catalogues, scrapbooks, and other ephemera such as erotic 'French' postcards, I reconsider a cluster of films that engage Nethersole's onstage and offstage 'character', including The Kiss (Edison, 1896), Something Good – Negro Kiss (Selig, 1898), Sapho (Lubin, 1900), The New Kiss (Edison, 1900), Sapho Kiss (Lubin, 1900), In a Massage Parlor (American Mutoscope & Biograph, 1902), The Seven Ages (Edison, 1905), A Modern Sapho (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1905), and Under the Old Apple Tree (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1907). I demonstrate that these films constituted a racialized Sapphic authorial discourse that produced queer pleasures for early audiences by engaging Nethersole's scandalous stardom. As a progenitor of early erotic screen genres, Nethersole must be contextualized in relation to the spectrum of erotic entertainment at the turn of the century from the 'unobjectionable' to the pornographic. In this context, I demonstrate how the intermediality of early cinema, so often understood through the heterosexualized metaphor of 'birth', is better understood as a form of queer reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article highlights the history of costume jewelry firm Joseff of Hollywood. Highlights include the establishment of the firm by Eugene Joseff in 1928, a metal plating process he created to help eliminate the glare caused by studio lighting, and Hollywood stars who were costumed in Joseff of Hollywood designs such as Marilyn Monroe.

The aim of this article is to illustrate some key points that will hopefully encourage further reflection on the cinematic representations and meanings of populism in both an Italian and international context. Firstly, we attempt a definition of populism as applied to cinema, drawing on both political science and the literature on film history. Secondly, we turn to film critics and directors, discussing the views some of them hold on populism and film in relation to the Italian cinema of recent years. Thirdly, we discuss how the star system provides a useful point of convergence for our analysis of cinema and populism, looking in particular at postwar commedia all'italiana and the role of Totò in this context. Finally, we draw some conclusions and suggest what directions future research on the issue of populism and Italian cinema could take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considered that Lotte Eisner was a woman of many talents such as a writer, archivist and curator who could draw on wide-ranging interests and a stupendous knowledge that went far beyond film history into other, varied fields of culture, including literature and philosophy, theatre and architecture, music and the visual arts.

A typical strategy in the philosophy of film is to identify a question or theory and then consult the data of cinematic phenomena that might speak to it. Here I take somewhat the opposite approach. I start with a particular phenomenon and make the case for its application to a fairly wide range of issues. The phenomenon in question is the "fictional film," which may be either an embedded fiction or a fictional document. I argue that the fictional film helps us work through some particularly thorny issues in film ontology, meaning, engagement, authorship and ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Wittgenstein's claim that our "seeing a thing as" is strongly dependent on what he calls "world-picture" and vice versa, motion pictures present "surveyable representations" of our world-picture and therefore influence the way we see the world. Insofar as understanding means to see coherences, motion pictures help humans understand world-pictures. But the insights imparted by motion pictures are not of a mere cognitive kind, since motion pictures do not present arguments. By making use of imaginative identification they have such an impact on humans that they directly "embody" insights and thereby changing what is accepted as knowledge within a world-picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does a film affect the sensuality and corporeality of the viewer? This question is raised by modern researchers concerned with phenomenological theory of film and the embodied viewer. They mostly rely on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's findings, according to which we - corporeally embedded in the world - project the field of potential gaze and motion, we grasp the expression of a gesture. Such conceptions, as Daniel Yacavone states, do not consider the film as a work of art; they focus on basic visuality (and aurality) of film. In this vein, Vivian Sobchack limits her theory. She describes film in the categories of embodied perception: she treats it as a vision of the world offered from within, with a specific point of view, directing the attention, grasp of a gesture. In order to broaden this perspective I refer to Hermann Schmitz's new phenomenology. His concept of the embodied subject, the sensitivity open for the world, and also the concept of the world experienced through atmospheric drives or ambiguous sensations, allows the conceptual apprehension of many elusive phenomena, which cinematography has learned to skilfully exploit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Allusions to color in film studies and philosophy of film rarely mention its major contributions. At