abstract: From the film medium's earliest years, the written word has been integral in establishing cinema's educational role. Yet historians have largely studied the writings by film companies as "paratexts" to their films. Text was used to integrate panoramas/magic lanterns into knowledge-making, and film was no different. The prose in catalogues, pamphlets, and journalism produced by British filmmakers, served to highlight cinema's pedagogical utility. This article foregrounds the forgotten figure of Thomas Clegg, arguing that Clegg's innovative writings positioned the film producer, Charles Urban Trading Com pany, as an educator. Through Clegg's example, I reveal that, more than image, text was integral to selling the promise of the moving image's unique contribution to instruction, knowledge, and media history.
abstract: This essay argues that re-education films made in the wake of World War II reorient the historical and political stakes of education filmmaking, thereby contributing to broader film-historical debates about visual propaganda and the ideology of nonfic tion cinema. The essay concentrates on the newsreel series Welt im Film [World in Film], which became a key instrument for re-educating the German public after twelve years of nationalist indoctrination. As fixtures of the postwar screen in Allied zones of occupation, these films reveal how the theatrical distribution of nonfiction films was instrumentalized for an anti-nationalist and globalist agenda.
abstract: This essay investigates the portrayal of immigrants and immigration in short American films, both nonfiction and fiction, in the decade before the Great War. That portrayal is based on surviving film prints as well as synopses and articles in the trade press. Several questions guide this investigation. Where did immigrants tend to come from, particularly if their ethnicity, as Italians and Jews, could make them "alien" and not always accepted as white ? In the nonfiction films, how were immigrants helped or hindered by government agencies, businesses, and other organizations? In the fiction films, how often do their narrative arcs allow immigrants to confront and overcome all kinds of difficulties, ending in success? In either kind of film, how were immigrants prepared, or not prepared, to become new Americans and even poised to rise socially and economically, as my own ancestors slowly did? The following pages take up these questions in several stages, with emphasis on changes in American society that occurred in the early 1910s. How does this analysis reveal what it meant more than one hundred years ago, in comparison to the fraught experience of current immigrants, to be or become an American ?
Film societies-or rather, film discussion clubs, as they used to be called in Poland-have come to represent one of the most mythologized elements of history in Polish film culture. Drawing primarily on newsletters of individual film clubs, as well as the official bulletin of the film club's federation, the article elaborates on specific roles that film clubs played within Poland's broader film culture, particularly against the backdrop of state-controlled film distribution. The first section of this article discusses the beginnings of the film club movement in Poland during the political thaw. Next, the programming policy of film clubs, including diverse sources of films, is thoroughly analyzed. The focus of the final section is the crisis in 1961-64 that affected the clubs at the end of the first decade of their existence.
This article investigates how the Turkish Cinematheque Association (1965-80) fostered an idea of cinematic internationalization that resulted in a fierce criticism of the Ye & scedil;il & ccedil;am period, the golden age of domestic film production in Turkey from the 1950s to the 1980s. Drawing on archival sources like journals and magazines, the article discusses how this criticism led to a heated debate in which different actors, groups, and institutions offered conflicting proposals for how a Turkish national cinema should be formed. I examine how this debate transformed into a conflict over cultural imperialism and Westernization, which deepened the rift within the Turkish intelligentsia.
The article examines the history of the Spanish National Film Archives, Filmoteca, from its inception in 1953 until its institutional stabilization in the 1980s. Filmoteca was an official body, integrated within the Spanish state, both during the dictatorship and in the democratic years that followed. But it was also-and this is the interpretation that this article highlights-an institution deeply intertwined with the possibilities and limitations of the Spanish film culture of the time. State policies, cinephile activism, individual engagement, and governmental intervention came together to shape its history and especially its institutional reinvention during the 1970s.
This article reviews the configuration of Cinemateca Uruguaya, addressing the disputes between film club groups during its emergence as well as its film acquisition processes, relationships with peripheral film club circuits, early exhibition practices, and its role in the assembly of Latin American associations that housed film archives. For this purpose, we review the literature dealing with this process and analyze documentary materials that showcase its international links. By describing the limited functions of the organization during its first stage, from 1952 to the mid-1960s, we highlight the importance of the personal links through which the institutionalization of the created organization was sought. This journey enables us to account for the fragile regional alliances and roles of actors in the general geopolitics of the framework of the International Federation of Film Archives.
The film society in Shumen, founded in 1926, was among the first in Bulgaria to have an amateur-filmmaking club. The society's cameraman was a local photographer, and the projectionist from one of the town's cinemas became its film director. Two of Shumen's earliest amateur films survived: An Adventure in Indiana (1937), a naive "tribute" to Indian Westerns, and Madara (1940), a documentary about an ancient sanctuary and proto-Bulgarian cult center. Still in existence to this day, the film club in Shumen confirms the evolution of the amateur movement in Bulgaria: a trajectory that went from film culture dissemination to active filmmaking.
In this introduction, we propose a rereading of the history of film clubs and cinematheques from a transnational perspective. We outline a global history of cinema that takes into account the experiences that emerged in misconceived peripheries of the Western world. Within this framework, we revisit the origins of studies on film clubs and the legacy that these beginnings left for research on the phenomenon. We also suggest several methodological tools, grounded in historical examples, that may help overcome the limitations inherited in the study of a phenomenon that has so far been largely neglected, such as film club culture.
