Category Archives: Conferences

Domitor comes to Brighton

April 15, 2012 By in Conferences Tags: Leave a comment

The twelfth Domitor conference, entitled “Performing New Media, 1890-1915” takes place in the UK at the University of Brighton, 18 to 22 June 2012. Domitor is the international society for the study of early cinema, and has held a conference every second year since 1990. This is the first time it has been held in the UK.

The conference aims to examine the relationship between performance and turn-of-the-century media technologies, such as the magic lantern, the phonograph, and motion pictures. Its title, Performing New Media, neatly makes the point that the impact of these new technologies upon the 1890s/1910s is paralleled by the impact of the new media technologies of today. This should give the conference a particularly interesting resonance or two, and there will be a special session on “Digital Technologies and New Media circa 1900″. Our new media are changing access to, perceptions of, and the historical interpretation of the media of 100 years ago.

A draft programme has been published, downloadable in PDF form on the Domitor site, or laid out helpfully you below.

MONDAY 18th June 2012

8:30 Pastries and beverages

9:00 Welcomes by Anne Boddington (Dean of Faculty, Faculty of Arts, University of Brighton); Frank Gray (Director, Screen Archive South East); Scott Curtis (President, Domitor)

9:30 Panel 1: Sallis Benney Theatre
Performing “Non-Fiction”

  • Gregory A. Waller (Indiana University), “Circulating and Exhibiting Moving Pictures of the Australian Antarctic Expedition (1911-3)”
  • Rositza Alexandrova (University of Cambridge), “Cinegramme-Sending from the Ilinden Uprising”
  • Rielle Navitski (University of California, Berkeley), “‘Mixtures of Féerie and Document’: Sensational Theater and True-Crime Films in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1908-1913”

10:30 Break

10:50 Panel 2: Sallis Benney Theatre
Music, Opera, and Song

  • Beatrice Birardi (Società Italiana di Musicologia), “From ‘Chamber’ to Cinema: The Music by Carlo Graziani Walter for Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (Italy, 1913)”
  • Bernhard Kuhn (Bucknell University), “Intermediality Italian Style: Operaticality and Metareferentiality in the Cinema of the Early 1910s”
  • Jaume Radigales (Université Ramon Llull, Barcelona) and Isabel Villanueva (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, Barcelona), “Le rôle de l’opéra dans le cinéma primitif : Étude des cas”
  • Anupama Kapse (Queens College, City University of New York), “Song and Dance in the Indian Silent Film”

Panel 3: Boardroom at Grand Parade
Exhibition beyond Theatres and Cinemas

  • Jon Burrows (University of Warwick), “Automatic Entertainment: Early Cinema in the Penny Arcade”
  • Oliver Gaycken (University of Maryland), “‘Denizens of the Deep’: F. Martin Duncan, Natural History Filmmaking, and the Brighton Aquarium”
  • Oksana Chefranova (New York University), “The Screen in the Garden: Moving Image Shows in Moscow circa 1900”

12:10 Lunch

1:10 Panel 4: Sallis Benney Theatre
Music, Colour, and Sound

  • Christopher Natzén (National Library of Sweden), “‘Such Music Cannot Be Regarded as Real or Genuine Art’: Swedish Cinema Musicians in 1908-1909”
  • Mélissa Gignac (Université Paris 7), “Le son dans les années 1910 : un exemple d’autonomisation progressive des films”
  • Jennifer Peterson (University of Colorado, Boulder), “Lyrical Education: Music and Color in Early Nonfiction Film”
  • Joshua Yumibe (University of St Andrews), “Colour as Performance in Visual Music, Film Tinting, and Digital Painting”

Panel 5: Boardroom at Grand Parade
Picture Personalities

  • Charles O’Brien (Carleton University), “Griffith Goes West: The Move to California and Its Impact on Actors’ Performances in the Biograph Films”
  • Laura Horak (Stockholm University), “Performing the Film Director: Mauritz Stiller and Vingarne”
  • Ian Christie (Birkbeck College, University of London), “Performers – On Stage and Now on Screen”
  • Chris O’Rourke (University of Cambridge), “In the Flesh: Personal Appearances and the Picture Personality in Britain before 1915”

2:30 Break

2:50 Panel 6: Sallis Benney Theatre
Performance and Pedagogy

  • Marina Dahlquist (Stockholm University), “Health on Display: The Panama Pacific Exposition (1915) as Sanitary Venue”
  • Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk (Utrecht University), “‘Kinoreformbewegung’ Revisited: Performing the
    Cinematograph as a Pedagogical Tool”
  • David Williams (independent scholar), “The Letchworth Experiment, 1914-1917”
  • Kaveh Askari (University of Western Washington), “The Artist’s Studio on Display: Workspace as Educational Space”

Panel 7: Boardroom at Grand Parade
Performing Femininity

  • Liz Clarke (Wilfrid Laurier University), “Old Wars and New Women: Performing Active Femininity”
  • Diana Anselmo-Sequeira (University of California, Irvine), “‘Neither Here, Nor There, But Everywhere’: How Early American Film Disembodied Adolescent Girlhood”
  • Leslie Midkiff DeBauche (University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point), “When the Law Is the Audience: Codifying Performance in a New Medium”

4:10 Break

4:40 Panel 8: Sallis Benney Theatre
Reconsidering Early Japanese Film: Sounds, Stories, and Performances
Panel Chair: Hiroshi Komatsu (Waseda University)

  • Ryo Okubo (University of Tokyo), “Teachers, Benshi, and Itinerant Entertainers: Magic Lantern Performances in Japan at the End of the Nineteenth Century”
  • Sawako Ogawa (University of Tokyo), “From Kodan to Kyugeki: How the Japanese Storytelling Tradition of Kodan Was Assimilated into Early Japanese Cinema”
  • Manabu Ueda (Ritsumeikan University), “The Development of Regional Characteristics during the Emergence of Moving Picture Theaters: A Comparison between Tokyo and Kyoto”
  • Masaki Daibo (Waseda University), “Reception of Film d’Art and Its Impact on Japanese Sound Culture”

6:30 Evening Event: Blackwell book reception

TUESDAY 19th June 2012

8:30 Pastries and beverages

9:00 Panel 9: Sallis Benney Theatre
Vaudeville and Comedy

  • Donald Crafton (University of Notre Dame), “McCay and Keaton: The Intermediality of Vaudeville, Animation and Slapstick Cinema”
  • Maggie Hennefeld (Brown University), “Performing Film Form: Vaudeville Theater and Early Motion Picture Comedy”
  • Gwendolyn Waltz (independent scholar), “20 Minutes or Less: Short-Form Film-and-Theatre Hybrids—Skits, Sketches, Playlets, & Acts in Vaudeville, Variety, Revues, &c”
  • Pierre Chemartin and Santiago Hidalgo (Université de Montréal), “Learning Film Performance Through Comics”

Panel 10: Room G4
Transnational Corridors: Southeast Asia, the Americas, Scandinavia

  • Nadi Tofighian (Stockholm University), “Circuit of Commerce and Cinema: Singapore and the Southeast Asian Film Market”
  • Joel Frykholm (Stockholm University), “From Movie Palace to Media Spaces: New Perspectives on the Exhibition Contexts of the Multi-Reel Feature Film, 1913–1915”
  • John Fullerton (Stockholm University), “Reframing the Panorama in Mexico: Early Actuality Film and Nineteenth-Century Lithographs and Photographs”
  • Anne Bachmann (Stockholm University), “Trajectories between Oslo, Copenhagen and Stockholm: What Norwegian Male Stars Brought to Swedish Biograph, 1913–1915”

10:20 Break

10:40 Panel 11: Sallis Benney Theatre
Performing Resistance

  • Natascha Drubek (University of Regensburg) “Unruly Projectionists and Censorship in the Cinema of Czarist Russia”
  • Denis Condon (National University of Ireland, Maynooth), “‘Offensive and Riotous Behaviour’: Regulating the Irish Cinema Audience, 1910-15”
  • Alison Griffiths (Baruch College, City University of New York), “Old New Media: The Time Warp Case of Motion Pictures in Prison”

12:00 Lunch

1:00 Panel 12: Sallis Benney Theatre
Old and New Media

  • Giusy Pisano (Université Paris-Est), “Au commencement était le son!”
  • André Gaudreault (Université de Montréal) and Philippe Marion (Université de Louvain), “D’un tournant de siècle à l’autre : l’animation restaurée”
  • Wanda Strauven (University of Amsterdam), “The Performing Screens of Early Cinema”
  • Andrea Haller (Deutsches Filminstitut), “Presenting New Media of the Nineteenth Century in the Context of the Twenty-First-Century Museum: The Case of the German Film Museum in Frankfurt”
  • Katherine Groo (University of Aberdeen), “Cut, Paste, Glitch, and Stutter: Remixing Early Film (History)”