best, color is seen as accessory, at worst, as sensory distraction from aesthetic and narrative content. Drawing from instances where color symbolism is deployed ironically, we argue that color is an essential component of meaning and authorial intention. By reversing the conventional symbolism of color, ironic filmmakers make of it more than arguments from aesthetic and stylistic purity are able to account for, and require specific analysis from a more inclusive perspective on the elements that make up the meaning and value of their works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes that Tom O'Regan's Australian National Cinema book is best understood among the contexts from which it emerged and, in this process, repositions the magnum opus of his scholarly career, as a post-national theorising of the national cinema formation in terms of 'an unprincipled assemblage' and a discursive multiplicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Cinema at a Standstill" examines the theory and practice of film within the Situationist International, circa 1968. Questioning Guy Debord's refusal to document the group's participation in the abortive revolution of May-June '68, the essay explores the Situationists' ambivalence to the image as mnemonic device. Their refusal of film's iconicity did not, however, mean a complete refusal of its logic: The austere, text-based posters produced by the SI during the uprising are here read as a species of revolutionary intertitle for a film running in real time along the streets. Sharing the aniconic quality found at the same moment in the work of Daniel Buren and Jean-Luc Godard, this Situationist imageless cinema is read through the dialectic of repetition and stoppage first developed by Giorgio Agamben. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson's Logistics (2012) is the longest film ever made, at over thirty-five days in duration. The film endeavors to make the world-spanning network of global logistics perceptible through an experience of the slow journey of the Dutch container-ship Elly Maersk from Gothenburg, Sweden, to Shenzhen, China. Following this document of an oceanic passage that coincided with—and was at one point halted by—the events of the Arab Spring, this article explores how extreme durational cinema raises questions about the position of the spectator and the limits of representation in an era of digitally networked media. It suggests that there exists, beyond the immediate relationship between spectator and image, a correspondence between the magnitude of filmic address and the logistical conditions of art's creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the institutional histories of film archiving in Latin America. Topics discussed include the influence of the New Latin American Cinema in politicized film archiving, failure of early Latin American film archives to correspond to the prevailing narratives in Euro-American film studies framing the film history in terms of social commitment and political resistance, and relations of Latin American film archives with the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF).

Since the early 2000s, Moroccan cinema has reflected on the period of intense political repression during the rule of King Hassan II, known as the Years of Lead. Running from the 1960s through the 1980s, this period of contemporary Moroccan history was characterised by huge violations of human rights against democracy activists. One of the key features of Hassan II's repressive policy was a network of secret prisons. In this article, I explore how prison has been represented in a group of 18 historical films produced from the year 2000 through to 2018. The theoretical approach connects concepts from cinema theories to wider questions of historical representation and film. By conducting interviews with eleven Moroccan filmmakers, two actors and two scriptwriters, and by accessing contextual and narrative analysis of the films, I aim to understand the construction of political suffering onscreen. The findings confirm that the prison as filmic icon pervades most of the films in ways that connect the plot with an inherited fear that overwhelms the main characters; fear at the prospect of imprisonment, fear deriving from the experience of actually being in prison, and fear that develops in the aftermath of having been imprisoned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Since 1919, the Hudson's Bay Company has sponsored films to document and advertise its trading operations. Films such as Hudson's Bay Company Centenary Celebrations (1919), The Heritage of Adventure (1920), and Leipzig Exhibition footage (1930) offered views of North American landscapes and Hudson's Bay Company trading posts and department stores alongside ethnographic footage of Indigenous Peoples. Analysis: Drawing on archival research conducted at the Hudson's Bay Company Archives and textual film analysis of these "fur films," this article theorizes their production and circulation within settler visual culture. Conclusions and implications: Tracing the films' paths from the Eastern Arctic to Montréal, and from London, England, to Leipzig, Germany, this article demonstrates how these moving pictures participate in the entanglement of settler and infrastructural projects that characterize early twentieth-century Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By