Playing dead
Les Misérables, advertisement in Universal Weekly, via Media History Digital Archive Last weekend I sat through six hours and thirty-seven minutes of of Les Misérables (France 1925), the longest film...
View ArticleDiscovering Kinemacolor
With Our King and Queen Through India: The Pageant Procession (1912) Kinemacolor was the world’s first successful natural colour motion picture system. It was preceded by some trial colour systems that...
View ArticleNow in paperback
I’m delighted to be able to report that my 2013 book, Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925, is now available in paperback, from University of Exeter Press....
View ArticleThe world in 1906
The 1906 Charles Urban Trading Company catalogue front cover It’s great to be able to report that the number of Charles Urban catalogues freely available online is growing. Charles Urban – just in case...
View ArticleBig
Watching Biograph films at the BFI IMAX, via BFI Twitter feed It was back in 1992, when an envelope turned up on my desk at the BFI. It came from the Nederlands Filmmuseum (now EYE Filmmuseum), and...
View ArticleDigitising the Bioscope
Volumes of The Bioscope on the shelves of the former British Newspaper Library at Colindale Well, perhaps I can retire now. I’ve been at the British Library for eleven years, and we have finally got...
View ArticleTime travel
‘Animatograph! How cinema was born in Haringey’ exhibitionCurrently running at the Bruce Castle Museum in Haringey, north London, from April to July 2019, is a small exhibition on local film pioneer...
View ArticleJust a Brixton shop girl
Postcard of Margaret Leahy, “The Daily Sketch Girl”The first feature film that Buster Keaton directed, The Three Ages, is not perhaps as familiar as it should be. A comic history of love in...
View ArticleIntroducing the Kine Weekly
Title for the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 5 September 1907 After the happy news back in 2018 that The Bioscope, the leading silent era British film journal, had been digitised for the British...
View ArticleO Pioneers!
Alice Rosenthal, via Science Museum Group, CC BY 4.0 I have two definitions of what history is, which I wrote years ago and have repeated several times thereafter – and here they are again: 1. History...
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