ABSTRACT This article explores the quickening pace of visual time in the nineteenth century from ‘slow’ portrayals, evidenced in long series showing gradual change over time, to ‘fast’ visual time conveyed through ‘before-and-after’ jump cuts. Drawing from film studies, it argues that popular image makers not only played a central role in creating innovative ways to represent people’s new experiences

ABSTRACT This article uses depictions of mechanical clocks in wall paintings of the Shekhawati region in Rajasthan to study the transition to a mechanized temporal order in a context that was both linked to cosmopolitan trade cities and separate from them. At one level, an increased visual citation of the mechanical timepiece is proof of an increased influence of clock time, while the diversity in

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Ahead of Print, 2022)

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Ahead of Print, 2022)

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT Late in 1914, Universal released The Master Key, a motion picture serial in 15 installments. Robert Z. Leonard directed and starred, and the project was marketed as the ‘most expensive serial yet’. The weekly film release was paralleled by a syndicated newspaper feuilleton, illustrated by stills from the motion pictures. Stills were also incorporated into an illustrated reissue of Fleming

ABSTRACT In 1899, a group of photographic societies and camera clubs in the north of England came together to form the Yorkshire Photographic Union. Soon after, five other photographic federations were founded by societies and clubs in Northumberland and Durham (1901), Scotland (1903), Lancashire and Cheshire (1905), the Midlands (1907), and East Anglia (1910). These umbrella organisations supported

ABSTRACT During what is described as the world’s first international stock market bubble – an economic bubble which burst in 1720 – visual and literary metaphors were an important means to criticise new economic practices and events. In this article I will argue that within this context, magic lanterns and raree shows functioned as key metaphors. Engravings and texts picture the devices as machines

ABSTRACT Scholars of cinema history have long identified the variety-theater tradition of lightning artistry among the most crucial influences upon the emergence of motion-picture animation. This article looks specifically at the work of the prominent illustrator and animator Winsor McCay, and examines his popular vaudeville routine entitled “The Seven Ages of Man”, first performed in June 1906, both

ABSTRACT This article examines the way that early female film stars from both Britain and America are portrayed in the popular magazine The Red Letter. It argues that even in 1920, there was already a common pattern to notions of female stardom that essentially revolved around ideas of class, and that rather than being newly minted, these notions of the female star were in several ways appropriated

ABSTRACT Although some significant contributions to early filmmaking production and exhibition involve strong entrepreneurial female figures, very few women’s names appear in the histories of Balkan cinemas. Based on original archival research and press of the time, this article foregrounds the filmmaking activities of the Romanian theatre director and actress Marioara Voiculescu (1885–1976) and the

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2022)

ABSTRACT Based on nearly 5,000 cinema ads from German newspapers, this article reveals the marketing of the Asta Nielsen brand from 1911 to 1914 in 53 cities and towns in Germany. The three Asta Nielsen series were the first long feature star series in Europe to be distributed with exclusive exhibition rights. The distributor Internationale Film-Vertriebs-Gesellschaft m.b.H. (IFVG) supplied promotional

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2022)

ABSTRACT In Manchester in 1890 a court case was heard in which the singer Peggy Pryde was accused of singing an obscene song at the Folly Theatre of Varieties. The case provides a detailed examination of the arguments about the nature of music hall performance. Local newspapers reported the case in detail and this provides unparalleled evidence about the attitude of the authorities to specific performances

ABSTRACT This article examines Asta Nielsen’s exceptional position in the British film market in connection with the film renter Walturdaw’s pioneering star-based exploitation of long feature films on exclusive terms, in the seasons 1911–12 to 1913–14. Close readings of renters’ advertising in leading trade journals and of star portraits in fan magazines, supplemented by OCR research in The British

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2022)

ABSTRACT In this essay, we offer a comparative analysis of women service workers in early cinema in Britain and the United States from the 1910s to the 1930s. Although this period has been the subject of much important scholarship in film history over the past several decades, women’s experiences as box office attendants, cashiers, cigarette girls, purveyors of ice cream and sweets, and especially

ABSTRACT The magic act is a performance best seen live, the skill of prestidigitation more difficult to deny when the trick is offered in the physical space shared by the audience. For Georges Méliès, the cinema offered the opportunity to extend the stage act he had developed and to embellish upon the traditional illusions of the music hall. Méliès’ skill lay with his knowledge of legerdemain, sleight

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2022)

