Bücher der Reihe Exeter Studies in Film History

This book analyses the diverse historical and geographical circumstances in which audiences have viewed American cinema. It looks at cinema audiences ranging from Manhattan nickelodeons to the modern suburban megaplex, and from provincial, small-town or rural America to the shanty towns of South Africa.

This book examines the work and art of Bill Douglas, thirty years after his death.Douglas made only a small body of work during his lifetime: The Bill Douglas Trilogy, based on his deprived childhood in Scotland; and Comrades, his epic on the Tolpuddle Martyrs; but he is acknowledged by many as one of Britain's greatest filmmakers. His films inspire a depth of passion in those that have seen them, and interest in his work has intensified over the years, both within the UK and overseas.This is the first work to examine Douglas's life and career through archive material recently made available to researchers. Editors Amelia Watts and Phil Wickham have carefully selected a range of voices-both scholars and practitioners-to reappraise Douglas's career from a variety of angles. The book raises important questions about Douglas's status as an artist, and reflects on his struggles within the film industry of the 1970s and 1980s in order to consider the attendant difficulties of working within a collaborative and commercial medium such as cinema. The volume also explores the wider legacy of this film artist, through the collection on moving image history he assembled with Peter Jewell, which became the foundation of the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. It will appeal to film students and scholars, and the small but committed group of general readers who are interested in Douglas's work.The book has a foreword by the renowned filmmaker Mark Cousins, who, like many other contemporary directors, is a great enthusiast for Douglas's work.

This book is a carefully selected, thematically arranged collection of eyewitness accounts of seeing motion pictures - from the 1890s to the present day, and from countries across the globe.Included here are essays, diaries, memoirs, travel accounts, oral history interviews, poems and extracts from novels. These verbatim accounts - from both professional and amateur writers - have been selected not only for what they tell us about the historical experience of cinema in many countries, but for their literary value. It is evocative testimony that shows how deeply cinema touches emotional needs, and the huge impact that the cinema has had on modern society.One-hundred and fourteen carefully selected excerpts are organized thematically into six evocatively-titled sections: 'First Encounters', 'Audiences', 'Places', 'Players', 'Reality', and 'Fears and Desires'. We find a host of everyday voices responding to cinema - Rudolf Rocker, anarchist; Li Hung-fu, Chinese villager; James Malone, wrestler; George Jordan, policeman; 'Negro male student in High School, age 17'. Amongst these are interspersed the insights of more familiar names - Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig, George Orwell, J.M. Coetzee, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen, J.B. Priestley, John Osborne, J.G. Ballard, D.H. Lawrence, Roland Barthes and Arnold Schwarzenegger.Twenty-one images complement the text by illustrating different ways in which films have been viewed, from battlefield cinemas to infrared studies of child audiences, from Madagascar to Vietnam, from Cinerama to virtual reality.While most film history studies put films or those who produce them first, Picturegoers puts the voices of the audience first. It analyses and celebrates the audience's point of view, shaped by time, experience and place, providing a rich, entertaining portrait of a medium that became so transformative precisely because anyone, rich or poor, educated or not, could share in it.Frank Cottrell-Boyce's pieceA Love Letter to Cinema, written for BBC Radio 4'sTodayprogramme (May 2021),and broadcast just as cinema emerged from lockdown, provides a fitting coda to the book - affirming the importance of cinema as a collectivecultural experience.The book will appeal to scholars interested in the relationship between cinema and society, those engaged in audience studies, and general readers interested in world cinema history.

Through a detailed study of the circulation of European silent film in Australasia in the early twentieth century, this book challenges the historical myopia that treats Hollywood films as having always dominated global film culture.Before World War I, European silent feature films were ubiquitous in Australia and New Zealand, teaching Antipodean audiences about Continental cultures and familiarizing them with glamorous European stars, from Asta Nielsen to Emil Jannings. After the rise of Hollywood and then the shift to sound film, this history-and its implications for cross-cultural exchange-was lost. Julie K. Allen recovers that history, with its flamboyant participants, transnational currents, innovative genres, and geopolitical complications, bringing it all vividly to life.Making ground-breaking use of digitized Australian and New Zealand newspapers, the author reconstructs the distribution and exhibition of European silent films in the Antipodes, along the way incorporating compelling biographical sketches of the ambitious pioneers of the Australasian cinema industry. She reveals the complexity and competitiveness of the early cinema market, in a region with high consumer demand and low domestic production, and frames the dramatic shift to almost exclusively American cinema programming during World War I, contextualizing the rise of the art film in the 1920s in competition with mainstream Hollywood productions.