2:30 Break

3:00 Special Session: Digital Technologies and New Media circa 1900: Sallis Benney Theatre

4:30 Break

5:00 Panel 13: Sallis Benney Theatre
Magic Lantern

  • Valentine Robert (Université de Lausanne/Université de Montréal), “De la page à la performance, de la toile à l’écran − ou comment la nouvelle culture des médias s’approprie et transforme le tableau vivant”
  • M. Magdalena Brotons Capó (Universitat de les illes Balears), “Les plaques de lanterne magique à l’origine de l’image cinématographique”
  • Sarah Dellmann (Utrecht University), “Getting to know the Dutch: Magic Lantern Series on the Netherlands Considered as Screen Practice”
  • Ludwig Vogl-Bienek (University of Trier), “Screening Sensations and Live Performance”

6:30 Break, Evening Event: Magic Lantern Show with David Francis

WEDNESDAY 20th June 2012

8:30 Pastries and beverages

9:00 Panel 14: Sallis Benney Theatre
The Circus and the Occult

  • Annie Fee (University of Washington), “Circus and Cinema: A Fairground Audience at the Gaumont-Palace”
  • Patrick Désile (Université de Paris), “Cirque et premier cinéma : Antagonismes et convergences”
  • Emmanuel Plasseraud (Université Paris-Est Marne-La-Vallée), “Médiums et nouveaux médias : Projections cinématographiques et performances médiumniques entre 1895 et 1915”

Panel 15: Room G4
Literature, Visuality, and Early Film

  • Pam Thurschwell (University of Sussex), “G.A. Smith, Psychical Research and Film: Disembodied Aesthetics and the Illusion of Embodiment”
  • Laura Marcus (Oxford University), “Conrad’s Figurative Understandings of the Cinema”
  • Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan), “Henry James and G.A. Smith: Illusion and Visuality”

10:00 Break

10:30 Panel 16: Sallis Benney Theatre
Shadowplay

  • Thierry Lecointe (chercheur indépendant), “Entre nouveauté et continuité : Le spectacle cinématographique serait-il une emergence du théâtre d’ombres français?”
  • Marco Bellano (Università degli Studi di Padova), “The Sound of the Shadows: The Aesthetics of Music for Shadow Plays in Late-Nineteenth-Century France”
  • Canan Balan (Istanbul Sehir University), “Early Multimedia Performances in Late-Nineteenth-Century Istanbul”

Panel 17: Room G4
Institutional Histories of Moving Pictures in the South West UK before 1914

  • John Plunkett (University of Exeter), “Variety Halls and Touring Visual Entertainment in Plymouth, 1860-1890”
  • Joe Kember (University of Exeter), “Plymouth’s ‘Home of Cinema’: The Long Institutional History of British Town Hall Picture Shows”
  • Rosalind Leveridge (University of Exeter), “‘A Complete Entertainment from the Moment They Enter’: Cinema and Community in the Coastal Resorts of the South West, 1909-1914”

11:30 Lunch

12:30 Panel 18: Sallis Benney Theatre
Narrators

  • Alain Boillat (Université de Lausanne), “Projections fixes / animées: approche historiographique et théorique”
  • Judith Buchanan (University of York), “‘Guttersnipe’s Dialects and ‘élocution soignée’: The Ranging Cultural Performance Registers of Early Cinema Lecturers”
  • May Adadol Ingawanij (University of Westminster), “A Late ‘Early’ Cinema: Orality and Siam’s 16mm Era”
  • Martin Loiperdinger (University of Trier), “Missing Believed Lost: The Film Narrator Then and Now”

1:50 Break

2:10 Special Session: Brighton 1978/2012: Sallis Benney Theatre

4:00 Sessions end

6:00 Evening Event: Frank Gray’s Brighton Show

THURSDAY 21st June 2012

8:30 Pastries and beverages

9:00 Panel 19: Sallis Benney Theatre
Technology I

  • Benoît Turquety (Université de Lausanne), “L’histoire des techniques comme source pour l’histoire des pratiques performatives”
  • Katharina Loew (University of Oregon), “Specters of the Theater: 3-D Cinema in the 1910s”
  • Doron Galili (Oberlin College), “The Invention that Will Out-Edison Edison: Early Cinema and Moving Image Transmission”
  • Ted Hovet (Western Kentucky University), “From Circle to Oblong: Standardizing the Borders of the Projected Image in the 1890s”
  • William Boddy (Baruch College, City University of New York), “The Spectacle of Technology: Cinema and Outdoor Advertising in Early-Twentieth-Century Visual Culture”

Panel 20: Room G4
Place and Exhibition

  • Marta Braun (Ryerson University) and Charlie Keil (University of Toronto), “Architecture and Performance: Toronto’s Screen Media Landscape at the Turn of the Century”
  • Paul S. Moore (Ryerson University), “Early Cinema’s ‘Social Media’ Moment: Local Views in Mainstream Picture Shows in North America before the Nickelodeon”
  • Leigh Mercer (University of Washington), “Barcelona on the Move: The Metropolitan Cinemaway at the Intersection of Tourism, Entertainment, and Urbanism”
  • Begoña Soto Vázquez (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid), “Cinema as Extension of the Train and the Journal: Considering a New Audience for the Cinematograph, Madrid 1900-1912”

10:20 Break

10:40 Panel 21: Sallis Benney Theatre
Historiography, Nation, Femininity, and Performance

  • Philippe Gauthier (Université de Montréal/Université de Lausanne), “L’historiographie de la performance dans le cinéma des premiers temps et l’émergence de l’histoire universitaire du cinéma”
  • Gunnar Iversen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), “Performing New Media and the Creation of National Identity: Kräusslich and Köpke in Norway before 1910”
  • Stephen Putnam Hughes (University of London), “Performing Authority at the Cinema in Victorian India”
  • Shelley Stamp (University of California, Santa Cruz), “Lois Weber at Rex: Performing Femininity Across Media”

Panel 22: Room G4
Performance Beyond the Silent Screen: Comedy, Criminality and the Fashioning of a Multimodal Cinema

  • April Miller (University of Northern Colorado), “Vamp until Ready: Parlor Songs, Pseudoscience, and the Ephemeral Performance of the Silent Screen Vampire”
  • Vicki Callahan (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), “Simulation Platforms for Writing Film History: A Scalar Presentation on Mabel Normand and Cinematic Performance”
  • Michele Torre (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale), “Transforming Comedic Performance for the ‘New Media’: Lina Bauer Does Film Comedy”

12:10 Lunch

1:10 Panel 23: Sallis Benney Theatre
Technology II

  • Richard Brown (independent scholar), “A New Look at Old History”
  • Paul Spehr (independent scholar), “Scopes, Phones, Graphs and Grams: Movies and Phonographs at the Introduction of Cinema”
  • Frank M. Scheide (University of Arkansas), “Freeman Owens: Early Arkansas Home Movie Exhibitor, Cinematographer, and Inventor of Motion Picture Technology from 1908-1972”
  • Stephen Herbert (Kingston University, London), “Recreating the First Cameras: A Twelve-Year Project”

2:30 Break

2:40 Special Session: Domitor General Assembly: Sallis Benney Theatre

4:00 Break

4:30 Panel 24: Sallis Benney Theatre
Programming and Performance

  • Laurent Guido (Université de Lausanne) and Laurent Le Forestier (Université de Rennes), “Performance et programmes : le cinéma programmé parmi des performances / les performances dans les programmes de cinéma”
  • Richard Abel (University of Michigan), “Motion Picture Advertisements, Programming and Performance”
  • Ansje van Beusekom (Utrecht University), “Performing Films in Winter 1904, 1905, and 1906: Albert Freres and Their Exhibition Skills in Multipurpose Buildings in Dutch Cities”
  • Ranita Chatterjee (University of Westminster), “‘Bringing out from Europe the Latest Scientific Illusion’: Performing New Media in British India”
  • Priska Morrissey (Université Rennes 2), “De l’invention des génériques: étude du cas français (1908-1914)”

6:00 Evening Event: Conference Dinner (details to be announced)

FRIDAY 22nd June 2012

8:30 Pastries and beverages

9:00 Panel 25: Sallis Benney Theatre
Fregoli, Reynaud, and Lightning Sketches

  • Frederic Tabet (Université Paris-Est), “La transparence du Fregoligraph”
  • Christelle Odoux (chercheuse indépendante), “L’application par Émile Reynaud de la photographie à son Théâtre optique: les Photo-peintures animées (1896)”
  • Jean-Baptiste Massuet (Université Rennes 2), “L’appropriation des Lightning Sketches par le Cinématographe, de la performance scénique au cartoon”
  • Malcolm Cook (Birkbeck College, University of London), “Performance Times: The Lightning Cartoon and the Emergence of Animation”

