Reel Families by Zimmermann

Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film by Patricia R. Zimmermann, 1995.

Chapter 1 is great. Has analysis and summary of evolution of 19th century professionals versus amateurs.
Page 12, "in his America by Design, David Noble has noted that technology can function as a powerful instrument of corporate consolidation and protection from competition"
Page 14, Kodak patents and monopoly.
Page 15-16, origin of Bell and Howell in 1906, eliminating flicker and standardized 24 fps.
Page 21, 1923 Kodak started reversal process.
Page 23, "amateur film became the domain where one mastered and controlled technology, in contradiction to work where technology and technocracy controlled the worker.
Page 23, "A 1910 Scientific American article explained how to build a 35mm motion picture camera.
Page 33, "The cultural and, by this time, common sensical distinctions between the amateur as spontaneous and the professional as disciplined emerged in amateur photography from 1888 to 1923, most pervasively on the level of content".
Page 36, "The relationship between amateur and art photography was grounded in idealist conceptions of the artist as being removed and protected from corrupting external influences like society or money".
Page 43, Susan Sontag book "On Photography" discusses amateurs.
Page 46, "Writers in both popular technical journals and mass-market magazines directed amateurs toward crafting narrative spectacles of idealized family life".
Page 64-65, Compare amateur with Hollywood.
Page 67, "Professional touted tripods to stabilize technique"
Page 82, Cecil B. DeMille using 16mm aesthetic in Ten Commandments and "Zeppelin Square in Madame Satan".
Page 85, "[Bertolt] Brecht argued for a redefinition of 'folk' or 'popular' culture in his sessay "The Popular and the Realistic", published in the 1930s."
Page 91-92, in 1944 Hollywood cinematographer James Howe observes artificial Hollywood vs realistic 16mm newsreel.
Page 109, Hopi Horizons by Mary L. DeGive and Margaret Cussler for Kiath.
Page 117, "consumption compensated for lack of control and creativity at work"
Page 127, "Narrative organization and common sense united to stave off chaotic confusing and incomprehensibility"
Pge 129, Maya Deren writing on amateur film.
Page 134, "parenting as a leisure time hobby"
Page 146, Experimental film using home movies.
Page 152, George Kuchar on video.
Page 154, Gay and Lesbian filmmakers. Sadie Benning with FIsher Price camera.
Page 157, Rodney King beating on tape. 

Amateur Film by Nicholson

Amateur Film: meaning and practice, 1927-77 by Heather Norris Nicholson, 2012

British book, primarily historical on the changes in the use of small gage cameras in England over this fifty years. Book can be a bit repetitive but each chapter ends with philosophical (although not particularly theoretical or critical) summaries and observations.

Chapter 1 is an introduction.
Page 6, "Typically, Britain's early hobby enthusiasts were affluent, white, middle-class and male"
Page 8, for some cine users, being there, witnessing and personal filmmaking was an antidote to the tide of visual factual and fictive narratives now washing through many people's lives and localities. For others, trying their hand at fictional storytelling brought pleasure and companionship"

Chapter 2 - clubs, membership trends discussed. Notable is how class boundaries are broken.
Page 53 "Clubs responded differently to developments in sound and tape-slide production. Some critics saw the latter, which involved projecting slides with accompanying music or spoken commentary, as a hybrid visual distraction from film production, even though it gained its own dedicated competition in 1970.

Page 67, "The Russian director Pudovkin provided an inspiration, 'Amateurs organize yourselves' for the first national conference of amateur cinematograph society of Great Britain in Ireland (1927).
Page 79, [Watson writes] "start imitating the professionals ... and you're the worst kind of amateur because you will have been doing a clog dance where angels fear to tread"

Chapter 4 is worthwhile (family life as fact and fiction)
Page 92, Rachel (aged 2 and a bit) Discovers England (1937) by Charles Chislett: "rehearsed many of the apparently carefree scenes". "accompanied by a carefully scripted commentary".
Page 99, "Family memories on film are about making good times last. ... Remembering is also about forgetting".
Page 103, non-seqitor about shipping film in northern Canada: "In remote regions in Canada, for instance, months might elapse before films returned on one of the supply or hospital ships that linked scattered Inuit settlements in the High Arctic"
Page 108, "The on-screen presence of family members no longer alive connected past to present, and th living to the dead. Home screenings accustomed children to loss and change over time too. Young children possibly grew to recognize relations whom they visited rarely via their screen identities. Watching films sent from relations living elsewhere maintained families spatially fragmented by war, migration or education and occupation.
"Being in charge of the camera changed the social dynamics too as one person was out of the picture framing others. Thus camerawork, for all its selectivity, also discloses subtleties about family narratives, identities and memory-shaping."