exploring the critical, journalistic and popular reception of Ingmar Bergman's films in Australia in the late 1950s and '60s, as well as tracing their patterns of exhibition and distribution, this essay examines how particular discourses and approaches to Bergman were already well and truly in place by the early '60s and prior to the arrival of most of the director's films in the country. The critical response to and release of Bergman's work in Australia does reveal minor antipodean variations and is an important staging ground for an emerging and quickly evolving screen culture, as well as debates around film as "art". But it is also highly referential and reverential to received opinion from overseas and evidences the truly global reach of Bergman's cinema and reputation during this period. This essay will examine the appearance of a range of Bergman films in Australia starting with Smiles of a Summer Night in 1957 and concluding with the controversial release of the heavily censored The Silence in 1965, fashioning evidence for a boom in "Bergmania" that reaches a peak in 1961–62 and provides an important test case for the rise of "foreign" film distribution in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of a film treatment is to convince the reader of a cinematic story and the potential for the film to reach a broad audience. The treatment is a prose summary of the story as it plays out, in a compressed form, and is a process of screenwriting. It ensures the story is coherent and its meaning is made clear by conveying a sense of screenwriting conventions. Specifically, for the genre of historical drama, the poetics of a film treatment will encapsulate a blend of verifiable facts and creative solutions that contribute to the understanding of the past. Screenwriters, by way of empathetic and informed speculation, bridge the gap between epistemology and imagination to capture the hearts and minds of the audience. In 1902, a brilliant engineer's emotions are at breaking point in the final days of his life as he struggles to defend himself against false allegations of corruption and incompetence levelled at him by parliament and the press. This is the 'true' story of the Coolgardie Water Supply Scheme, in Western Australia, encompassing the longest water pipeline in the world, but events conspire against the Engineer-in-Chief, Mr C.Y. O'Connor, leading to his tragic death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Islamist engagement with popular culture in Egypt, focusing on Ikhwān Cinema a cultural intervention launched by a youth group affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, following the election of Mohamed Morsi as president in June 2012. Until now, scholars have tended to ignore Islamist-produced popular culture, reflecting assumptions that Islamists are opposed to popular culture, and even culture more broadly. Yet, as this article explores, the Muslim Brotherhood has historically viewed culture as an important vehicle through which to disseminate their ideas and to attract people to the organization. The first part of the article reviews the historical position of the Muslim Brotherhood towards the arts and cinema in order to put Ikhwān Cinema into context. The second part examines the aesthetic content of Ikhwān Cinema's video productions, specifically created for social media consumption. The third part analyses how the group continued these aesthetics following the toppling of their political leader in July 2013. Overall, the article argues that we can understand Ikhwān Cinema both as a continuation of the Muslim Brotherhood's historical engagement with culture as well as a case of a post-Islamist trend that seeks to blend Islam with elements of global youth culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, critics and historians have come back to Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd periodically and with varying enthusiasm. This essay will show how the film's influence of real-world media manipulators has increased its power and has renewed relevance in the digital era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about how Foucault's archaeology of the modern episteme, emerging from early 19th-century Europe, was curiously divorced from its context of colonialism. Media archaeology, as Foucault's legacy, has also remained rather geopolitically insular and race agnostic in its epistemological reverse engineering of media modernity. Using screenwriting history as a case study, this article demonstrates how bringing decolonial thinking and media archaeology together can challenge linear narratives of modernity/coloniality in media history. The article connects two seemingly disparate histories of archival absence and human obsolescence to reveal the construction of an elusive screenwriting modernity that has historically obscured parallel scripting practices and pre-existing scribal traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/Context: this paper reviews the strategies and practices through which the Catholic Church and the Medellin Cine-Club (Movie Club) drove specific ways of viewing and judging movies in the mid-20th century in this city. Methodology: with this aim, we draw upon the critique of printed documentary sources such as newspapers, magazines, books, statistical yearbooks, and legislation, complemented with the