Showing papers in "Early Popular Visual Culture in 2012"
TL;DR: Time-lapse plant growth images provided novel visual records that initially were seen as providing evidence of an evolutionary link between the plant and animal kingdoms as discussed by the authors, and they were used as a means to demonstrate the remarkable vitality of plants to students and lay audiences.
Abstract: As devices of motion analysis were introduced into botanical research in the late nineteenth century, Charles and Francis Darwin, Wilhelm Pfeffer, and investigators at the Marey Institute used a variety of techniques to visualize plant movements whose slowness rendered them otherwise imperceptible. These ‘time-lapse’ images provided novel visual records that initially were seen as providing evidence of an evolutionary link between the plant and animal kingdoms. While time-lapse plant growth images ultimately could not provide proof that plants are evolutionarily related to animals, time-lapse images did remain useful as a means to demonstrate the remarkable vitality of plants to students and lay audiences, and Oskar Messter’s exhibition of a time-lapse plant growth film was the first of a long tradition of time-lapse plant growth films that circulated in popular culture.
37 citations
TL;DR: A more solid insertion of spiritualism's visual culture into the pre-history of film practice, giving three main cases in support of the relationship between spirit photography and early cinema is given in this article.
Abstract: As several scholars have noted, the use of superimposition effects in cinema to conjure such apparitions as ghosts, fairies, devils, and other fantastic creatures finds a significant precedent in spirit photography, a spiritualist practice by which the image of one or more spirits was ‘magically’ captured on a photographic plate. However, arguing for a relationship of direct filiation between spirit photography and the tricks employed in film remains problematic, especially given that spirit pictures were entangled with matters of religious belief. This article calls for a more solid insertion of spiritualism’s visual culture into the pre-history of film practice, giving three main cases in support of the relationship between spirit photography and early cinema. Firstly, the commercial use of spirit photographs within the spiritualist movement suggests that the circulation of these images was not exclusively informed by matters of belief. Secondly, the popularization of exposures of spirit photography ope...
29 citations
TL;DR: Hediger and Vonderau as mentioned in this paper, 2009, 491 pp., $77.50 (hardback; paperback also available), ISBN 9789089640123 If the non-fiction film has not...
Abstract: edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2009, 491 pp., $77.50 (hardback; paperback also available), ISBN 9789089640123 If the non-fiction film has not...
26 citations
TL;DR: The authors examines the ways in which high-profile circuses of the long nineteenth century demonstrated a commitment to innovation that embraced many of the ideas and socioeconomic processes now generally accepted as belonging to or emerging out of modernity.
Abstract: This article examines the ways in which high-profile circuses of the long nineteenth century demonstrated a commitment to innovation that embraced many of the ideas and socioeconomic processes now generally accepted as belonging to or emerging out of modernity. The economic drives of capitalism, the development of the individual, and an enthusiastic embrace of new technology were all transmitted to vast audiences through the operations, performances, and linguistic declarations of the leading circuses of the period. Mobilizing the historiography of Thomas Frost and his first diachronic history of the British circus, Circus Life and Circus Celebrities, first published in 1875, the author examines the ways in which leading nineteenth-century circuses in several Western industrialized nations embodied ideas about what it was to be modern, functioning as a metonym for modernity. The article proposes moreover that the circus’s demonstrations of modernity in action contributed to the genre’s immense popularity.
23 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a theoretical discussion and history of special effects is presented, along with a discussion of the history of the special effects field. But this discussion is limited to a single topic.
Abstract: by Dan North, London, Wallflower, 2008, 256 pp., $28 (paperback), ISBN 9781905674534 This is an unusual and interesting book: a theoretical discussion and history of special effects. Previous publi...
23 citations
TL;DR: From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition as mentioned in this paper is an interesting and quite useful book, which examines film archival issues in general, but also includes much concrete information and various case studies.