Page 154-155, Sam Hanna docs on disappearing traditional craft practices filmed for posterity. Find some?

Page 181-182, in 1939, filming from window of car was common.
Page 189, voyeurism and exoticism in travel films "conferred status upon filmmakers who ventured into alien spaces" ... "wilst also being problematic in terms of appropriation and objectification"
Page 199, woman filmmaker Lucy Fairbank (for Kyath)
Page 211, 1933 films by Harold and Sidney Preston at Stockport Infirmary - "children wearing underwear and goggles receive 'sunlight treatments' from portable x-ray equipment in the violet ray department"
Page 215, "a mouche que veux-tu" abouit alcoholic waging war on flies.
Page 231, Filmmakers who produced films with a message represent a social group that, in many cases, felt that their right to look was unquestionable. Concerns over authority and the politics of representation were not preoccupations for the bulk of these filmmakers.
Page 245 - media archaeology discussed.

Silent Topics: essays on undocumented areas of silent film

Silent Topics: essays on undocumented areas of silent film by Anthony Slide, 2005  

Book is generally historical. Critical analysis takes back seat to lists and dates. 

Page 2. "...film historian Terry Ramsaye, who wrote on December 27, 1929 to E.B.Derr of Pathe, "May I, at this time, observe that I consider all British pictures makers lousy -- and, that the art of photography is practically unknown in Great Britain, so far as the motion picture is concerned"

Page 8-9, "British producers and distributors knew their films were inferior to American product, but rather than improve them, they felt it more important to stress the bond of friendship between the two nations and to emphasize that Americans should want to see British films in order to become better acquainted with their wartime allies".

Page 27, break down of each dollar spent of a film

Page 32, Lord's Prayer as a Hollywood satire: 

Our father who art in Hollywood

hallowed be DeMille

Thy kingdom come but fun is fun on earth as it is in Hollywood

Give us this day our daily break

And forgive us our wise cracks

As we forgive those who wisecrack against us,

Lead us not into von Stroheim

And deliver us from Jim Tully,

For Thine is the income, 

What Price Glory, 

For ever and ever,

yes, yes!

Page 44-45, Muybridge wrestlers gay? Plates 345-346 (according to Francis Bacon)

Page 55-57, Green carnation and red neckties were gay codes. See Betty Boop "Any Rags" from 1932. 

Page 59, Margerie Benner, a minor silent actress and sister of Priscilla who married to alcoholic author Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano). 

Chapter 7, interview with early film composer David Mendoza (COPY)

Page 78, Roy Pomeroy, early SFX engineer, did first Ten Commandments; made Red Sea out of gelatin. Also a major sound designer. 

Page 99-100, worst silent actress was Beulah Poynter, especially in the worst silent film ever made: "Lena Rivers". 

Pop Off: the regular 8 faction

Small booklet (program?) from Archer library: Pop Off: The Regular 8 Faction, curated/edited by Milanda Kovacova, YYZ, 1998.

Short essays by Milanda Kovacova, John Porter, and Lisa Steele plus one page film descriptions (writer not indicated but likely Kovacova) for 8 films.

Scan this booklet.

Notes:
Page 13 (Robert Cowan) "It was not until I saw ... most of my films shown together than I realized that there definitely was common ground in all of them. It is nice to see that, but it is also a good idea to ignore it, otherwise you start to work in formula to remain safe. I hope I am still growing."

Page 19 (Linda Feesey), "At the time, I believed the elements of my films were pregnant with meaning. Now, I do not believe in meaning, per say. Meaning is an unnecessary and frivolous imposition upon my filmmaking".