review of relevant bibliography. Originality: the documentary review allowed suggesting that, as opposed to the traditional vision, the role of the Church cannot be reduced to its intervention in official film censorship and moral censorship it performed through the classification of films. This institution was also particularly active in publishing bulletins and books, creating film fora, and organizing conferences. The Cine-Club, on the other hand, was an entity set up to screen movies not exhibited in commercial theaters because of censorship or lack of mass audience appeal. It made the Church and the city's most conservative sectors hostile and made it challenging to find members and host regular exhibitions. The meeting between those two social actors evidences a historiographically unexplored dispute within the bounds of movie exhibition. Conclusions: the Catholic Church was interested in exercising its capacity for moral control, but did not limit its activities to the latter, given it also sought to form the faithful in the technical and artistic aspects of the sphere seeking to build a Catholic spectator, understood as a spectator who would watch and judge a movie as a work of art without forgetting Christian morals. At the same time, the Cine-Club was attempting to educate cinephiles, in whom the love for movies implied an independent esthetic judgment supported in a relative split between quality and morality. Both positions came into conflict, which led to the close of the secular institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of HiSTOReLo: Revista de Historia Regional y Local is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Centro Editorial Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Economicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Explorer and artist Anthony Fiala successfully shot the first motion pictures in the polar regions between 1901 and 1905. The footage, however, was not edited and distributed as a film until 1909 when Kineto Ltd., London, released A Dash for the North Pole. This essay repositions Fiala as a pioneer in arctic filmmaking by examining the circumstances that delayed the film's production and distribution and caused the material to be misdated in archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the production and reception of the natural history film series Secrets of Nature (1919–33) and its sequel Secrets of Life (1934–47), exploring what these films reveal about the role of cinema in public discourses about science and nature in interwar Britain. The first part of the article introduces the Secrets using an 'intermedial' approach, linking the kinds of natural history that they displayed to contemporary trends in interwar popular science, from print publications to zoos. It examines how scientific knowledge was communicated in the series, especially the appeal to everyday experience as a vehicle to engage mass audiences with scientific subjects. The second part examines the Secrets series through the lens of knowledge co-production, detailing how a range of different figures, including academic scientists, nature photographers, producers and teachers, became entangled in making the films. Recovering the term 'ciné-biology', it argues that Secrets developed a unique style of filmmaking that generated cultural space for the life sciences in British popular culture. The third part analyses two interwar cinema experiments to explore how audiences, imagined and real, shaped the kinds of natural knowledge characterized by the Secrets films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of ANAFORA is the property of Anafora and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article describes a project titled Mapping Contemporary Cinema (MCC) that forms part of the final year undergraduate curriculum in a film studies programme at a UK Russell Group university. The project is a distinct and innovative synthesis of critical pedagogy with research-based learning and is here considered in the light of Gert Biesta's educational thinking. The article first glosses the concepts of critical pedagogy and research-based learning, and how they relate to Biesta's work. There follows a description of the setting up of the project and an account of its development and execution between 2011 and 2017; this description continues to call on Biesta and is interspersed with discussion of practical and theoretical issues stemming from the blending of the two approaches. The article concludes that critical pedagogy and research-based learning are complementary and share commonalities, especially a concern with generative learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is the second volume originating from the 'Doing Women's Film and Television Histories III' international conference held at the Phoenix Cinema, Leicester, England, in May 2016. It connects with concerns and questions of women's production histories related to the constructed nature of history and how we write a 'history from below' to foreground the hidden, marginalised or forgotten histories of our women ancestors. This collection captures something of the dominant 'structures of feeling' of women's film and broadcasting history scholarship in the contemporary period ranging from considerations of women working in both above and below-the-line roles in film, television and radio, to those