Abstract: From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition is an interesting and quite useful book, which examines film archival issues in general, but also includes much concrete information and various case studies. It is slightly unfortunate that the author, Giovanna Fossati, presents her study through theoretical ‘frameworks’ that seem inappropriate to what is, or should be, an essentially practical work. The social construction of technology (SCOT) model is useful in analysing how technologies arose historically, but less so I would say in explaining current practices and ongoing developments. Fossati seems overly concerned to ‘fit’ specific archives/ companies or restoration projects into this technological model, rather than describing them according to their own qualities and merits. The author also spends some time discussing the question of ‘what is cinema?’ – an issue that, in an age of digital processing and exhibition, is far more complicated than it ever used to be; but I wonder if discussing such concepts (and issues like indexicality and re-mediation) will be of much relevance to actual archivists dealing with, and restoring, real lengths of damaged celluloid? This double dose of theoretical framing is a clue that the book is a reworked academic thesis, the other clue being that the author keeps summarizing what she will soon tell us or has just told us. Theses have different purposes from books, and I would submit that this one should have been reworked a bit more for publication. Nevertheless, on the content side, it has much to offer, with a lot of novel material and practical information, and well-researched accounts of the practices and projects of particular organisations involved in film restoration. For example, chapter 1 offers an excellent explanation of digital restoration, with informative quotations from practitioners; then later chapters present detailed case studies of particular companies such as Haghefilm and Cineric and (chapter 4) of specific restoration projects, including Beyond the Rocks (1922) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). The book has a fine bibliography testifying to the in-depth research that the author has evidently undertaken in the relevant literature, as well as within the archives themselves. With some reservations, this should be recommended reading for future moving picture archivists and some film/media historians too.
21 citations
TL;DR: Armstrong's book as mentioned in this paper is a classic example of such a book and it is unavoidably tempting for a reviewer to describe Isobel Armstrong's book as a "love story".
Abstract: by Isobel Armstrong, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, xix + 449 pp., £38.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-19-920520-2 It is unavoidably tempting for a reviewer to describe Isobel Armstrong’s book ...
19 citations
TL;DR: In the nineteenth century, millions of people paid to see exhibitions of foreign, often colonized, peoples performing songs, dances and other ceremonies in exhibitions designed to showcase their singular nature.
Abstract: Throughout the nineteenth century, millions of people paid to see exhibitions of foreign, often colonized, peoples performing songs, dances and other ceremonies in exhibitions designed to showcase their ‘singular nature’. Originally consisting of a single performer or possibly a small group, by the end of the century displayed peoples were being imported in their hundreds to live in purpose-built ‘native villages’ under the aegis of world fairs. Significantly, performers were marketed as exemplars through the use of theatrical scenery, often drawn from travel literature, to geographically locate them in their homelands. By considering how travel literature and theatrical performances were combined in order to create new visual experiences, it is possible to reconstruct how such shows were both advertised and interpreted, and to shed light on practices of broader significance for understanding nineteenth-century visual culture.
18 citations
TL;DR: A range of image machines, including projectors, cameras, spark devices and cinematographs, were important resources in later Victorian physics as discussed by the authors, and they were not solely used to display the backstage results of physics experiments to a wider public, but were also investigative tools well within the scientific workplace: this science's scope was widely understood as being defined by the scope of the visible, and changed when new kinds of visibility were introduced.
Abstract: A range of image machines, including projectors, cameras, spark devices and cinematographs, were important resources in later Victorian physics. These devices were not solely used to display the backstage results of physics experiments to a wider public, but were also investigative tools well within the scientific workplace: this science’s scope was widely understood as being defined by the scope of the visible, and changed when new kinds of visibility were introduced. An enterprise defined by such notions of perceptual acquaintance would also therefore depend on the accessibility and restriction of defined spaces. Here, the enterprises of the eminent nineteenth-century experimenters and lecturers John Tyndall and Charles Vernon Boys are used as examples of physics’ visual culture, its urban geography, and its relation with the emergence of cinematography in London in the 1890s in the projects of Robert Paul and his associates.