Panel 26: Room G4
Early Cinema (A)live! Sound, Body Performances, and Media Constructions of Presence

  • Wolfgang Fuhrmann (University of Zürich), “Listening to the Image: Ethnographic Film’s Long Beginning”
  • Kristina Köhler (University of Zürich), “Tango Mad and Affected by Cinematographitis: The 1910s Dance Crazes, Early Cinema, and Rhythmic ‘Contagions’ between Screens and Audiences”
  • Daniel Wiegand (University of Zürich), “‘Performed Live and Talking. No Kinematograph’: Amateur Performances of Tableaux Vivants and Local Film Exhibition in Germany around 1900”
  • Franziska Heller (University of Zürich), “Lumière Re-Mastered? Early Cinema Today and Its ‘Digital Performance’”

10:20 Break

10:45 Panel 27: Sallis Benney Theatre
Stage and Screen

  • Ivo Blom (VU University of Amsterdam), “The Cross-Medial Case of Lyda Borelli”
  • Nic Leonhardt (LMU Munich), “Pictorial Dramaturgy. Theatre and Visual Media around 1900”
  • Stephen Bottomore (independent scholar), “The Lady of Ostend”

12:00 Lunch

1:00 Panel 28: Sallis Benney Theatre
Showmen

  • Caitlin McGrath (independent scholar), “‘The Eye is a Great Educator’: J. K. Dixon at Kodak”
  • Peter Walsh (Sheffield University), “Standards of Practice in Transition: The Showmanship of Jasper Redfern as It Emerged”
  • Maria A. Velez-Serna (University of Glasgow), “Mapping Showmanship Skills and Practices in Scotland”
  • Artemis Willis (University of Chicago), “‘Marvelous and Fascinating’: L. Frank Baum’s Fairylogue and Radio Plays”

2:30 Break

3:00 Special Session: Closing Roundtable: Sallis Benney Theatre

4:00 End of conference

This is certainly a remarkable range of papers and themes, with a healthy mixture of leading names in the field and new scholars coming to the fore. The Bioscope will be there for a couple of days at least, and will be producing an on-the-spot conference report for you. There are a lot of old friends named above that it will be good to see again.

The full delegate rate for the five days is £140.00 (concessions rate £80.00), with a daily rate of £30.00. All presenters have to be members of Domitor, but attendees not presenting do not have to be members, which is a sensible arrangement. Further details and online booking are provided by the University of Brighton. General information on the conference, including location and travel information, are available on the Domitor site.

By the way, it’s been noticeable this year how very few conferences there seem to be worldwide this year that are either directly or indirectly devoted to silent cinema. If anyone knows of such events coming up, do let me know.

For your diaries

December 27, 2011 By in Conferences, Events, Festivals Tags: Leave a comment

Audience at the Giornate del cinema muto, Pordenone

Well folks, in just a few days it will be 2012, and it is time once again for our annual round-up of what is scheduled to be happening in the silent film world over the next twelve months. You can find further details about the conferences and festivals coming up in the relevant blog sections for these, while our calendar lists all that’s coming up in one handy place. We are considering a reorganiation of the site in the near future, but for the time being those sections remain.

OK, and it will come as a surprise to no one that things kick off with January. The Slapstick festival in Bristol, UK, returns 26-29th, with its traditional mixture of silent comedy classics and present-day TV and radio comedians. StummFilmMusikTage, the annual festival of silent films held in Erlangen, Germany, also takes place in January, though no dates have been given as yet.

February is going to have special interest for the silent film world as the Academy Awards take place on the 26th, and we’ll all be rooting for The Artist just so that we can tell everyone we’ve been backing the right horse all along. The Kansas Silent Film Festival takes place at Topeka, Kansas on 24-25th (no programme announced as yet).

March looks busy, with Cinefest, the annual collectors’ festival at Syracuse, New York, taking place 15-18th – no programme as yet, but bookings begin in January; the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema, Scotland’s first silent film festival now in its second year, to be held in Bo’ness, 16-18th; another relative newcomer, the Toronto Silent Film Festival, to be held 29th March-3rd April; and the twelfth Festival du film muet in Servion Switzerland, 29th March-1st April. With any luck, the Kilruddery Silent Film Festival should be returning this month, held in Bray, Ireland. Finally, there will be the major event of the first US screenings with orchestra of the fully restored Napoléon at the Paramount Theatre, Oakland, CA, 24-25th, 31st and 1st April.

Spring will then be upon us, and April will see the British Silent Film Festival moving venue once again, this time to the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, 19th-22nd- though officially both dates and venue remain provisional for now.

Then comes May, when we shall see the classic film convention Cinevent taking place at Columbus, Ohio, though no exact dates as yet. We do have dates for France’s Festival d’Anères, however, still going strong in Hautes-Pyrénées, 23rd-27th – or at least, we hope so, because just at present their website is down.

June will bring us the twelfth international Domitor conference, taking place in early cinema’s spiritual home, Brighton, UK, 25-28th [Update: dates are now 18-22 June], on the theme of ‘Performing New Media, 1890-1915′. There’s going to be something of a dilemma for some, as Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, for many specialists an essential part of their year, runs virtually parallel to Domitor, over 23rd-30th, with special features on Raoul Walsh, Lois Weber and the regular Films from 100 Years Ago all promised so far. 29th June-1st July will see the fifteenth annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival, at Fremont, California, marking the centenary of Broncho Billy Anderson coming to Niles.

In July the sun is hot (is it shining? not it’s not). Aside from the sunshine, there will be the Olympic Games in the UK (27th July-12th August), and we’ll endeavour to have suitably Olympic things happening on the Bioscope as well. For those elsewhere, there will be the San Francisco Silent Film Festival taking place 12-15th; or else look out (hopefully) for something eye-catching once again from Babylon Kino’s StummfilmLiveFestival in Berlin this month. In 2011 Slapsticon, the annual silent and early sound film comedy festival traditionally held in Arlington, Virginia, was cancelled – we await news of what will happen this year.

Few silent film events have announced their dates as far ahead as August, though New York’s Capitolfest, scheduled for 10-12th, and Finland’s Mykkäelokuvafestivaalit, or the Forssa Silent Film Festival, is taking place 31st August-1st September. Festivals generally held this month are Strade del Cinema, held at Aosta, Italy; Jornada Brasileira de Cinema Silencioso in São Paulo, Brazil; Bonner Sommerkino, in Bonn, Germany; and the International Silent Film Festival held in Manila, Philippines. No dates or details for any of these as yet.

And then we will find ourselves in September, and ready for a particularly busy month. No dates announced as yet, but we should be getting Cinecon, the annual classic film festival held in Hollywood; New Zealand’s charming Opitiki Silent Film Festival; the Toronto Urban Film Festival of one-minute modern silent films, held in Toronto, Canada; Sydney, Australia’s Australia's Silent Film Festival (though this could turn up at any point between September and December, judging by past form); the Annual Buster Keaton Celebration held in Iola, Kansas, USA; and Cinesation, the silent and early sound film festival held in Massillon, Ohio, USA.

After all that, what might October hold? Why, Pordenone of course. The Giornate del Cinema Muto takes place 6-13th. Nothing else would dare to think even for a moment of clashing with it, and as things stand it has the month to itself.

November and December don’t seem to have anything fixed, though the Bielefelder Film+MusikFest in Germany and Poland’s Festival of Silent Films, held in Krakow and organised by Kino Pod Baranami, generally occur around this time.

If you know of other major silent films events – as opposd to individual screenings or general festivals with some silents included – do let me know. Hopefully there will be more than just the one conference happening in 2012, while the festivals all deserve your patronage. They take a lot of time, effort and money to put on, they are organised by people who believe passionately in the importance of what they do, and festivals remain the place where the real discoveries are made and silent film history is renewed and refreshed. Hope to see you at one or more such events in 2012.

Looking back on 2011

December 18, 2011 By in 3D, Archives and museums, Asian cinema, Bioscope, Blogs, Catalogues and databases, Colour, Conferences, Criticism and theory, Digitised journals, DVD and Blu-Ray, Events, Festivals, Film Archives, Filmmakers, Images, Literature, Lost films, Magic lanterns, Modern silents, Non-fiction, Obituaries, Online videos, Organisations, People, Performers, Pre-cinema, Publications, Restoration, Social themes, Sport Tags: 4 Comments

News in 2011, clockwise from top left: The White Shadow, The Artist, A Trip to the Moon in colour, Brides of Sulu

And so we come to the end of another year, and for the Bioscope it is time to look back on another year reporting on the world of early and silent film. Over the twelve months we have written some 180 posts posts, or well nigh 100,000 words, documenting a year that has been as eventful a one for silent films as we can remember, chiefly due to the timeless 150-year-old Georges Méliès and to the popular discovery of the modern silent film thanks to The Artist. So let’s look back on 2011.