ABSTRACT The ‘invention’ of the long feature film was the key tool used by production and distribution companies to try to solve the overproduction crisis of short films in Europe at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. Neither cinema owners nor their patrons had clamoured for the shift from entertaining short film programmes to challenging long feature films that absorbed the viewer’s

ABSTRACT For the past two years, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi have been curating Cinema’s First Nasty Women: a 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set that features 99 archival silent films and will be released by Kino Lorber in August 2022 (see https://wfpp.columbia.edu/cinemas-first-nasty-women/). In this co-written archive piece, they put theory into action and share tantalizing snippets

ABSTRACT This article discusses ‘the dainty’, an aesthetic category that rose to prominence in the trade and fan press during American cinema’s transitional era as a means of characterizing female stars like Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clarke, Billie Rhodes and Lois Wilson. The readiest reading of the dainty is that, like the stars the term often described, it was a throwback to an older

ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the histories of waiting, particularly in medicine, business, politics, and culture. This essay contributes to that history by tracing the evolving visual representation of waiting in popular American culture between 1870 and 1930. As contemporary illustrators, photographers and artists interpreted a metropolitan landscape populated

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 2-3, 2022)

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 2-3, 2022)

ABSTRACT Where are the women within historical and theoretical discourses on the cinephilic phenomenon? Christian Keathley boasts that the cinephile’s experience draws its intensity partially from the fact that ‘it cannot be reduced or tamed by interpretation’ (2005, 9). I question whether the female cinephile is allotted that same experience, ‘untamed’ as it were. Both sides of cinephilia’s ‘Janus

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 19, No. 4, 2021)

ABSTRACT A carnival float in the 1914 Cologne Rose Monday parade was designed under the slogan ‘Theatre Then and Now’. The float depicted a cinema under the headline ‘The Theatre of Today’, pointing out that the film industry was encroaching on actors, authors and topics of the classical legitimate theatre. While the cinema sector was booming in the city, the Cologne Schauspielhaus (Cologne Theatre)

ABSTRACT In the late 1910s and 1920s, a number of British national newspapers were involved in competitions to find potential stars for the British cinema. These ‘star search’ contests were aimed predominantly at young women. Often run in collaboration with British film producers, the competitions reflected, and sought to capitalise on, a moment of optimism about the prospects of the British production

ABSTRACT The article examines the uses of visual culture and visual representations of time in two major public anniversaries in nineteenth-century colonial Southeast Asia: the 35th anniversary of Singapore in 1854 and the 250th anniversary of Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1869. The authorities in these two major colonial cities, capitals of the British Straits Settlements and the Dutch East Indies respectively

ABSTRACT For most of the nineteenth century, letterpress design in Britain followed conventions established in the pre-industrial era, paying little attention to matters of colour, form, and display. Decorative typefaces competed with a profusion of type ornaments, leaving job printing, especially, with no visual logic in its composition. In the final decades of the century, however, some Victorian

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2022)

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 19, No. 2-3, 2021)

ABSTRACT In view of the loss of all contracts and business correspondence on the three exclusive long feature film Asta Nielsen star series, finding the Spezial-Nummer der Asta Nielsen-Zeitung (Special Edition of the Asta Nielsen Magazine) from 11 November 1911 in the library of the German Film Institute (DFF) in Frankfurt am Main represents a small sensation. In this sales brochure, the Projections

ABSTRACT The circulation of early films was highly ephemeral, since films were regarded as consumable, interchangeable objects. Their rapid passage through cinemas, staying for just a few days or weeks, left few traces that can be used to document their movement a century later. Even in the case of films featuring a phenomenally successful star like the Danish actress Asta Nielsen in the burgeoning

ABSTRACT In the thriving, import-dependent cinema market of pre-First World War Australasia, the transition to multireel narrative feature films facilitated the rise of a movie star culture based on crossover European theatre stars and film actors who exemplify Andrew Shail’s definition of a star as a celebrity whose fame is commodified as a production value. From 1908 through 1915, local distributors

ABSTRACT Between the invention of photography and the advent of film there arose a singular visual medium: tissue paper stereoviews of the 1860s that permitted the viewer to change a scene from greyscale and unilluminated to colour and illuminated when viewed through a stereoscope. These dual images, photographed using a camera with two lenses, were printed, hand-coloured, and perforated on layers

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2022)

ABSTRACT This article analyses how nineteenth-century medical science apprehended the eye and its functions. It disputes Jonathan Crary’s claim of the alleged mistrust towards human vision as a source of reliable information from the 1830s onwards. It is based on the analysis of scholarly and popular scientific publications from the early 1850s to the first decades of the twentieth century, a typology