17 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the use of the stereoscope as a pedagogical medium in the United States from the 1870s to the 1920s as an extension of object teaching, and as a device that asserted a particular visual paradigm on student users.
Abstract: This article explores the use of the stereoscope as a pedagogical medium in the United States from the 1870s to the 1920s as an extension of object teaching, and as a device that asserted a particular visual paradigm on student users. Due to aggressive marketing strategies by firms like Underwood & Underwood and the Keystone View Company, the stereoscope experienced a resurgence of popularity near the end of the nineteenth century, particularly finding application in American schools. This was, in part, because the three-dimensional images that stereographs simulated could be used in the popular nineteenth-century pedagogical method of the object lesson. Analysis of the marketing and pedagogical materials that surrounded the stereograph in the classroom demonstrates the fidelities that its use bore to the methods and objectives of object teaching, and reveals educators’ and social scientists’ efforts to endorse the stereographic image’s properties as realistic to legitimize its work in education. These ef...
16 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the intersection between Victorian science and popular visual culture is explored, and the Victorian period is especially important for understanding how they became intimately intertwine and why they became intertwined.
Abstract: In this issue, we explore the intersection between Victorian science and popular visual culture. The Victorian period is especially important for understanding how they became intimately intertwine...
TL;DR: In this paper, the role of intertitles in exhibition practice in the early 1900s and the discourse around them during the silent era is investigated, and the dynamic interplay between the film lecturer, magic lanterns, developments in narrative film, and changing models of spectatorship is examined.
Abstract: Intertitles are a complex and understudied component of film. This article investigates two aspects of intertitles: their role in exhibition practice in the 1900s, and the discourse around them during the silent era. Firstly, the dynamic interplay between intertitles, the film lecturer, magic lanterns, developments in narrative film, and changing models of spectatorship is examined. The rise of in-film titles triggered a shift away from artisanal programming by film exhibitors and lecturers, resituating power in the hands of film manufacturers and producers. Intertitles were a significant factor in the increasing middle-class acceptance of film during cinema’s first decades. The shift from scenic or topical films to intertitle-reliant narrative films allowed cinema to appropriate the aura of bourgeois-friendly narrative art forms like novels and theatre; likewise, intertitles conveyed information that relied on a literate audience, often excluding immigrant populations and the lower class. The discourse a...
TL;DR: The authors locates both Pepper's performances and Brewster's text within a tradition of illusory practice and points to the importance of Scottish common sense philosophy in providing an intellectual context for that tradition.
Abstract: John Henry Pepper, better known as Professor Pepper of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ fame, clearly relished the intellectual and cultural trajectory that linked his spectacular performances at the Royal Polytechnic Institution to Sir David Brewster’s researches and revelations in his Letters on Natural Magic. This paper locates both Pepper’s performances and Brewster’s text within a tradition of illusory practice and points to the importance of Scottish common sense philosophy in providing an intellectual context for that tradition. I argue that tracing this tradition provides historians with a way of reassessing the role of spectacle and sensation in Victorian science, moving away from a historical narrative that emphasizes the move to mechanical objectivity. I suggest that Brewster and the common sense tradition provided later performers with a language and a set of practices that could be used to discipline sensation and to teach audiences how to witness and appropriately frame scientific spectacle.
TL;DR: This paper explored how the British writer and artist Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913) made use of images derived from popular visual culture to construct and express a queer identity that attempted to combine cultural, religious and sexual deviance.