Ben Kingsley as Georges Méliès in Hugo

Georges Méliès has been the man of the year. Things kicked off in May with the premiere at Cannes of the coloured version of Le voyage dans la lune / A Trip to the Moon (1902), marvellously, indeed miraculously restored by Lobster Films. The film has been given five star publicity treatment, with an excellent promotional book, a new score by French band Air which has upset some but pleased us when we saw it at Pordenone, a documentary The Extraordinary Voyage, and the use of clips from the film in Hugo, released in November. For, yes, the other big event in Méliès’ 150th year was Martin Scorsese’s 3D version of Brian Selznick’s children’s novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, in which Méliès is a leading character. Ben Kingsley bring the man convincingly to life, and the film thrillingly recreates the Méliès studio as it pleads for us all to understand our film history. The Bioscope thought the rest of the film was pretty dire, to be honest, though in this it seems to be in a minority. But just because a film pleads the cause of film doesn’t make it a good film …

And there was more from Georges, with his great-great-grandaughter Pauline Duclaud-Lacoste Méliès producing an official website, Matthew Solomon’s edited volume Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès’s Trip to the Moon (with DVD extra), a conference that took place in July, and a three-disc DVD set from Studio Canal.

For the Bioscope itself things have been eventful. In January we thought a bit about changing the site radically, then thought better of this. There was our move to New Bioscope Towers in May, the addition of a Bioscope Vimeo channel for videos we embed from that excellent site, and the recent introduction of our daily news service courtesy of Scoop It! We kicked off the year with a post on the centenary of the ever-topical Siege of Sidney Street, an important event in newsreel history, and ended it with another major news event now largely forgotten, the Delhi Durbar. Anarchists win out over imperialists is the verdict of history.

Asta Nielsen in Hamlet

We were blessed with a number of great DVD and Blu-Ray releases, with multi-DVD and boxed sets being very much in favour. Among those that caught the eye and emptied the wallet were Edition Filmmuseum’s Max Davidson Comedies, the same company’s collection of early film and magic lantern slide sets Screening the Poor and the National Film Preservation Foundation’s five disc set Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938. Individual release of the year was Edition Filmmuseum’s Hamlet (Germany 1920), with Asta Nielsen and a fine new music score (Flicker Alley’s Norwegian surprise Laila just loses out because theatre organ scores cause us deep pain).

We recently produced a round-up of the best silent film publications of 2011, including such titles as Bryony Dixon’s 100 Silent Films, Andrew Shail’s Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896-1912 and John Bengston’s Silent Visions: Discovering Early Hollywood and New York Through the Films of Harold Lloyd. But we should note also Susan Orlean’s cultural history Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, which has made quite an impact in the USA, though we’ve not read it ourselves as yet.

There were all the usual festivals, with Bologna championing Conrad Veidt, Boris Barnet and Alice Guy, and Pordenone giving us Soviets, Soviet Georgians, polar explorers and Michael Curtiz. We produced our traditional detailed diaries for each of the eight days of the festival. But it was particularly pleasing to see new ventures turning up, including the Hippodrome Festival of Silent Cinema in Scotland, which launched in February and is due back in 2012. Babylon Kino in Berlin continued to make programming waves with its complete Chaplin retropective in July. Sadly, the hardy annual Slapsticon was cancelled this year – we hope it returns in a healthy state next year.

The Artist (yet again)

2011 was the year when the modern silent film hit the headlines, the The Artist enchanting all-comers at Cannes and now being touted for the Academy Award best picture. We have lost count of the number of articles written recently about a revival of interest in silent films, and their superiority in so many respects to the films of today. Jaded eyes are looking back to a (supposedly) gentler age, it seems. We’ve not seen it yet, so judgement is reserved for the time being. Here, we’ve long championed the modern silent, though our March post on Mr Bean was one of the least-read that we’ve penned in some while.

Among the year’s conferences on silent film themes there was the First International Berkeley Conference on Silent Cinema held in February; the Construction of News in Early Cinema in Girona in March, which we attended and from which we first experimented with live blogging; the opportunistically themed The Second Birth of Cinema: A Centenary Conference held in Newcastle, UK in July; and Importing Asta Nielsen: Cinema-Going and the Making of the Star System in the Early 1910s, held in Frankfurt in September.

In the blogging world, sadly we said goodbye to Christopher Snowden’s The Silent Movie Blog in February – a reminder that we bloggers are mostly doing this for love, but time and its many demands do sometimes call us away to do other things. However, we said hello to John Bengston’s very welcome Silent Locations, on the real locations behind the great silent comedies. Interesting new websites inclued Roland-François Lack’s visually stunning and intellectually intriguing The Cine-Tourist, and the Turconi Project, a collection of digitised frames for early silents collected by the Swiss priest Joseph Joye.

The Bioscope always has a keen eye for new online research resources, and this was a year when portals that bring together several databases started to dominate the landscape. The single institution is no longer in a position to pronounce itself to be the repository of all knowledge; in the digital age we are seeing supra-institutional models emerging. Those we commented on included the Canadiana Discovery Portal, the UK research services Connected Histories and JISC Media Hub, UK film’s archives’ Search Your Film Archives, and the directory of world archives ArchiveGrid. We made a special feature of the European Film Gateway, from whose launch event we blogged live and (hopefully) in lively fashion.

Images of Tacita Dean’s artwork ‘Film’ at Tate Modern

We also speculated here and there on the future of film archives in this digital age, particularly when we attended the Screening the Future event in Hilversum in March, and then the UK Screen Heritage Strategy, whose various outputs were announced in September. We mused upon media and history when we attended the Iamhist conference in Copenhagen (it’s been a jet-setting year), philosophizing on the role of historians in making history in another bout of live blogging (something we hope to pursue further in 2012). 2011 was the year when everyone wrote their obituaries for celluloid. The Bioscope sat on the fence when considering the issue in November, on the occasion of Tacita Dean’s installation ‘Film’ at Tate Modern – but its face was looking out towards digital.

Significant web video sources launched this year included the idiosyncractic YouTube channel of Huntley Film Archives, the Swedish Filmarkivet.se, the Thanhouser film company’s Vimeo channel, and George Eastman House’s online cinematheque; while we delighted in some of the ingenious one-second videos produced for a Montblanc watches competition in November.

It was a year when digitised film journals made a huge leap forward, from occasional sighting to major player in the online film research world, with the official launch of the Media History Digital Library. Its outputs led to Bioscope reports on film industry year books, seven years of Film Daily (1922-1929) and the MHDL itself. “This is the new research library” we said, and we think we’re right. Another important new online resource was the Swiss journal Kinema, for the period 1913-1919.

It has also been a year in which 3D encroached itself upon the silent film world. The aforementioned Hugo somewhat alarmingly gives us not only Méliès films in 3D, but those of the Lumière brothers, and film of First World War soldiers (colourised to boot). The clock-face sequence from Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (also featured in Hugo) was converted to 3D and colourised, much to some people’s disgust; while news in November that Chaplin’s films were to be converted into 3D for a documentary alarmed and intrigued in equal measure.

The Soldier’s Courtship

Film discovery of the year? The one that grabbed all the headlines – though many of them were misleading ones – was The White Shadow (1923), three reels of which turned up in New Zealand. Normally an incomplete British silent directed by Graham Cutts wouldn’t set too many pulses running, but it was assistant director Alfred Hitchcock who attracted all the attention. Too many journalists and bloggers put the story ahead of the history, though one does understand why. But for us the year’s top discovery was Robert Paul’s The Soldier’s Courtship (1896), the first British fiction film made for projection, which was uncovered in Rome and unveiled in Pordenone. It may be just a minute long, but it is a perky delight, with a great history behind its production and restoration.

Another discovery was not of a lost film but rather a buried one. Philippine archivists found that an obscure mid-1930s American B-feature, Brides of Sulu, was in all probability made out of one, if not two, otherwise lost Philippines silents, Princess Tarhata and The Moro Pirate. No Philippine silent fiction film was known have survived before now, which makes this a particularly happy discovery, shown at Manila’s International Silent film Festival in August. The Bioscope post and its comments unravel the mystery.

Among the year’s film restorations, those that caught the eye were those that were most keenly promoted using online media. They included The First Born (UK 1928), Ernst Lubistch’s Das Weib des Pharao (Germany 1922) and the Pola Negri star vehicle Mania (Germany 1918).

Some interesting news items throughout the year included the discovery of unique (?) film of the Ballet Russes in the British Pathé archive in February; in April Google added a ’1911′ button to YouTube to let users ‘age’ their videos by 100 years (a joke that backfired somewhat) then in the same month gave us a faux Chaplin film as its logo for the day; in May the much-hyped film discovery Zepped (a 1916 animation with some Chaplin outtakes) was put up for auction in hope of a six-figure sum, which to few people’s surprise it signally failed to achieve; and in July there was the discovery of a large collection of generic silent film scores in Birmingham Library.

