Double Think: The Cinema and Magic Lantern Culture

"Celebrating 1895" includes 27 of the finest papers presented at The Centenary of Cinema conference in June 1995. The first part discusses the reception of film as a new technology in the early part of the 20th century. The second focuses on exhibition and audiences. The relation of early film to popular culture forms the third part of the book, and through examining the way in which film as a new medium threw earlier definitions of the public and private sphere into disarray. The final part examines issues in the formal development of the medium and the response to initiatives arising from the 'new film history'

The Public Exhibition of Moving Pictures Before 1986

This article is an attempt to refresh our ideas of how moving pictures were invented and first seen. It is also an attempt to find one new way — of many possible ways — of discussing the earliest moving pictures, and in so doing to think again about which inventors or pioneers were significant in developing moving image culture

Serpentine Dance: Inter-National Connections in Early Cinema

Text for the Honorary Research Fellow Lecture given at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, 27 October 1998, and later published under the above title as Occasional Papers in Modern Languages, Culture and Society, Issue No. 1, May 1999, by the Department of European Languages, Goldsmiths College, University of London

Nuernberg and the Bull's-Eye Magic Lantern

This is a revised and expanded version of an article first published in New Magic Lantern Journal, Vol. 9 No. 5 (Winter 2003), pp. 71-75, as “Some Thoughts on the Bull’s-Eye Magic Lantern"

Double Think: The Cinema and Magic Lantern Culture

“Double Think: The Cinema and Magic Lantern Culture”, In: Celebrating 1895. The Centenery of the Cinema, edited by John Fullerton (Sydney, 1998: John Libbey & Co. Ltd.). (Reprinted in Richard Abel, ed., Early Cinem

‘Living Pictures.’ The Origins of the Cinema

This is the first book in English in nearly half a century to tell the full story of the international development of the first films, the origins of celluloid itself, the background of magic lantern shows (which were the first home of the movies), and the social influences on movie inventors and their chosen technologies. When moving pictures were invented one hundred years ago, inventors in many countries had different ideas about what a movie was, how it could be used, and how it could be seen; these ideas directly influenced their technological solutions to the problem of reproducing moving pictures, and account for the plethora of devices proposed during the period of invention. Living Pictures takes a new look at the international origins of moving pictures and examines the many solutions posed by Thomas Edison in America, the Lumiere brothers in France, Robert Paul in England, and Max Skladanowsky in Germany, among many other pioneering figures. Using concepts drawn from recent work in the sociology of the history of technology, Living Pictures places the invention of the movies firmly in the context of late-nineteenth-century entertainment and explains clearly the motivations and accomplishments of the inventors in both America and Europe who brought the first movies to astounded audiences in 1895 and 1896. In addition, new research illuminates the roles played by many secondary figures whose proposals for movies in the home, in mobile street theatres, and in major concert halls were a vivid part of the struggle of the new medium to find its place in the world