Abstract: This article explores how the British writer and artist Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913) made use of images derived from popular visual culture to construct and express a queer identity that attempted to combine cultural, religious and sexual deviance. He made particular use of practices of bricolage of images and artefacts, as can be seen from both his photographs and novels. The Christmas cards that he posted into a scrapbook in the early 1880s can be analysed as evidencing his development of a particular form of queer aesthetic self-expression. This article argues that satires – one of these cards was a satire on clerical effeminacy – have increasingly been seen in a positive light as being implicated in the very practices of deviance that they appear to denounce. However, in relation to aestheticism such arguments may have been taken too far, because of the inherently anti-aesthetic drive of visual satire towards the grotesque. It is suggested that it was only in Rolfe’s final years, when he emerged from t...
TL;DR: In some respects, work concerning film production and exhibition prior to approximately 1909 has been central to this range of enterprise, suggesting intermedial and other connections between nineteenthand twentieth-century entertainment cultures that have proven of broad social, technological, and economic importance stretching into the 1910s and well beyond as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: It is encouraging to see that the last four years have brought an ever-diversifying range of publications dedicated to exploring precisely those cultural forms with which this journal is chiefly concerned. In some respects, work concerning film production and (especially) exhibition prior to approximately 1909 has been central to this range of enterprise, suggesting intermedial and other connections between nineteenthand twentieth-century entertainment cultures that have proven of broad social, technological, and economic importance stretching into the 1910s and well beyond. Some recent works have sought to develop these empirical linkages much more extensively (nowhere more so than in Kevin and Emer Rockett’s remarkable two-volume survey of exhibition practices in Ireland from 1786 to 2010). Others, like Judith Buchanan’s book, Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse, and David Mayer’s Stagestruck filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American theatre have traced much more specific linkages between key narratives and exhibition forms from the nineteenth century into early and silent film genres. Both Early Popular Visual Culture Vol. 10, No. 3, August 2012, 319–324
TL;DR: This article examined the scientific and political context of the production, exhibition and reception of a single panorama, Robert Burford's Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions (1850), which represented the first Admiralty-sponsored search for John Franklin's missing expedition, which had departed in 1845 and expected to cross the Northwest Passage.
Abstract: This article examines the scientific and political context of the production, exhibition and reception of a single panorama, Robert Burford’s Summer and Winter Views of the Polar Regions (1850). This panorama represented the first Admiralty-sponsored search for John Franklin’s missing expedition, which had departed in 1845 and expected to cross the Northwest Passage. Burford clearly collaborated with the Admiralty, acquiring permission to base the panorama on sketches taken by Lieutenant William Browne, an officer on the expedition. Burford repaid the Admiralty by supporting their current endeavours in the Arctic through both panorama and programme. However, the many reviews of this popular panorama reveal that viewers did not necessarily agree with Burford and that multiple interpretations of this panorama were extant. Detailed examination of the context of this single exhibition suggests that a reassessment of the influence the proprietors of such exhibitions held over their viewers is necessary. It als...
TL;DR: In this paper, the significance of the photographic representation of the gap girl during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in terms of her mediated visual image is investigated, and the role that gender representation plays in the construction of location in colonial tourism and how photography sets a precedent for the gendered visualization of nation that will emerge in twentieth-century Ireland.
Abstract: The gap girl of Killarney is the most popular representation of the Irish figure of colleen during the nineteenth century. Colleen attributes come to be affixed to the gap girl due to the ‘iconology’ that, as David Brett observes, Killarney acquired in Irish Romanticism and because of the currency of her representation in a cluster of popular forms by the 1860s. This inquiry focuses on the significance of the photographic representation of the gap girl during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in terms of her mediated visual image. It also addresses why a change in that representation becomes necessary in the late 1880s. Central to this study is an investigation of the role that gender representation plays in the construction of location in colonial tourism and also how photography sets a precedent for the gendered visualization of nation that will emerge in twentieth-century Ireland. In order to pursue this line of enquiry, two key representational compositions of the gap girl are analysed: a s...