Barbara Kent

And we said goodbye to some people. The main person we lost from the silent era itself was Barbara Kent, star of Flesh and the Devil and Lonesome, who made it to 103. Others whose parting we noted were the scholar Miriam Hansen; social critic and author of the novel Flicker Theodore Roszak; the founder of Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart; and the essayist and cinéaste Gilbert Adair.

Finally, there were those ruminative or informational Bioscope posts which we found it interesting to compile over the year. They include a survey of cricket and silent film; thoughts on colour and early cinema; a survey of digitised newspaper collections, an investigation into the little-known history of the cinema-novel, the simple but so inventive Phonotrope animations of Jim Le Fevre and others, thoughts on the not-so-new notion of 48 frames per second, the amateur productions of Dorothea Mitchell, the first aviation films, on silent films shown silently, and on videos of the brain activity of those who have been watching films.

As always, we continue to range widely in our themes and interests, seeing silent cinema not just for its own sake but as a means to look out upon the world in general. “A view of life or survey of life” is how the dictionary defines the word ‘bioscope’ in its original use. We aim to continue doing so in 2012.

Staging illusions

October 13, 2011 By in 3D, Conferences, Fantasy and horror, Others arts, Theatre Tags: Leave a comment

www.sussex.ac.uk/sccs/activities/stagingillusion

Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy is a two-day conference taking place 8-9 December 2011 at the University of Sussex, whose themes, while not directly referencing silent cinema, are highly relevant to it. So here’s the conference blurb:

Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy,
December 8th and 9th, University of Sussex

Keynote speakers: Professor Vanessa Toulmin (Director of the National Fairground Archive), Dr Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths) and Professor Sally R Munt (Director of the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies).

Plenary speakers: Dr Astrid Ensslin (Bangor), Dr Melanie Chan (Leeds Met), Professor Nicholas Till (Sussex), and Dr Jo Machon (Brunel).

Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies & the Centre for Material Digital Culture present:

From magicians and mediums to immersive media, and from the circus to cyborgs, the celebration and/or mistrust of illusion has been a central theme across a range of cultures. Notions of fakery and deception remind us that our identities that are performative. The figure of the ‘mark’ of the fairground scam remains culturally ubiquitous, perhaps more so than ever, in an era of (post) mechanical reproduction. Is new technology a flight from the real or merely a continuation of older cultural forms? Is it necessary, or even possible, to define reality in relation to the illusory? What realms of ‘otherness’ remain to be embraced? This international conference will discuss staged illusions across a spectrum of historical, geographical and cultural contexts, featuring original and exciting papers and performances.

Panels interrogate staging illusion from diverse perspectives, including: 3D cinema, the paranormal, the music hall, digital trickery, the fairground, magicians and illusionists, theatre, science, the museum, the magic of cinema, the gothic, digital gaming, social networking, the circus, advertising, illusory bodies and genders, theme parks and digital animation. Over two days the conference will also showcase illusory performance pieces, installations and magic.

Panel speakers so far confirmed: Jon Armstrong, Adam Bee, Victoria Byard, Diane Carr, Eleanor Dare, Cristina Miranda de Almeida with Matteo Ciastellardi, Lane DeNicola, Yael Friedman, Aristea Fotopoulou, Kate Genevieve, Jonathan Gilhooly, Dr Rachael Grew, Birgitta Hosea, Jacqueline Hylkema, Jane Insley, Lewis Johnson, Laura Ellen Joyce, Frances A. Kamm, Ewan Kirkland, Chara Lewis with Kristin Mojsiewicz & Anneke Pettican, Liang-Wen Lin, Joe Marshall, John Carter McKnight, Jenny Munro, Constantino Oliva, Professor Deborah Philips, Burcu Yasemin Şeyben, Jayne Sheridan, Peter Sillett, Frances Smith, Marian St. Laurent, Nozomi Uematsu, Owen Weetch, John Wills.

No programme as yet, but registration is now open, with the cost £190 (£85 for students). There’s a downloadable booking form on the conference site, and you can follow developments on the conference blog or via its Twitter feed.

Poverty on screen 1880-1914

October 9, 2011 By in Conferences, Magic lanterns, Pre-cinema, Social themes Tags: , 1 Comment

Comment les pauvres mangent à Paris / How the Poor Dine in Paris (Pathé 1910), from the Screening the Poor DVD

Recently we reviewed the the double-DVD release from Edition Filmmuseum, Screening the Poor 1888-1914, which innovatively brings together early films and magic lantern sets on the theme of poverty. Now the DVD release and the Screen1900 Project at the University of Trier which encouraged it have led to a conference taking place 1-3 December at the German Historical Institute in London. The title of the conference is ‘Screen Culture and the Social Question: Poverty on Screen 1880-1914′, and the convenors are Professor Dr. Andreas Gestrich (GHIL) and Dr Ludwig Vogl-Bienek (University of Trier). Here are the descriptive blurb and preliminary programme:

This conference will bring together different international research approaches looking at how the optical lantern (‘art of projection’) and cinematography were used in the context of the Social Question around 1900. The media history relevance of the Social Question to the establishment of these new visual media has hardly so far been examined. Nor have these media been critically investigated as social history sources. The conference aims to make a fundamental contribution towards establishing an innovative field of research in the area where social history and media history overlap.

The rapid success of ‘cinematography’ at the beginning of the twentieth century owed much to what was known as the ‘art of projection’. The screen became firmly established as a part of international cultural life in the second half of the nineteenth century by the ‘art of projection’. The enormous creative potential of these new visual media in public performances was used not only for commercial purposes, but also for events in areas such as education, religion, and social policy.

The interdisciplinary comparison will discuss the state of research on the motifs, production, dissemination, and reception of the projection media in the field of poor relief and social policy. Different methodological concepts will be introduced for researching the performative potential of existing scripts and artefacts (glass slides, films, projectors). In addition, projects editing sources will be presented, and new processes for digitally reproducing and documenting historical sources and artefacts will be discussed.

Preliminary Conference Programme

Thursday, 1 December 2011:

13:00
Registration

14:00
Welcome and Introduction
Andreas Gestrich (German Historical Institute London) and Ludwig Vogl-Bienek (University of Trier)

14:30 – 17:00
Panel 1: Screen Culture and the Public Sphere – Historic Context and Social Impact 1880 – 1914
Chair: Ian Christie (London)
Martin Loiperdinger (Trier): The Social Impact of Screen Culture 1880 – 1914.
Stephen Bottomore (Bangkok): The Lantern and Early Film for Social and Political Uses.

15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 – 17:00 Comment and Discussion Panel 1
Comment by Andreas Gestrich (London)

17:15 – 19:00
Road Show: Approaches to the Hidden History of Screen Culture
Frank Gray (Brighton): The Lucerna Network for the History of Projection.
Ine van Dooren (Brighton): Archiving and preserving lantern slides and related resources.
Richard Crangle (Exeter): Digitizing the History of Screen Culture: The Lucerna Database.

Friday, 2 December 2011:

09:30 – 12:30
Panel 2: Raising Public Awareness for the Living Conditions in Slums and Tenements
Chair: Clemens Zimmermann (Saarbrücken)
Ludwig Vogl-Bienek (Trier): Slum Life and Living Conditions of the Poor in Fictional and Documentary Lantern Slide Sets.
Joss Marsh (Bloomington) / David Francis (Bloomington): “Poetry of Poverty” – The Magic Lantern and the Ballads of George R. Sims.
Bonnie Yochelson (New York): Jacob Riis, His Photographs, and Poverty in New York, 1888-1914.

11:00 – 11:30 Coffee Break

11:30 – 12:30
Comment and Discussion Panel 2
Comment by tbc

12:30 – 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 – 17:00
Panel 3 – Education and Entertainment for the Poor – the Use of Lantern Shows and Early Films by Charity Organisations
Chair: Ine van Dooren (Brighton)
Karen Eifler (Trier): Free Meals and Lantern Shows: Charitable Events in Great Britain and Germany.
Judith Thissen (Utrecht): Educating Moyshe: Jewish Socialists, Gentile Entertainments, and the Future of the Jewish Immigrant Masses in America.
Caroline Henkes (Trier): Early Christmas Films in the Tradition of the Magic Lantern.

