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.