TL;DR: For both artistic and personal reasons, D.W. Griffith was drawn to melodrama, and his most influential work, The Birth of a Nation, is, in almost every way, a fully realized melodramatic work as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: For both artistic and personal reasons, D.W. Griffith was drawn to melodrama, and his most influential work, The Birth of a Nation, is, in almost every way, a fully realized melodramatic work. As is typical of this style, the story is presented as a clearly delineated struggle between, on the one side, the good and right and, on the other, the wicked and wrong. In the end, of course, the former triumphs over the latter. With but one exception, all of the film's characters fit neatly into one category or the other. Only Austin Stoneman, arguably Birth's most important figure, seems to defy easy characterization. While he is arrogant, scowling, dismissive of others, and specified to be wrong on the issue of race, he is also principled, forthright, and a loving father. The purpose of this study is to show that Stoneman has the essential characteristics of a tragic Greek hero, albeit one with the good fortune to live in nineteenth-century America rather than ancient Thebes.
TL;DR: In this article, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, Yale University Press, 2011, viii + 288 pp., £50.00 (hardcover), 131 colour and 63 b/w illus.
Abstract: edited by Stephen Bann, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Yale University Press, 2011, viii + 288 pp., £50.00 (hardcover), 131 colour and 63 b/w illus. ISBN 987-0-300-13590-9 Developed from a sy...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate Dziga Vertov's often overlooked and misread first feature-length film, Kino-Glaz (1924), and discover within this historical context a unique cinematic intervention that sought to institute an alternative hegemony to American narrative film, and dominant conventions of narrativity itself, by exploiting the subjects and composite forms of early cinema to evolve a new proletarian sphere.
Abstract: Within the early Soviet Union, artists and theorists experimented with a variety of representational forms and modes that were designed to manipulate audience reception and effect a new Soviet subjectivity. Investigating Dziga Vertov's often overlooked and misread first feature-length film, Kino-Glaz (1924), this article discovers within this historical context a unique cinematic intervention that sought to institute an alternative hegemony to American narrative film, and dominant conventions of narrativity itself, by exploiting the subjects and composite forms of early cinema to evolve a new proletarian sphere.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine how we might view representations of Ceylon by the Ceylonese that complement colonial representations, and yet stand in tension with those imperial visualizations.
Abstract: Drawing upon a nineteenth-century Sri Lankan illustrated satiric magazine called Muniandi, I examine how we might view representations of Ceylon by the Ceylonese that complement colonial representations, and yet stand in tension with those imperial visualizations. Through an analysis of three illustrations of Muniandi, I show how the magazine reveals mixed messages when it contends with Orientalist discourses of Ceylon in an ambivalent manner. I argue that Muniandi becomes a site where complicity or participation coexists with subversion, providing a point of intersection between colonial and nationalist discourses. However, I hesitate to argue that Muniandi intentionally appropriates imperial discourses in its narrative to resist colonial discourses. While resistance implies deliberate subversion, I contend that in the Ceylonese context, Muniandi assimilates the dominant discourse only to reinterpret it for its own use and create its own utterances. In my attempt to disrupt problematic hierarchies where ...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored two occurrences of smaller-scale farm models that were used in exhibitions in a context of multiple other media, including cinema, and found that the model may shed light on the specifically three-dimensional branch of exhibitory items, particularly in instances when it was used in conjunction with moving pictures.
Abstract: Among the many endeavours of visualization that took place in fairs and expositions at the time of early cinema, one medium warrants closer attention than it has hitherto received: the scale model. Well suited to pedagogical ideals of overview and visual compression, the model may shed light on the specifically three-dimensional branch of exhibitory items, particularly in instances when it was used in conjunction with moving pictures. Chiefly on the basis of contemporary press sources, this essay explores two occurrences of smaller-scale farm models that were used in exhibitions in a context of multiple other media, including cinema. These instances of model culture reflect two very different aspects of Scandinavian–American relations during the mid-teens: on the one hand, a Swedish government-funded organization used the 1915 Panama–Pacific Exposition for political purposes, attempting to convince Swedish Americans to go back to Sweden and build their own small farms; on the other, a Norwegian official e...