whose labour fell outside of mainstream cinema production, as in the instance of the amateur film in the UK between the 1930s and 1980. Together, these case studies span from 1926 to the contemporary period, providing particular flashpoints of women's history across the UK, North America, Italy and Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term Arabesque has often been used as a verbal shorthand for an ornate pattern of interlaced flowers, leaves, or animal motifs. This essay attempts to retrace a longer affective history of the Arabesque in a contemporary Perso-Arabic context, made possible by the emergence of the cinema. Paying particular attention to trade routes that developed between Bombay, Persia, and the Middle East, it makes a polemical case for the long history of the Arabesque as a repertoire of Persianate or brown cultural sounds, images, tales, or motifs that circulate in the Global South and thrive by competing with or appropriating tropes from Western Orientalism. I argue that the mobility of the cinema across India, Iran, and beyond inaugurated systems of cultural exchange and collaboration that went beyond the mere figural understanding of the Arabesque. Sound cinema and, more recently, digital media formats are capable of expanding the frontiers of the Arabesque in unprecedented ways, allowing for new forms of play with physical space, as well as aural and temporal articulations of long-shared Persianate idioms addressed to a global collective imagined as brown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the film poster has taken center stage in South Asian cinema studies and in the contemporary nostalgia-driven popular imagination. In analyzing Lollywood film Zerqa 's (1969) song booklet and its art direction, this commentary reveals the merits of deliberating upon other mass-produced cinematic ephemera—especially publicity materials—in conjunction with or in the absence of the film text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers an Iranian record of two film songs from the megahit Qarun's Treasure (1965) that was found in Bombay and is now owned by a private collector in the US. I analyze the record's material qualities and circulation to demonstrate that midcentury Iranian commercial cinema's connections to sonic infrastructures in the Middle East and South Asia are integral to its history. Through focus on the record's travels and sonic qualities, my essay expands the archive of Iranian cinema in ways that challenge national narratives and other limiting frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines that the periodical publishes original research on the international history of cinema, broadly and inclusively understood areas of interest which include the production, distribution, exhibition, and reception of films designed for commercial theaters as well as the full range of nontheatrical, noncommercial uses of motion pictures; the role of cinema as a contested cultural phenomena.

The article presents an interview with scholars Kristen Warner, Rebecca A. Wanzo, and Jonathan W. Gray. It highlights their views on significant about the ways that Watchmen remediates American history; elements of Watchmen that found compelling with regards to speculative fiction, film history, and culture; also race and the myth of the superhero.

The article focuses on military convergence and divergence in the First World War and explore aesthetic and conceptual impact of their affinities across a range of avant-garde writings and films from the period before 1931. It mentions Fernand Léger comment within the context of the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars's account of the painter's experience of trench warfare. It also mentions need to frame the purview of film history and expansion of the intermedial scope of cinema's impact.

This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the representation of gender and gender transgression in British popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century by exploring the evidence provided by early British films. It examines surviving prints and records of more than eighty films made in Britain between 1898 and 1918, all of which feature cross-dressing performances. The majority of these films involved male performers dressing as women, either for comic effect or to add novelty value to sensational crime stories. The article situates them in relation to performance traditions in the Victorian and Edwardian popular theatre, including music hall, pantomime and stage farce, as well as showing how men’s cross-dressed performances were used to satirise the women’s suffrage campaign. Although early British films did not draw an explicit link between male effeminacy and same-sex desire, gender-crossing plots seem to have given filmmakers licence to represent more intimate behaviour on screen. Discussions in early British film periodicals, along with reviews of imported American films, show that while commentators were sometimes worried about the overtly sexual nature of cross-dressing comedies, they were also enthusiastic about performances that blurred the line between masculinity and femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including documentarian Arthur Dong's interview; Viola Lasmana's Kelly Loves Tony (1998) directed by Spencer Nakasako; and Lan Duong's Vietnamese American film history.