This essay explores the discourses surrounding high frame rate projection in conjunction with other specialty exhibition technologies. Though consistent with earlier appeals to immersion via technological novelty, HFR 3D is often subject to backlash comparing the format's appearance to soap operas and video games. Through an analysis of Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), I argue that these critiques expose hierarchies of taste by calling attention to limitations in accepted cinematic aesthetics; they demonstrate one way in which historically contingent filmmaking formats and practices are naturalized, with deviations subject to questions of cultural legitimacy insofar as they resemble less-respected media forms.
Universum-Film AG (Ufa) was the Weimar Republic's largest film company, but few studies examine the man at its top, Emil Georg von Stauf3, Vorsitzender of the Aufsichtsrat from Ufa's founding in 1917 until 1927. This study examines his management before the financial crunch of the post-inflation period using understudied Deutsche Bank documents. While this period is often understood as Ufa's good years, the company was in almost-constant financial turmoil, in part due to von Stauf3's management decisions. He also pushed to produce films that promoted German cultural education and at times intervened in the production process to this end.
This article traces the aesthetic and historiographic concepts of linearity and rupture from the settler-colonial film archive, American Mutoscope and Biograph's short hunting film Stalking and Shooting Caribou, Newfoundland (1907), to contemporary Mi'kmaw visual artist Jerry Evans's video installation Apaja'lujik-Bring Them Back (2019). To do so, it employs Jacques Derrida's concept of via rupta for thinking along the broken paths offilm history. By granting agency to environmental forces, including caribou, these moving images also locate rupture through their cinematographic lines, the panning shot and the tracking shot, where via rupta is decidedly formal.
Movienews was a weekly tabloid of 16-20 pages published in Chicago for five years in the mid-1930s. Heavily sponsored by ads, it promoted local retail businesses seeking to attract middle class women by offering information and gossip about movie stars. Most of the columns were syndicated, but for six months in 1935-1936 others were written by a well-known Chicago film critic, Genevieve Harris, who conducted tours of the Hollywood studios. Especially interesting was her interview with Dorothy Arzner, now an associate producer at Columbia after a decade as an important director. If Movienews was not unique, what other similar tabloids circulated in cities across the country in the 1930s?
Premiered in a Stalinist show-trial in 1947, the overlooked East German Holocaust film Todeslager Sachsenhausen (Death Camp Sachsenhausen) is treated at length for the first time in English. Using the framework of Jaimie Baron's archive effect and drawing on archival records to chart the film's production and contested reception through the end of the twentieth century, this article maps the complex and contradictory discourses of authenticity and archivality that defined its use and reuse as they intersect with volatile notions of history during German division and reunification. Analysis of the film's heterogeneously authentic sources leads to the discovery that it was the first Holocaust film written by aJewish Holocaust survivor.
This essay explores the puzzling appeal of Hitler Lives specialIntscript for postwar American audiences. The Warner Bros. documentary was lauded domestically despite its thorough vilification of not just the defeated Nazi leaders but also the German peo- ple themselves. In doing so, director Don Siegel forwarded what I term a doppelganger metaphor-the -the decades-old conceit that Germany suffered from a malignant duality, often discussed at the time as a kind of split personality. Drawing on Carl Jung's psycho- logical conceptualization of the shadow within the human psyche, the analysis illuminates the understudied featurette's compelling approach to its war-weary viewers.
This article explores the historiographical significance of the port city of Selanik/Thessaloniki in early cinema history. Formerly a part of the Ottoman Empire, the city was annexed by the modern Greek state during the first Balkan War in the fall of 1912. Moving beyond methodological nationalism, the study delves into the networks of cinema distribution, strategies of exhibition, and cinemagoing activities in the city of Thessaloniki before and after 1912. The aim is to contribute to the discourse on the transnational cinema history of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans. Furthermore, by examining Thessaloniki's interwoven history, this research seeks to enrich our understanding of cinematographic centers and peripheries around 1910. It also strives to provide insights into the discordant chronologies of the dissemination and establishment of cinema by considering a diversity of regional factors across borders.
Cinema N & ocirc;vo is generally regarded as the first and most aesthetically accomplished cinematic wave in Brazilian film history, maintaining a solid canonical status in international film historiographies to date. This essay historicizes the early reception and circulation of Cinema N & ocirc;vo and focuses on the sites whereby these processes crucially occurred: the politicized contexts of Italian film festivals in the 1960s and critical writing in left-wing journals and magazines at a time when third-worldist theories started circulating in Italy. Identifying and examining the forms of critical intervention and gestures of political solidarity these festivals extended toward the cinemanovisti, this article sheds light on the uneven power relations at play in these encounters and their impact on canon formation processes.
This article examines the history and legacy of SuperFilmShow!, a traveling exhibition of experimental films for elementary and secondary schoolchildren presented between 1979 and 1986. Curated by the American Federation of Arts for museums in over thirty US cities, SuperFilmShow! frequently complemented films by Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, and other avant-garde luminaries with maker-oriented activities and art-appreciation workshops. I argue that SuperFilmShow! challenges our received ideas about experimental film's accessibility, complicates our understanding of the contexts within which experimental films were shown, and introduces experimental film into conversations about the expectations for children's art education in midcentury America.