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the characteristics of the commercial context affecting the UK Kinetoscope business in early 1895, noting the development of niche markets, competition, price trends, and the financial viability of the exhibition.
Abstract: Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope was the first practical and commercially viable method of film exhibition. Its history in Britain has not, however, been well documented. Two complicating factors have been a previous over-reliance placed on an incomplete and misleading account by Robert Paul (1869–1943), and a failure by film historians to appreciate the central role of the contemporary phonograph business in the commercial development of the Kinetoscope. The opportunity to take a fresh look at circumstances surrounding its introduction into Britain, and the fraudulent attempt to copy it, is now possible due to the location by the author of a contemporary record of a hitherto unknown legal case. A full transcript of this document is given in the appendix. This article briefly examines the characteristics of the commercial context affecting the UK Kinetoscope business in early 1895, noting the development of niche markets, competition, price trends, and the financial viability of Kinetoscope exhibition.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an investigation of Redfern's unsteady progress through the changing market of film production and performance in the region through the Fred Holmes Collection.
Abstract: While the history of early filmmaking and exhibition in Yorkshire has previously drawn only limited critical attention, the materials of the Fred Holmes Collection now offers us new insight into the region through the practices of Jasper Redfern. Drawing on both this newly uncovered collection, the materials of the National Media Museum, as well as on a series of business records held by the National Archives, this article presents an investigation of Redfern's unsteady progress through the changing market of film production and performance in the region. Starting as a demonstrator of the Kineoptikon, Redfern established himself as a localized showman who was able to tailor his show to high-profile music hall shows, as well to private performances for various social events. From this he developed his own ‘complete' touring programme of mixed live and screened entertainments, and ‘Jasper Redfern's No. 1 Vaudeville Company' broke into more permanent forms of exhibition, eventually forming a network of venue...
TL;DR: In this article, a media-archaeological study examines the environment of Czech modernity, delineated by two crucial events organized at the turn of the nineteenth century in Prague, the first entirely Czech General Global Exhibition (1891) and the Exhibition of Architecture and Engineering (1898).
Abstract: This media-archaeological study examines the environment of Czech modernity, delineated by two crucial events organized at the turn of the nineteenth century in Prague – the first entirely Czech General Global Exhibition (1891) and the Exhibition of Architecture and Engineering (1898). Within the space of exhibitions, it is revealed how the interaction of individual innovations brought about by the end of the century influenced the definition of a medium. The study does not just offer just an argumentation for media heterogeneity at the end of the nineteenth century and period differentiation of media definitions; it focuses also on manifestations of such media variegation in very specific local conditions. In order for these exhibitions to be able to demonstrate the continually promoted idea of a well-developed nation and to stimulate the spirit of enterprise in Czech industrialists, the newest inventions of Czech industry, engineering, science and culture were exhibited. At the same time, however, the c...
TL;DR: Schlupmann, Heide, the authors The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early..., 2010 [orig. 1990], xv + 273 pp., $30 (paperback), ISBN 9780252076718
Abstract: by Heide Schlupmann, Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 2010 [orig. 1990], xv + 273 pp., $30 (paperback), ISBN 9780252076718 The first thing to say about The Uncanny Gaze: The Drama of Early...
TL;DR: The history of taste of American movies of the 1920s is described in this paper. But it is not a complete survey of all the films of the 20s, and it is difficult to find a good summary of the entire collection.