15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 – 17:00 Comment and Discussion Panel 3
Comment by Frank Gray (Brighton)

19:00 tbc

Evening Programme at The Foundling Museum:
“TIDINGS OF COMFORT AND JOY
A festive and true-made Victorian Magic Lantern Show for the deserving poor of London”
by Mervyn Heard with Juliette Harcourt (recitation and song) and Stephen Horne (piano)

Saturday, 3 December 2011:

09:00 – 12:00
Panel 4 – Social Prevention with the Aid of the Screen and Exhibitions
Chair: Richard Crangle (Exeter)
Annemarie McAllister (Preston): The Promotion of Temperance by means of the Magic Lantern.
Marina Dahlquist (Göteborg): Health Entrepreneurs: American Screen Practices in the 1910s.
Michelle Lamuniere (Harvard University): From Jacob Riis’s Lantern Slide Presentations to Harvard University’s Social Museum.

10:30 – 11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:00 Comment and Discussion Panel 4
Comment by Scott Curtis (Evanston)
12:00 – 13:00
Closing Remarks and General Discussion
Chair: Andreas Gestrich
Closing Remarks by Ian Christie (London) and Clemens Zimmermann (Saarbrücken)

Spaces are limited (with all those speakers they can’t have much space left) and those interested to register should contact the organisers via this link.

Importing Asta

August 26, 2011 By in Conferences, Performers, Women Tags: Leave a comment

Asta Nilesen, from http://deutsches-filminstitut.de

Over 27 to 29 September 2011 the Deutsches Filminstitut, Frankfurt, and Media Studies, University of Trier are organising an international conference dedicated to arguably the leading European film star of the early cinema period, Importing Asta Nielsen: Cinema-Going and the Making of the Star System in the Early 1910s. The conference is curated by leading German early film scholar Martin Loiperdinger, and here’s the descriptive blurb:

Asta Nielsen has been the first renowned female star of world cinema. Her name is inextricably connected with the advent of the long feature film and the introduction of the star system. Her films played a crucial role in the transition from short films to the long feature film as the main attraction of the programme which took place in various countries, in the years before the First World War.

Asta Nielsen’s international film career started in Germany with the ‘invention’ of the Monopolfilm, the monopoly rental system, in late 1910. Her films were distributed within this exclusive system and received tremendous box-office records. The screen personality of the Danish actress appealed to audiences of all sorts. Branded as ‘the Eleonora Duse of Film Art’ she uncontestedly was the most popular film actress with German film audiences in 1913.

But was this also the case with the many countries which imported Asta Nielsen films before the First World War?

How was the distribution of her films organized in those countries?

Did the Danish actress indeed attract audiences in those countries as she was able to do in Germany? And did her films also play a crucial role in establishing the long feature film format as they did in Germany?

What about the reception of her films in so many countries with different cultures and customs? How did censorship react to the provoking characters which Asta Nielsen played on screen? How did trade periodicals and daily newspapers respond to her screen personality?

And, last but not least, in which ways was Asta Nielsen on screen appropriated and received by the varied audiences of so many countries, varying not only in gender and class, but also in education, religion, and life style? Is it possible to map different patterns of audience response to Asta Nielsen films in different countries?

The conference will discuss various modes of distribution, exhibition, appropriation, and reception of Asta Nielsen within countries of all continents.

The conference takes place in Frankfurt (at the Deutsche Filminstitut Filmmuseum), and is scheduled to take place just before the Pordenone silent film festival (which starts 1 October). The conference organisers point out that participants will be able to travel easily from Frankfurt airport to Venice Marco Polo airport, or by Ryanair from Hahn airport (1 hour bus ride from Frankfurt) to Treviso airport (30 minute train ride to Pordenone). The conference fee will be 30 Euro for three days, 15 Euros for one day; the fee for students will be 15 Euro and 7.50 Euro respectively, which all sounds very reasonable indeed. Participants are requested to register up to 15 September 2011 via email at nielsen@deutsches-filminstitut.de.

And here’s the conference programme:

27 September

09:00 – 10:00 Registration

10:00 – 10:15 Opening of the Conference

10:15 – 12:30
Panel 1: Asta Nielsen and the Emergence of the Star System in Germany

Martin Loiperdinger (Trier):
The German Model – Asta Nielsen Monopolfilm Series

Andrea Haller (Frankfurt):
Asta Nielsen, the Introduction of the Long Feature Film and Female Audiences – the Case of Mannheim

Pierre Stotzky (Metz):
The Exhibition of Asta Nielsen Films in Metz

12:30 – 14:00 Lunch

14:00 – 15:30
Panel 2: Asta Nielsen in Austria-Hungary and Poland

Patric Blaser (Vienna):
Asta Nielsen in Austria-Hungary

Jakub Klíma (Brno):
Asta Nielsen in Brno

Andrzej Debski (Wrocław):
Asta Nielsen in Poland

15:30 – 16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 – 17:30
Panel 3: Asta Nielsen in Small Countries – Northern Europe

Anne Bachmann (Stockholm):
Public Response to Asta Nielsen’s Clash with the Censorship Board in Sweden

Outi Hupaniittu (Turku):
“Three times at the censorial office and nothing to remark, for you with a special price” – Afgrunden’s lucky escape and the new ways of promotion in Finland

Gunnar Iversen (Trondheim):
Asta Nielsen in Norway

18:00 Dinner

20:30 – 22:30
Cinema Lecture
Karola Gramann, Heide Schlüpmann, (Frankfurt):
Asta Nielsen – A Cinematic Phenomenon (followed by film screenings)

28 September

09:00 – 10:30
Panel 4. The First Filmstar – Asta Nielsen in Italy and Russia

Giovanni Lasi (Bologna):
Italy’s First Film Star – Asta Nielsen, ‘Polaris’

Lauri Piispa (Turku):
Marketing Russia’s First Film Star – Asta Nielsen in the Russian Trade Press

10:30 – 11: 00 Coffee Break

11:00 – 13:00
Panel 5: Asta Nielsen in Great Britain and the US

Jon Burrows (Coventry):
‘”The Great Asta Nielsen”, “The Shady Exclusive” and the birth of film censorship in Britain, 1911-1914′

Richard Abel (Ann Arbor):
The Flickering Career of Asta Nielsen in the US, 1912–1913

13:00 – 14:30 Lunch

14:30 – 16:00
Panel 6: The Emergence of the Long Feature Film in Denmark

Caspar Tybjerg (Copenhagen):
Hjamlar Davidson, His Kosmorama Cinema, and Afgrunden

Isak Thorsen (Copenhagen):
The Mülleneisen Case: Asta Nielsen and Nordisk Films Compagni

16:00 – 16:30 Coffee Break

16:30 – 17:00
Panel 7: Film Stars and Marketing Policies in the Early 1910s

Caroline Henkes (Trier):
Asta Nielsen and Her Poor Female Characters of 1911

Ian Christie (London):
From Screen Personalities to Divas – Early Film Stars in Europe

19:00 Dinner

29 September

09:00 – 11:00
Panel 8: Strange Encounters – Asta Nielsen in Arabia and the Far East

Ouissal Mejri (Bologne):
Asta Nielsen in Egypt and Tunisia

Sawako Ogawa / Hiroshi Komatsu (Tokyo):
Asta Nielsen in Japan

Stephen Bottomore (Bangkok): Asta Nielsen in Australasia

11:00 – 11:30 Coffee Break

11:30 – 13:30
Panel 9: Asta Nielsen in Small Countries – Western and Central Europe

Ansje van Beusekom (Utrecht):
Distributing, programming and recycling Asta Nielsen films in the Netherlands

Paul Lesch (Luxembourg):
“Earning the audience’s unbridled applause” – Asta Nielsen in Luxembourg

Mattia Lento (Zurich) / Pierre-Emmanuel Jaques (Lausanne):
Asta Nielsen in Switzerland

13:30 – 14:30 Lunch

14:30 – 16:00
Panel 10: Digital Tools for Comparative Research in the Emergence of the Star System

Karel Dibbets (Amsterdam):
The Cinema in Context Database

Joseph Garncarz (Cologne):
The Siegen Database

N.N. (Brno):
The Local Cinema History Database on Brno

16:00 – 16:30 Coffee Break

16:30 – 17.30
Comments and Closing Discussion

Truly a gathering of notable scholars from around the world in celebration of a world star. It looks like an excellent event all round, and fingers crossed that a publication comes out of it as well.

More information should eventually be available from this link: http://importing-asta-nielsen-conference.uni-trier.de, but until it’s ready try this one (in English) or this one (in German) instead.

Méliès at the crossroads

July 11, 2011 By in Conferences, Filmmakers Tags: 4 Comments

www.melies.eu

As noted in our interview with Matthew Solomon, later this month there is to be a conference on Georges Méliès, news of which I hadn’t picked up on before now. It is to take place 25 July-August 2011 at Cerisy-la-Salle in France. Méliès, carrefour des attractions has been organised by André Gaudreault and Laurent le Forestier, with the support of the Méliès family. It seeks to re-examine Georges Méliès’ position in early cinema history, whether as a precursor of subsequent developments in narrative cinema, spectacle, science fiction etc, or whether he is better understood as a product of the social, economic and legal practices of his time.