Page 29 (John Kneller), "The hermetically sealed film cartridge is a design that takes into account the sensitive material nature of the film within. ... The simple irony is that while the films celebrate the visual splendor of architecture and landscape, they are equated entirely within a hermetic space. The filmmaker is thus dis-engaged from the experience and the process itself takes precedence."

Alice Guy Blache: Cinema Pioneer

Alice Guy Blache: Cinema Pioneer edited by Joan Simon, Yale University Press, 2009.

The Great Adventure: Alice Guy Blache, CInema Pioneer by Joan Simon
Discusses Blache's biography with focus on her ability as a storyteller.
Page 11, Serpentine dance films
Page 13, "Madame a des envies or The Missus has her Cravings "Where a pregnat woman satisfies her food cravings ... [and] other sexual cravings..."
Page 15, "A Fool and His Money... made with an all black cast"

The Sage Femme of Early Cinema by Alan Williams
Page 41, "The Alcoholic or Drunken Mattress, or The Epileptic Mattress" best of her comedies -- deadpan performance of cross-dressed leading lady. "Guy had discovered a major truth of film comedy: things were much funnier if you don't laugh at your own jokes"
The Making of an American Citizen (1912) about immigrant experience and spousal abuse.

Madame Blache in America: Director, Producer, Studio Owner by Alison McMahan
Page 48, "Alice Guy directed more than 150 phonoscenes (as the sound films for the chronophone were called) between 1902 adn 1907" Audio was pre-recorded onto cylinders and performers would lip sync while filmed.
"As Alan Williams has noted, 'until vitaphone, in fact, the history of sound filmmaking is a history of repeated failure, not of technology, but of marketing'"

Madame Blache's Maternal Melodrama: New Love and the Old (1912) by Jane Gaines
no notes

The Wages of Feminism: Alice Guy Blache and Her Late Feature Films by Charles Musser
page 88-89, copy these pages, very interesting notes idealizing and vilifying the artist.

Wonderment -- Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Alice Guy Blache by Kim Tomadjoglou
Discusses restoration and archiving and the notes and remnants of her colourization.

Loop Collective, 1996-2013

 Loop Collective, 1996-2013, by Kelly Egan, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof and others, 2013
Introductions by R.Bruce Elder and Kathy Elder. 

Part critique, part biography, part history, part artist statement, part manifesto, this book is a nice starting point to introduce one to this group and even, in a way, to lead others to the brave/foolish/necessary path of creating a mad little collective of their own 

Page 1. Mission statement. Concern with dialogue between film and other arts. 
Page 7, History of begining of group, reference to teh 1989 "notorious experimental film congress which shattered teh already tiny community of experimental filmmakers".
Page 8, Susan Oxtoby adn Independents Series in 1995.
Page 9-10, Group finally gels at Allan Ginsberg reading and reception they entered with Bruce Elder's ticket.
Page 80, Enka Loio poetic comparison of film to a book. 

Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales by Marie-Louise von Franz, revised edition, 1974, 1995.

Generally written with assumption that the reader is Christian (see especially page 111) and is frequently sexist (see page 82)

Page 34 "with the archetype of the great mother you have the witch, the devilish mother, the beautiful wise woman, and the goddess who represents fertility.
Page 61, Nose and smelling as metaphor, "smell a rat" etc.
Page 66, Latin prayer to Venus used a millennium later as an exorcism prayer.
Page 91, If people can do active imagination for hours, then it is wrong. If it is done rightly, one is exhausted after ten minutes, for it is a real effort and not a 'letting go'."
Page 102-103, Paradox (for Rania)
Page 107, frigidity in woman.
Page 126, Isis, light and dark side, witch and mother
"as Jung points out, the moment when the figure of the virgin Mary becomes more important was also the time of the witch persecutions. Since the symbol of the Great Mother was too one sided, the dark side got projected onto women"
Page 127, explains witches not attacking the king directly but through others. Also relates problems of the husband (Rania).
Page 180, "if a man is frightened of a woman he becomes impotent ... with women it is the other way around".
Page 214, "Jung also says ... one of the most wickedly destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power".
Page 247, "absolutely ice-cold from rage"
Page 301, Magic is therefore the older form of spiritual and religious knowldge and activity which has been superseded by a new spiritual religious attitude" (old religious becomes "magic")
Page 320, Adler tree - useless, grows in bogs, devil uses it to beat grandmother, can be used to ward off evil.
Page 322, Sacrifice milk to underworld to subdue them but sacrifice wine to the gods.
Page 323, "The Devil is personified haste".