Abstract: For me this book is almost in the ‘excellent’ category, but with one reservation. The problem I find is that it falls between two stools. It is described (by the author) as a ‘history of taste’, specifically a history of how the themes and style of American films changed during the 1920s, taking into account the influence of literary naturalism. The trouble is that this historical thread or argument tends to get lost as we journey through the dense detail of long plot summaries and the author’s detailed findings from the trade press. I feel that the book could have been made more accessible either as a shorter, argument-based work, with brief summarising references to the films and to critical opinion; or, by adding wider coverage of other films, thereby turning this into a complete survey of American films of the 20s. Having said that, there is much to like and admire here, and for scholars of jazz age America, it will be a fabulous resource: the research is meticulous, the knowledge of the films admirable. It would be a fine viewing guide to the films that are discussed in detail. The author examines five major genres: naturalist films such as Greed and The Wind; sophisticated comedies such as Cecil B. DeMille’s work and films like The Marriage Circle; male adventure stories, notably war films such as The Big Parade as well as westerns and gangster films; films based on ‘the seduction plot’, including Way Down East and lesser-known films like Women Love Diamonds; and finally romantic dramas, such as Lorna Doone, the ‘flaming youth’ subgenre, the work of Frank Borzage, and films with stars such as Valentino, Garbo, Negri and John Barrymore. Perhaps the most definitive films of the 1920s in this account are Greed and A Woman of Paris. Concluding her wide-ranging survey, Jacobs suggests that such films embodied a spirit of cynicism and that what came to be admired most in this period was refinement. Thus the book’s final words compare filmic taste in the 20s to a ‘dry martini’. I have seen three other reviews of this: Jonathan Auerbach in Journal of American History, March 2009, criticises Jacobs for employing an unreliable definition of naturalism; John Fidler in Senses of Cinema, no. 50, 2009 finds the book stiffly written with overlong plot descriptions and insufficient analysis from the author; Steve Neale in Film Quarterly, Fall 2010, is the most complimentary and neatly summarises the book’s contents.
TL;DR: The authors argue that Cooper's status as an early film pioneer has been underestimated, even deliberately depreciated, by established academic historians including Georges Sadoul, Rachael Low and John Barnes, who are all accused of burying Cooper's legacy.
Abstract: This book is the culmination of several decades of research and investigation. The extent of that labour is apparent in the wide-ranging, meandering and occasionally whimsical first half, which alternates between biographical and filmic analysis, and in the second half’s remarkably detailed filmography: each of Arthur MelbourneCooper’s films, even when barely a trace remains of its existence, is given an exhaustive entry annotated with interview and correspondence extracts, corroborative sources and other signs of provenance. The core argument of this book is that Cooper’s status as an early film pioneer has been underestimated, even deliberately depreciated, by the established academic historians including Georges Sadoul, Rachael Low and John Barnes, who are all accused of burying Cooper’s legacy. The authors cite Cooper as the inventor of puppet animation and the maker of the first-ever animated film, Matches Appeal, whose date of production they claim had been previously misrecorded. Running throughout is a historiographical, investigative metanarrative about the types of evidence used to investigate the life and work of an early film pioneer. The authors periodically reflect upon the fragility of the medium, the concomitant need for archival preservation of films, the importance of studying films from prints as opposed to digital copies, and the sheer difficulty of acquiring provenance for very old films for which only fragmentary, conflicting or ambiguous records exist. In this respect, this is a valuable and illuminating addition to studies of early film history. However, this methodological circumspection sits awkwardly alongside the stridency of the claims made on Cooper’s behalf, which are asserted with more certainty than the evidence should permit. The authors have drawn extensively on the testimony of Cooper’s eldest daughter, Audrey Wadowska, who conducted many years of research into her father’s filmmaking career; but her recollections are asked to bear too much evidential weight and to cement the gaps in the documentary records. Having offered a sobering picture of the crumbling corpus of early cinema history, the authors nevertheless proceed to draw firm conclusions, when they could just as easily admit that uncertainty is always an occupational hazard for historians: sometimes, tantalizing possibilities have to be left with their ambivalence intact. There is persuasive evidence that Matches Appeal, in which stop-motion matchstick men write in chalk a message requesting donations from audience members, was made for the benefit of the home front in the Boer War, and not for the First World Early Popular Visual Culture Vol. 10, No. 3, August 2012, 313–318