The conference will comprise a mixture of academic papers and screenings. The only information available on its contents is in French, which will be the dominant language at the conference, but here is the line-up of speakers and papers:

Lundi 25 juillet
Après-midi:
ACCUEIL DES PARTICIPANTS

Soirée:
Présentation du Centre, du colloque et des participants

Mardi 26 juillet
Matin:
André GAUDREAULT: La cinématographie-attraction chez Méliès: une conception durable
Laurent LE FORESTIER: Le point de vue du monsieur de L’Orchestre: la place des “films” de Méliès dans les programmes de spectacles

Après-midi:
Patrick DÉSILE: Trucs de théâtre et trucs de cinéma. Essai d’inventaire et d’interprétation
Réjane HAMUS-VALLÉE: La sauce et le poisson: pour une esthétique de l’effet mélièsien

Lectures de lettres, par Elisabeth SERMAN et Sylvain SOLUSTRI, présentées par Jacques MALTHÊTE

Soirée:
Projection de films

Mercredi 27 juillet
Matin:
Jacques MALTHÊTE: L’appentis sorcier de Montreuil-sous-Bois
Jean-Pierre SIROIS-TRAHAN: La scène réfractée au travers de la lentille de Georges Méliès

Après-midi:
Jean-Pierre BERTHOMÉ: Les décors de Méliès
Martin BARNIER: Le son féerique de Méliès

Présentation des publications récentes

Soirée:
Projection de films

Jeudi 28 juillet
Matin:
Matthew SOLOMON: Méliès, Incohérent
Frédéric TABET: Méliès, le magicien et les magiciens

Après-midi:
DÉTENTE

Vendredi 29 juillet
Matin:
Laurent GUIDO: Entre performance scénique et ciné-chorégraphie, les avatars de la danse chez Méliès
Priska MORRISSEY: Femmes-papillons et diables en collants: les costumes des vues de Georges Méliès

Après-midi:
Giusy PISANO & Caroline RENOUARD: Méliès et la lanterne magique
Rae Beth GORDON: Voir double: le fondu enchaîné et le regard sidéré du spectateur

Soirée:
Lectures de lettres, par Elisabeth SERMAN et Sylvain SOLUSTRI, présentées par Jacques MALTHÊTE
Spectacle de magie, par Frédéric TABET

Samedi 30 juillet
Matin:
Frank KESSLER & Sabine LENK: Méliès et la série culturelle de la féerie
Stéphane TRALONGO: Georges Méliès et les faiseurs de féeries. Pour une histoire des échanges entre théâtre et cinématographe

Après-midi:
Caroline CHIK: Arrêt de caméra et photographie animée
Pierre CHEMARTIN & Dominique NOUJEIM: Méliès et Cohl: transformations, métamorphoses et disparitions

Soirée:
Spectacle de magie, par Sylvain SOLUSTRI

Dimanche 31 juillet
Matin:
Elena DAGRADA: Entre astronomie et astrologie, ou de l’anthropomorphisation des astres
Nicolas DULAC: Méliès et les fictions de la science

Après-midi:
Viva PACI: Les visions d’un scientifique récalcitrant
Wanda STRAUVEN: Une lecture média-archéologique de l’œuvre de Georges Méliès (ou: Méliès, un praticien SM?)

Soirée:
Projection de films

Lundi 1er août
Matin:
Philippe GAUTHIER & Santiago HIDALGO: Georges Méliès dans l’historiographie des premiers temps
François ALBERA: Synthèse du colloque

Après-midi:
DÉPARTS

The conference site has abstracts for each of the papers (in French).

There is further information, also in French, at something else that is new to me – what is billing itself as the official Georges Méliès site (www.melies.eu). On quick inspection it contains a biography, a rudimentary filmography (without catalogue numbers), a family tree (handy), links and entertaining associated information (including a listing of the remarkable number of French streets named after Méliès – can any other filmmaker have been so recognised?), bibliography, news and images.

The site has been put together by Pauline Duclaud-Lacoste Méliès, who (the family tree tells us) is Méliès’ great-great-granddaughter. It isn’t anywhere near the great, comprehensive and useful website that an artist of Méliès’ standing ought to have by now, but it’s maybe a little better than what has gone before. If only there was as much attention paid to Méliès by our website builders as there has been by France’s road builders.

Media and cultural memory – day three

July 8, 2011 By in Conferences Tags: 1 Comment

I have two definitions of history which I keep coming back to in my mind.

1. History is what was known once but has been forgotten.

2. History is the present’s interpretation of the past.

Time and again historical questions, interpretations and hypotheses involve trying to recover something that was common knowledge. Equally, history can only be seen through our ever-changing eyes. The history we understand now is not what those tomorrow will understand.

All of which makes the idea of history and cultural memory a bit nebulous. If history is about forgetfulness and re-interpretation, then remembrance has little to with it, and the memories of others are theirs alone.

But we press on.

Day three of the Iamhist conference on the above theme, and the last day for me, though conference and events continue to Sunday. Nothing among the 9am parallel sessions immediately grabs me, but I think I’ll go for New Media, New Memory – three papers piquantly bringing together pirate radio, the Bible, and the Tea Party.

10.20 – Efficient paper from David Dault on ideologically-biased Bible commentaries (e.g. explaining that the invitation to share all your goods is not an invitation to communism) which seemed to belong to a different conference entirely.

Chirpy paper by A.W. Badenoch on pirate radio, mostly a critique of The Boat that Rocked for misremembering Radio Caroline. Do films ever remember anything correctly? What is a correct memory anyway?

Katy Scrogin on the Tea Party’s use of new media to disremember. Depressing account of ideology run riot. History as the past reinterpreted by the present in extremis. Or a denial of any sort of history at all. I guess their belief in interpretation overriding historical fact makes them cultural theorists of a kind.

You fear that the media have failed, because fundamentally they cannot communicate truth. But rather they ably reflect human fallibility.

I need to escape into the past. I need a paper on newsreels.

12.25 – Somewhat disappointing paper on Swedish newsreels which announced work to come rather than work done. Lively paper by Scott Anthony on iconography of Imperial Airways, though not quite sure how it connects with memory.

Jo Fox gave authoritative, clear paper on the self-myth making of the British documentary movement, revisiting their 1930s’ work as an ideal for engaging with the working man and helping to change society. They were driven to myth and overstatement because they were arguing their case in the face of a sceptical comissioning body (Ministry of Information) which was probably more interested in results. Did they really believe documentary would be fundamental to building post-war Britain? Such vanity.

13.15 – Now this is going to be fun – keynote from Richard Howells on the Titanic and modern memory. Just what’s needed at this stage of things – a star turn.

17.50 – An entertaining deconstruction of all things Titanic, pointing out that in historical terms its sinking is little more than a footnote, but in mythological terms it retains huge importance. The myth-building began almost as soon as it sank (witness the fakery in newsreel from the time), and has changed according to need, from early patriotic interpretation, to nationalist (the Nazi film version), to liberated Rose in James Cameron’s avowedly historically accurate version.

We learned lots about Titanic merchandise, including teatowels, sinking bathpugs, and cheese. Our ‘memories’ (there are no surviving survivors) are all so post-modern, it’s too easy to forget that there was a real tragedy, with real people dying.

From multimedia myth to memories of cinemagoing, using evidence from the time or derived after the event though interviews. I chaired a session with microhistories from Guy Barefoot (Leicester), Lies Van de Vijver (Ghent) and Kathleen Lotze (Antwerp), all fine examples of what sometimes gets called the new cinema history – empirical evidence, databases, sociological questions, films as something seen by people. Right up the Bioscope’s street.

17.20 – I’m now journeying back to find that street once more. Maybe more thoughts later.

20.20 (UK time) – Back home (Gatwick is starting to feel like home). Do I have any more thoughts? Cultural memory is a con, at least where history of the usual sort is concerned. Like personal memory, it’s about what a society wants to have happened rather than what did. Of course history is all about interpretation in any case, but not the interpretation by society. History is made by historians – by people who know what they are doing. That’s why bodies like Iamhist are important and why conferences such as this are important. They are essential means for discovering the truth. It is good to explore cultural myths and memories, but the truth is our anchor.

And now I’m going settle down with my newspaper and read all about the sorry end of The News of the World.

Good night.

Media and cultural memory – day two

July 7, 2011 By in Conferences Tags: 6 Comments

And here we are on day two of the Iamhist conference, on the theme of Media and cultural memory. First up is a parallel session on Memory and World War I, right up my street and I’m chairing it. Best to put down the Blackberry – it won’t look so good.