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2022)

ABSTRACT This 1867 document, akin to a patent application for the US Patent Office, is among the first to describe processes for producing both motion and color photography. It precedes by 20 years Edison’s 1888 kinetograph/kinetoscope design, the earliest working prototype of cinema. Its author is Charles Cros, who also outlined a phonograph system in 1877, a few months before Edison displayed his

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2022)

(2020). The pasts and prospects of media archaeology. Early Popular Visual Culture: Vol. 18, Media Archaeology. Guest editors: Erkki Huhtamo and Doron Galili, pp. 333-339.

ABSTRACT This article is a contribution to the historiography of media archaeology, and therefore to its self-understanding as a scholarly approach. It starts from a simple observation: the use of the words ‘archaeology’ or ‘media archaeology’ within media studies has exploded in recent years, but so far no one has clarified when, how and where these naming practices developed. This is the task the

ABSTRACT This essay offers insights to late German film historian Thomas Elsaesser’s pioneering teaching methods in the field of media archaeology at the beginning of the 21st century. It looks into Elsaesser’s original approach of teaching cinema history at the University of Amsterdam and discusses some of his key conceptual and educational tools such as the epistemic 1900–2000 juxtaposition, the

ABSTRACT Efforts to lend cinema-going a sense of liveness and cinematic projections a bodily presence are in vogue today. The recent rise of phenomena like ‘augmented cinema’ or ‘event cinema’ has largely been framed as responses to digitalization, home media consumption, and an experience economy in the digital age. However, they possess a long genealogy. This article examines the German Kino-Variété

ABSTRACT The panorama was introduced to Japan in 1890, two decades after the collapse of the feudal society. Not only the horizontal 360-degree view was a novelty for Japanese audiences, but also the realistic oil paintings drawn in perspective. In the same year, a 12-story viewing tower was erected and the first hot air balloon ascent took place, both in the adjacent Asakusa and Ueno districts where

ABSTRACT Taking its cue from magic lantern performance as a cultural practice, this article explores and expands the ground where theatre studies and media archaeology overlap. The aim is not only to unearth untold stories of the theatrical past, but also to develop models and approaches for how theatre and performance studies can contribute to and participate in media archaeological excavations, and

ABSTRACT This essay considers the conceptual and historical implications of trick automatons, three-dimensional material simulations of lifelike movement that were both mechanical and performed, for an expanded vision of film and media history. Although they have mostly been excluded from accounts of the origins of cinema, trick automatons, like cinema, appear to be automated and autonomous, but in

ABSTRACT The essay presents the latest research results on Charles Chaplin’s wartime comedy Shoulder Arms (1918). It provides background information on the production of the film, describes the different camera negatives produced in 1918, and traces their uses for different releases. There were four different negatives (A, B, C, and D) and six official releases (First National domestic first release

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 20, No. 1, 2022)

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 19, No. 4, 2021)

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 19, No. 4, 2021)

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 19, No. 4, 2021)

Published in Early Popular Visual Culture (Vol. 19, No. 4, 2021)

ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration and investigation of the frescoes that decorate the majestic haveli (mansion) of Baba Sir Khem Singh Bedi (1832–1905), a Sikh social and education reformer and religious leader. The haveli was constructed in the late nineteenth century. The frescoes are beautiful and interesting in themselves and fill the walls with a plethora of colour and design. They are unique

ABSTRACT This article traces the emergence of the misogynist as a character type in American feature comedies of the 1910s. Though scholars note how comedy shorts in this period often derived humor at the expense of women’s fight for social change, some feature comedies appealed to female audiences by mocking the comical misogynist. Correlating with public debates around the New Woman, the misogynist

ABSTRACT With its sequences of projected images, accompanied by narration and often by music, the optical lantern as a communication medium proved to be effective for Christian evangelism, especially through life model slides. The religious life model slide sets or ‘scenes d’après nature’, produced by the Catholic publisher Maison de la Bonne Presse from 1908, hold a particular place in the cultural

ABSTRACT This article analyses lion-taming performances in South Africa through the acts displayed in three circuses: Frank Fillis’s, William Pagel’s and the Boswell’s, between 1888 and 1916. While lion-taming proved popular in the international arena, especially Britain, by the 1830s already, it was performed in South Africa only from the end of the nineteenth century. Drawing on global literature