Glossary
Analysands
Freud: Id, Ego, Superego
Animus
Shadow
Projection
Affect
Libido

Hidden Images

Hidden Images: Games of Perception, Anamorphic Art, Illusion (From the Renaissance to the Present by Fred Leeman, 1975.
Notes
page 13, "Ideal means of camouflaging themes that contain double meanings"
Page 25, convex mirrors used to paint from (see plate 7 on page 29)
Page 74, "The Architecture here severs only to create a visual impression ... reality thus becomes theater"
Page 82-83, Boxes with interiors painted and peep holes place for these illusions.
Page 117, crystal ball anamortph example. 

George Kuchar Reader

The George Kuchar Reader, edited by Andrew Lampert, 2014
Page 27, "The common man makes movies to see himself, his life, and we see ourselves through him because we too are common men"
Page 32, Mekas on Kuchar, talk about home movies and 8mm.
Page 64, Blank screen with fishing pole example sited as a 1960s screening event.
Page 64-69, summary of 1960s avant garde styles.
Page 82, unused titles for films
Page 181, romantic description of a Bolex
Page 214-227, examples of his torrid alteration in his personal references.
Page 231-257, more alliteration in scripts.
Page 328, Harvard archiving all his work. 

Mothering Canada, two essays

Read 2 essays from Mothering Canada: interdisciplinary voices, edited by Shawna Geissler, Lynn Loutzenhiser, Jocelyne Praud, and Leesa Streifler, 2010

Was looking for essays that might help An or Rania, but these were not a great fit.

Why Mothers are Still Women by Alison Hayford
Page 87, "Virtually all narratives in this genre make women responsible for getting their husbands to change, not the men themselves. If men don't change, it's because of wives [who] permit their husbands to shirk their responsibility".

Othermothering: parenting across international borders by Natalie M. Ward
Page 197, "it is interesting to note that while mothers who leave the home to support their children are viewed as bad mothers, the same criticism is not leveled at fathers". 

Haunted Media

Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television by Jeffrey Sconce, Duke University press, 2000.

Page 25, Rise of spiritualism suggests that Morse "could not have fashioned the magnetic telegraph" but basically the spirits helped him.
Page 29, how to build spirit battery with magnetic rope.
Page 30-31, Leyden jar - 1745 - first battery
Page 31, Galvani - electricity in dead frog.
Page 33, Franz Mesmer - therapeutic electricity
Page 36, "In electricity was suddenly seen the power to redeem all the dreams betrayed y the machine" (Carey and Quirk)
Page 43-44, Frank Tripler 1994 theory - "For many, then as now, metaphysics are more convincing when supported with some form of mathematics"
Page 46, Reichenbach and Odic force or the substance Odyle.
Page 46, Perception inverse to intellect.
page 65, Dx fishing - listening for radio broadcasts - contact more important than content.
Page 75, "Decidedly eerie Dx practice of 'ghost broadcasting' came into vogue ... turn the microphone on and, with the studio door locked and no one in the room, to listen for mysterious sounds on the station carrier".
Page 82, Thomas Edison - good long quote to base dialogue on.
Page 84, Attila von Szalay, 1956 reel to reel recording of a ghost.
Page 88 - funny surreal ghost quotes.
Page 93, Re: radio, 1922 transition year from purist communication to corporate distribution.
Page 96-97, Tesla, while working for Edison, got signals from Mars
Page 97, Professor David Todd - radio controlled dirigible to send signals to space from upper atmosphere.
Page 98, 1923 - first 3D movie "Radio Mania" AKA "MARS Calling" or "Man From Mars".
Page 113, Non-communication - mass media is only one way (broadcast is not "communicating")
Page 115-116, myth of War of the Worlds "panic".
Page 119, 1927 Theremin debut.
Page 128, herry Stephen Keeler "The Box from Japan"
Page 151, Keith Laumer short story "The Walls" in Amazing Stories, 1963, dystopia
Page 153, Mass culture = femminine, Modern Art = Masculine therefore Nietzche suggests "artist - philosopher-hero, the suffering lover who stands in irreconcilable opposition to modern democracy and its inauthentic culture"
Page 169, Baudrillard, postmodernism.
Page 171, "In their more delirious articulations, popular accounts of media culture often share the premise that television produces a separate and wholly sovereign 'reality.' What unites stories like Channel 10 from Nowhere with the more ecstatic stains of postmodern theory is this mutual vision of a living electronic landscape, a product of television's cultural ubiquity and its capacity for uninterrupted simultaneity."
Page 174, Robert Tilton, tele-evangilist. "Tilton takes care to assure viewers that his 'teletouch' still works even if that day's particular episode is a rerun! ... a slightly more sophisticated version of Romper Room's 'magic mirror'"
Page 205, Kill switch on X-Files, written by William Gibson.
Page 231, note 39, Tom Gunning, "Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theatre, Trick Films, and Photography's Uncanny." in Fugitive Images.
Page 208, "Cyberenthusiasts are no more insane than Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, or any other practitioner of mystic belief"

