Search

The study of early cinema beyond Europe and North America is still sufficiently underdeveloped to make Rielle Navitski’s Public Spectacles of Violence a welcome addition. But it should also be of w...

Gunning argued that ‘tricks’ largely disappeared from cinema between 1907–13 as narrativisation became dominant. But if we trace the use of ‘sensation’ devices, with their roots in many popular nineteenth-century narrative modes, then two crucial new film genres of the 1910s made extensive use of trick-based effects: the fantastic crime thriller and the ancient-world spectacle. While ‘effects’, as they were now known, remained crucial to many genres, the status of their expert practitioners declined as effects became invisible.

Long considered of limited interest, ‘locality’ has emerged as a key concept in both human geography and ethnography, championed by Doreen Massey and Clifford Geertz. It can be argued that all films, whether addressing ‘universal’ or limited audiences, deal in the depiction of place; and that our engagement with these often depends tacitly on how we identify such places, whether in a Western or in North London. Taking cues from Massey’s validation of the ‘merely local’, from De Certeau’s ‘practices of everyday life’ and from experience of working with local archive film, it is argued that spatial apprehension is a neglected aspect of how we engage with all film, and that a sense of the ‘local’ dramatises this engagement, making us active participants in the spaces represented filmically.

We live in an era of screens. No longer just the place where we view movies, or watch TV at night, screens are now ubiquitous, the source of the majority of information we consume daily, and a crucial component of our basic interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. This transformation has happened almost without us realizing it-and certainly without the full theoretical and intellectual analysis it deserves. Screens brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines to analyse the growing presence and place of screens in our lives today. They tackle such topics as the archaeology of screens, film and media theories about our interactions with them, their use in contemporary art, and the new avenues they open up for showing films and other media in non-traditional venues.

The history of avant-garde film in the twentieth century can be defined by a widely accepted canon of major works and artists, although the function of this canon changed between the pre-World War II pioneer period and the 1960s, when avant-garde film emerged as a challenge to conventional narrative. A more dialectical conception of the avant-garde, proposed by Peter Wollen, has since served to unite different traditions, until recent concerns have emerged about the very idea of a film-based canon. New studies have emphasised the importance of networks and of contexts of presentation as perhaps greater than the film-texts themselves. More varied contemporary forms of access to avant-garde film may eventually supersede the traditional Modernist canon.

This interview took place on 8 September, 1976, at the London Filmmakers’ Coop, Fitzroy Road, London. Frampton already had a reputation as one of the major theorist-filmmakers of the contemporary avant-garde, although his work was comparatively little known in Britain at this time.

This chapter explores film exhibition in the 1890s and 1900s in light of evidence for the musical accompaniment of forms of screen media produced in London from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Early films are also considered in terms of remediation, such as the emergence of films inspired by popular song titles at the turn of the century, and the fact that popular songs formed the principal content for the various synchronized sound systems developed in the 1900s. This chapter thus provides historical evidence that in London music would likely have been used to accompany early film exhibition from the inception of the medium.

During the twentieth century, the concept of ‘total’ representation emerged as an equivalent to Noël Burch's ‘Frankenstein complex’. ‘Total’ representation has taken on the form of omnipresent surveillance, using an all-powerful system or state in a technological extrapolation of the panopticon of Bentham. This chapter discusses the possible relationship – if any – between the exponential rise of audiovisual recording and the development of biography. It is argued that there are closer links between the early twentieth-century revolution in biography and the rise of cinema than might be supposed. The chapter also tries to show that the meaning of biographical film cannot be reduced to simplistic canons of accuracy, since these are more typically allegorical.

Book synopsis: This text ranges widely over key films and moments from stages of Luis Bunuel's career. It locates and re-appraises Bunuel's films with particular emphasis on the national cinemas and varied cultures with which he was identified.