Cinema on the Front Line offers the first comprehensive history and analysis of how the medium of cinema intersected with the lives of British soldiers during the First World War. Documenting the use of cinema from domestic recruitment drives to make-shift theatrical venues established on the front line, and then in convalescent hospitals and camps, the book provides evidence of the previously unacknowledged importance of cinema as recreational support and entertainment for soldiers living through the trauma of the First World War. Chris Grosvenor makes extensive use of war diaries and other military records to foreground the voices and perspectives of British soldiers themselves. The book includes discussion of over 70 films.DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/LAML7430

This book "e;decodes"e; 1930s Hollywood movies and explains why they looked and behaved in the way they did. Organized through a series of related case studies, the book exposes Classical Hollywood movies to a detailed analysis of their historical, industrial and cultural contexts. In the process it utilizes industry data, aesthetic analysis and the insights of New Cinema History to explain why and how these movies assumed their familiar forms.The book represents the summation of Richard Maltby's four decades of scholarship in the field of Hollywood cinema. The essays presented here share an assumption that has increasingly informed the author's critical method over the years: that any historical understanding of the films of this period requires a deep contextualization in the social circumstances surrounding both their production and consumption. In this way, the book introduces an innovative, overarching research methodology that synthesizes branches of research that are typically employed in isolation, including production, distribution, reception, film aesthetics, and cultural and historical context.Of the book's nine chapters, three are presented here for the first time, and four have been substantially revised and extended from their original publication.

This Reader brings together for the first time key works by Steve Neale, one of the founding figures of UK film studies. It includes selections of his influential writing on genre, together with other critical work encompassing film analysis, representation, cinema history, technology, and the film industry.

This book sheds new light on the under-researched period of early British cinema through a history of the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company in the years 1908-1916, when it became one of Britain's leading film producers. The book provides an account of its films and personalities, and explores its production methods and business practices.

Silent Features is a collection of essays on seventeen feature-length silent films and two silent serial features, their diverse stylistic, generic and structural characteristics, and the national, historical and industrial contexts from which they emerged. Of the 17 films discussed, 15 are still currently available on DVD. 200 b&w illustrations.

Charles Urban was a renowned figure in his time, and he has remained a name in film history chiefly for his development of Kinemacolor, the world's first successful natural colour moving picture system. He was also a pioneer in the filming of war, science, travel, actuality and news, a fervent advocate of the value of film as an educative force, and a controversial but important innovator of film propaganda in wartime.The book uses Urban's story as a means of showing how the non-fiction film developed in the period 1897-1925, and the dilemmas that it faced within a cinema culture in which the entertainment fiction film was dominant. Urban's solutions - some successful, some less so - illustrate the groundwork that led to the development of documentary film. The book considers the roles of film as informer, educator and generator of propaganda, and the social and aesthetic function of colour in the years when cinema was still working out what it was capable of and how best to reach audiences.Luke McKernan also curates a web resource on Charles Urban at www.charlesurban.com

Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet is the first book to explore in detail the vital connections between today's digital culture and an absorbing history of screen entertainments and technologies. Its range of coverage moves from the magic lantern, the stereoscope and early film to the DVD and the internet.By reaching back into the innovative media practices of the nineteenth century, Multimedia Histories outlines many of the revealing continuities between nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century multimedia culture. Comprising some of the most important new work on multimedia culture and history by key writers in this growing field, Multimedia Histories will be an indispensable new sourcebook for the discipline. It will be an important intervention in rethinking the boundaries of Anglo-American film and media history.

Widely regarded by historians of the early moving picture as the best work yet published on pre-cinema, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema throws light on a fascinating range of optical media from the twelfth century to the turn of the twentieth. First published in French in 1994 and now translated into English, Laurent Mannoni's account projects a broad picture of the subject area now known as 'pre-cinema'.Starting from the earliest uses of the camera obscura in astronomy and entertainment, Mannoni discusses, among many other devices, the invention and early years of the magic lantern in the seventeenth century, the peepshows and perspective views of the eighteenth century, and the many weird and wonderful nineteenth-century attempts to recreate visions of real life in different ways and forms. This fully-illustrated and accessible account of a strange mixture of science, magic, art and deception introduces to an English-speaking readership many aspects of pre-cinema history from other European countries.

For the first time, this book tells the 'lost' story of the 1930s Western. Written from a concern to understand Western films primarily as products of Hollywood's studio system, it recovers the context in which Westerns were produced, exhibited and viewed in the 1930s.

A volume of specially-commissioned essays dealing with the attempts to create a pan-European film production movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and the reactions of the American film industry to these plans to rival its hegemony.

This book brings together the study of silent cinema and the study of British cinema, both of which have seen some of the most exciting developments in Film Studies in recent years. The result is a comprehensive survey of one of the most important periods of film history.

This book analyses the diverse historical and geographical circumstances in which audiences have viewed American cinema. It looks at cinema audiences ranging from Manhattan nickelodeons to the modern suburban megaplex, and from provincial, small-town or rural America to the shanty towns of South Africa.

Silent Features is a collection of essays on seventeen feature-length silent films and two silent serial features, their diverse stylistic, generic and structural characteristics, and the national, historical and industrial contexts from which they emerged. Of the 17 films discussed, 15 are still currently available on DVD. 200 b&w illustrations.