10.55 – Three interesting papers on memory and World War I, each in its way looking at how the visual archive has served as commemorative evidence. Sheena Scott on fleeting images of disabled soldiers in French cinema of 1920s/30s. Are there so few because the French repressed it or because it didn’t appeal to a filmgoing public? There is nothing like Lucky Star in the US.

Roel vande Winkel on With Our Troops on the Yser (1928/29), war footage repurposed by Flemish nationalists for propagandist ends, with emphasis of gruesome death that you wouldn’t get in commercial cinema.

Leen Engelen on the interesting theme of picture postcards of Edith Cavell and Belgian-born heroine, also executed by the Germans, Gabrielle Page. Statues as one form of visual commemoration turned into another, postcards.

11.20 – Another session, another war – now it’s WW2. Brian Petersen on Danish resistance movies – made after the war, fairly obviously. Particularly Three Years After (1948) on a disillusioned former resistance fighter. A commercial flop for telling audiences what they did not wish to hear.

Wendy Burke on heroes and villains in Dutch war-themed films 1962-1986. Refreshing to have someone from one country speaking about another. It would be interesting to have a rule for film conferences saying that no one can give a paper about their home nation. What new things we might learn.

Here film moves from ideas of goed (good, noble) and fout (bad, collaborationist) to the grey area where many actually lived. Yet there were no Dutch films about the war 1951-61 and only two in the 1960s. The Silent Raid (1962) has all Dutch working collaboratively for the resistance. Long wait til Soldier of Orange (1977) which shows a more complex picture of resistance and collaboration. Some have to collaborate to avoid worse for themselves or loved ones. It took over 30 years for Dutch film to face up to such truths. We can accept more the further we are away from it, in place and time. Inevitably.

Ilse Raaijmakers on commemoration of the war in Dutch newspapers. Dutch had no recent experience of war so had to learn for new the art of commemoration. They established a national liberation day which no one much followed, so they stopped it being a public holiday in 1954, at which point everyone (insofar as newspapers can mean everyone) protested. So newspapers drove it to become a national holiday again in 1955.

13.05 – Things going well so far. So many pitfalls with the theme of memory, let alone the yawning vagueness of cultural memory, but Iamhist types know how to steer through such territory.

13.20 – Now for keynote from Christine Becker, winner of Iamhist book prize for It’s the Pictures that Got Small, a really excellent work on film stars keeping their careers going on US 1950s TV. Yours truly was one of the judges so I know. Do read it. Wise, revelatory, comprehensively researched and a pleasure to read.

Gee, she talks even more quickly than I do when giving papers. And she’s speeding up …

Entertaining account of the research process focussing on the perils and pleasures of using interview material. Eternal watchfulness needed, but sometimes people do actually speak the verifiable truth. Also the challenges of dealing with those who didn’t want to remember.

A good talk. Sort of a masterclass on conducting research and turning it into publication. I think it will have inspired an audience member or two.

14.30 – Now three papers on new media history. First up, Berber Hagedoorn on Dutch multi-platform TV and history. Focus on rescreening of archival TV – catch-up, online archives, open media platforms (YouTube) etc.

Example of In Europe – http://ineuropa.nl – TV series, website, virtual atlas, blog, radio broadcasts, user contributions. TV keeps the memories alive, archives on their own don’t. Discuss.

Nice, optimistic paper.

14.50 – Krisitan Handberg offers us the phrase “digital yesterland”. Who will thank him?

Agh, Yesterland exists – it’s a virtual theme park.

The retro boom of today. An obsession with the past beyond the domain of history. Is there more to the past than history? I must ponder this.

Retro is always a gesture, never total recall. It’s us playing with the past.

Perhaps we look so much to the past because we no longer look to the future.

15.15 – Sian Barber on EU Screen, the TV equivalent to European Film Gateway reported on last week. Aims to offer 35,000 open access items from European TV. That’s what 5M euros buys you. I’m greatly impressed by these ambitious, idealistic, rigorous projects, but I don’t know who they are for. Has anyone asked for a selective portal to European archival TV? Is this creating a shared heritage that doesn’t exist, or does it exist only we haven’t thought about it much, or will it now have to exist because we have created a platform for it?

16.20 – How politely the Danes are addressing us all in English. At the end of paper sessions they ask questions of one another in a foreign tongue when in their own land.

16.25 – Danish filmmaker Neils Vest introduces his documentary about Copenhagen’s squatters’ ‘free city’ Christiania.

To live outside the law you must be honest, as the great man sang.

18.55 – Hmm, the free life looks like it has about as much hassle as the unfree one, and they sing such terrible songs. Now by a canal listening to Danish trad jazz band play ‘It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing’. And now it’s time for supper and society.

Cheerio.

Media and cultural memory – day one

July 6, 2011 By in Conferences Tags: 2 Comments

So here we are on day one of the Iamhist conference, being held at the University of Copenhagen, on the theme of ‘media and cultural memory’. It’s so broad a theme that practically anything could be made to fit somehow, so long as it covers the media and history – for what is history but cultural memory in any case?

09.45 – Sitting on a bench on the immaculately clean and clean-cut university campus, glorious weather abounding. Have breakfasted with fellow inmates at the comically plain hotel (rooms just above prison cell status, but not much). Now for a Iamhist council meeting, once I have grasped the cryptic directions given to me.

14.10 – The council was what council meetings have a tendency to be. Now after lunch in the sunshine we are looking to kick off the conference with formal introductions, just as soon as the chaos in the registration queue is sorted out … and we’re ready.

14.15 – The dean of faculty of humanities hasn’t heard of Nordisk. So much for Danish cultural memory …

14.25 – Roundtable on memory and museums with Thomas Christensen (Danish Film Institute), Raye Farr (US Holocaust Memorial Museum), Suzanne Bardgett (Imperial War Museum).

15.25 – Christensen economically gives same presentation as he did in Bologna. The mechanics of sustaining film archives in a digital age. What is a digital object/original? “History can only be truly trusted if the primary documents survive unaltered”. That’s subtle – you can write history with digital surrogates, but our archives and museums must preserve the originals, or we have no history worth writing.

That’s sort of right. But film archiving is all about copying. I guess it’s that we must always be able to determine provenance – the memory of what the object (now digital) once was.

15.45 – Much discussion of importance of capturing first person testimony, but I wonder if our compulsion for collecting oral history is greater than the actual wish we have to consult this. Ultimately the only memories we have are our own.

16.45 – Parallel session on radio and sound history, and Foucault gets his first mention. It won’t be the last.

16.20 – And now Derrida. The speaker asks Whither spectrality? Whither transindividualtion? Search me. I have Archive Fever on my bookshelves but I don’t know of any archivist who has read it.

16.40 – LARM audiovisual research project, which is generating one million hours of Danish radio. Wow. Might there be a case for having too much memory? Recordings from 1931 onwards. Aims to stream sounds to researchers to their own computers and mobiles. 3.35M euros project grant.

Power of radio to give illusion of proximity to an event. How are they overcoming the copyright issues? (It’s for HE users only, and covered by licence) And how extensively do they expect it to be used?

17.05 – Third speaker from this same project on how to deal methodologically with radio recordings that no longer exist. When secondary sources (scripts etc) become primary sources.

Intriguing observation – analogue archives offer potentially infinite information, digital archives are closer to a finite amount of information.

Fascinating project. I hope it gets the use to match its potential. Researchers struggle so much with audio archives – more so than film. It’s the curse of the time-based medium, it takes time to listen to it.

17.45 – Looking forward to this – Stephen Badsey on Media, Memory, and the Transformation of First World War History. Keynote given in memory of the late Phil Taylor, a great historian of media and propaganda.

20.55 – It was a terrific talk from Steve Badsey (ex IWM and Sandhurst, now at Wolverhampton). On military history v cultural history, and pretty withering about the latter. Essentially military historians have revised all the sentimental ideas about WWI (the pity of war, lions led by donkeys etc), but until recently cultural historians have been more interested in the myth than the reality, while the popular idea remains rooted in poets and O What a Lovely War.

It’s rare to hear a talk which would go down as effectively with a general audience as with an academic one. Some gems I noted down:

  • Think of all those who did well out of the war: Hollywood producers, Irish nationalists, British women over 30 (who got the vote)
  • There were two Western Fronts – the one of literary/cultural theory, and the one of military history
  • Not everyone appreciates the fact as yet that you can be interested in military history and yet not be a murderous psychopath
  • For many soldiers their frontline experience was better than they knew at home, and with the risk of violent death possibly less

Also he spoke about the increased appreciation of visual media (including film) as evidence, a heartening trend that has grown as access has grown. We archivists just have to keep on making more available.

Good chats over dinner about access to scholarly journals online, repairs to the Little Mermaid, Foyle’s War, the necessity of having Journey’s End on DVD, and the possibility of newsreel footage proving that the Titanic never sank …

More on the morrow in another post.

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