The English folk rhyme 'Monday's Child' predicts a fortune for children based on the day of the week on which they were born. Line 4 reads 'Thursday's Child has far to go.' This article explores whether Lindsay Anderson and Guy Brenton edited the documentary film Thursday's Children (1954) to convince the viewer that deaf children educated in the oral method at the residential Royal School for the Deaf, Margate, Kent, England, would go far. Alternatively, perhaps the filmmakers were presenting the educational experiences on offer with a film-title tinged with doubt. The film's voice-over, scripted by Anderson, states: 'without words there can be no thoughts, only feelings.' We are also told that only one in three deaf children will achieve 'speech'. This tension is presented in the documentary with a curious mixture of visual and verbal contradictions. The author argues that the seeds of Anderson's other filmmaking can be found in this early documentary. His ultimate interest was not a 'tender' portrayal of children submitting to a particular pedagogy, but instead to show the power and camaraderie of children who, however, they might be taught, should not be made to feel dis-empowered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyze film "The Fall of the House of Usher" directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber with classic of American avant-garde film but not as an amateur film. It mentions difficulties of categorizing their films within one film history framework and championed again by its supporters as a seminal film of the American artistic cinema. It also mentions mix of technical and general advice for amateur filmmakers.

The 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War that began in 1980 have played an effective role in reconstructing contemporary Iranian culture, history, and politics. The war was beneficial to Ayatollah Khomeini and his new regime in defining themselves and their ideas and suppressing opposition, so he refused to end the war for eight years until 1988. However, by the end of the war, neither Iran nor Iraq had achieved their aims: Iraq's attempts to bring down the revolutionary government in Iran failed, and Iran could not provoke a revolution in Iraq. The Islamic Revolution and the war imposed new kinds of restrictions on women in all social domains, including cinema. Since the new regime regarded women as the ones to blame for the corruptions of the Pahlavi era, they censored women's bodies and intimacy between women and men. Additionally, revolutionary ideological codes shaped gender representations in media and close-up shots of females were banned in the cinema. This article focuses on a well-known live-action puppet movie for children, The City of Mice (1985), and its sequel, which were directed by a female Iranian director, Marzieh Boroumand. It aims first to depict the way The City of Mice represents gender to its audience (mainly children) based on socially-constructed notions of gender within Islamic discourse and Islamic ideology during the Iran-Iraq War in Iran, and second, to study the way gender practice changed thirty years later within The City of Mice 2 (2014). To do so, the essay provides a brief introduction and a summary of both movies' stories, then analyzes the costumes, characters, actions, dialogue, objects, and camera work to respond to the statement of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promotional materials – such as posters, trailers, press/campaign books, lobby cards – have been part of the commercial film industry for almost as long as there have been films to advertise. The history of these materials, their creators, and the industries that produced them remains largely unexplored territory in film and media history, even while academic interest in such materials has increased over the last decade. This article argues that much of the existing scholarly work on promotional materials – including the recent 'paratextual turn' – lacks a strong methodology for approaching, selecting and analysing such materials. Through an exploration of academic theories and approaches currently used within historical promotional material scholarship, the article considers the limitations found in the current dominance of textual studies, and proposes new methodological steps to help refine and enhance the future of studies of historical promotional materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the culture in and around Hollywood in the years leading up to the 1941 Senate Investigation on Motion Picture Propaganda. While the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League was holding events and Leon Lewis was organising his anti-Nazi espionage network, Hollywood moguls were working to battle the growth of fascism with public outreach and powerful film productions. Harry Warner hosted an elite discussion session and presented lengthy speeches while Universal's Carl Laemmle spent the last years of his life organising affidavits to save victims of oppression in Europe. Joseph Roos, one of Lewis' spies, complied a dossier for the US Senate on pro-Nazi activities in Los Angeles that focused on the film industry. Regardless of Roos's findings, the anti-Semitic Senator Gerald Nye helped ensure there was enough skepticism of Hollywood to investigate the industry in September 1941. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the history of the aviation film in light of the genre's contributions to the evolution of 'the talkie.' Starting with the first sound newsreel of Charles Lindbergh's take-off, the aviation film became a crucial but understudied site for the testing and development of sound technologies, as well as for the teaching of sound film literacy. Through readings of three classic aviation films—Wings (1927), Hell's Angels (1930) and Dawn Patrol (1930 and 1938), as well as one outlier—Dorothy Arzner's Christopher Strong (1933)—this article examines how the sound of flight was codified and argues that these films participated in what Miriam Hansen has termed Hollywood's 'vernacular modernism' by popularising previously élite listening practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the genesis and development of the UK's Watershed Cinema and Digital Creativity Centre. Established in 1982, Watershed was both the first full-time multi-screen independent cinema outside London and the first to integrate exhibition with production across a range of media arts: an innovative model that earned it the moniker, 'Britain's first media centre'. Watershed was also one of the first culture-led regeneration projects in the country, a model later much-imitated elsewhere. Despite its significance, however, Watershed's genesis and development is largely unaccounted for. Beginning in the mid-1960s with the British Film Institute's Regional Film Theatre policy, the article analyses Watershed's history until the late-1990s. It reveals the complex local and national contexts that shaped Watershed's development and investigates how and why such a major cultural initiative came into being at a time of profound cuts to arts funding in the UK. Moreover, the article demonstrates how issues central to Watershed's development remain at the heart of contemporary debates about independent cinema exhibition, from questions of subsidy and tensions between nation and region to the difficulties of policy implementation and the complex realities of 'independence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay builds on emerging ecomaterialist accounts of film history to advance an argument about the primitive thermoplastic, celluloid, that served as the base for early photosensitive emulsions. It contends that, more than simply feeding early film technology, this "pioneer plastic" helped shape developments in early film aesthetics. Drawing on a close analysis of the early writings and film output of pioneering British director Cecil M. Hepworth, it shows that a series of encounters with this volatile vegetable compound played a key role in the director's early filmmaking practice, mediating his burgeoning appreciation of the medium's plastic as opposed to its purely photographic possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to document the transition of film to digital, and what has been lost thereby, including the materiality of film and its fragility. Topics covered include an examination of the material and social practices of cinema film projection following the transition to digital, the retrospective assumptions about medium specificity entailed by the transition, and a shift of emphasis in the understanding of both the medium and the history of cinema.

The article explores the influence of American Western films on the Soviet republic of Georgia. Some of the Georgian films discussed include the 1923 motion picture "Little Red Devils" directed by Ivane Perestiani and the 1925 film adaptation by Alexander Tsutsunava entitled "Who’s Guilty" based on Nino Nakashidze's play. American motion pictures shown in Georgian theaters include "The Magnificent Seven" and "Stagecoach." Themes considered include patriotism, individualism, and violence.

This study of the emergence of the film industry in the U.S. between 1893 and 1920 contributes to the growing literature linking legal environments and population dynamics. This was an era characterized by a shift to active anti-trust policy, which manifested itself in legal action to disband a trust that had dominated the industry, the Motion Pictures Patents Corporation (MPPC). We use archival data to show that mortality was reduced by trust membership and increased with the market share of the trust members. The effects of litigation are varied, with litigation filed by trust members enhancing mortality and litigation filed against trust members decreasing mortality. Analysis of coded headlines from media reports on the emerging industry shows that a shift in the view of the trust in the normative environment toward a more negative view was also associated with decreased mortality. Results also show that learning and the compensatory fitness enjoyed before anti-trust law was enforced prevented the MPPC members from recognizing changes in the marketplace; as a result, they were less likely to move from making short films to making increasingly popular feature-length films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early years of the twentieth century, cinema joined the multitude of images (such as paintings, photographs, and engravings) which were spreading worldwide postcard stereotypes of Naples and its surrounds. The icons of this topographical myth included the natural beauties of the region and the monuments of the city, but also the citizens themselves. In fact, from macaroni eaters to tarantella dancers and brigands, they were an essential part of the urban landscape. This paper especially focuses on the Neapolitan tarantella dance and its local variants in silent cinema, examining how they were strictly linked to the city and its environs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]