New Media 1740-1915

New Media 1740-1915, edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, MIT Press, 2004.

Zograscopes, Virtual Reality, adn the Mapping of Polite Society in Eighteenth Century England by Erin C. Blake
Page 1-3, zograscope viewer (one lens to create depth in a printed image) described.
Page 4, "virtual reality, a space that is enacted technologically and perceived by viewers but that exists nowhere on its own"
Page 5, role of zograscope image as a print
Page 11, "trade, politics, and industry, subjects that were inappropriately businesslike for polite conversation, were also inappropriate for virtual reality in the 1740s and 1750s.
Page 15, space as spacious is open and abstract. It carries the illusion of neutrality... place is particular, engages, even personified"
Page 21, "In theory, constructing knowledge of space by emptying places of previous associations, then filling the resulting empty space with new values, will create a new place. In practice, polite space would always exhibit a tension between abstract ideals and actual human impulses."

Heads of State: profiles and politics in Jeffersonian America by Wendy Bellion

Page 31, physiognotrace - a profile tracing device, 1802
Page 38-39, history of profile, esp 1st century Pliny the Elder and French bureaucrat Etienne de Silhouette.
Page 42, 1788 physionotrace
Page 44, inner sections of profile cuts all put into a barrel - 2 barrels full of "blockheads"
"All sitters equal in size and shape and colour - constituted democratic assembles in miniature"
Page 45, posing within device "entailed an implicit expression of consent"
Page 46, "Silhouettes were the product of spatial abuttal, proof of contact between a person and a representational system"
Page 51, "During the 1800s the Englishman Francis Galton, best known as the father of eugenics, ... replaced phsiognomy with another pseudoscience of the head, phrenology ... that gave rise to the mugshot, enabled 'profile' to attain an ominous legalistic meaning; "profiling""

Children of Media, Children as Media: optical telegraphs, Indian pupils, and Joseph Lancaster's system for cultural replication by Patricia Crain
Page 62, Lancaster described as a ready made American: "a figure of romanticism, a blowzy Byronic character, Profligate, spendthrift, overweight, paranoid, probably a sadist, possibly a pedophile, half altruist, half self-=promoting snake-oil salesman"
Page 64-65, "Panoptical visibility" school system illustrated. Very big brother/dystopian.
Page 66, "The Lancasterian student is not so much a surface to be written on as he is a surface upon which messages can be posted".
Page 71, "You're in the know if you find the abbreviation legible. In this way, the abbreviation embraces change"
Page 75, optical telegraph like the Pratchett clax
Page 77-78, Belief in Indian gestural language - eerie discussion.

Telegraphy's Corporeal Fictions by Katherine Stubbs
Page 92, Tom Standage casts the telegraph as "the Victorian internet"
Page 92-93, Telegraph fiction as genre
Page 96, "female operators could be hired at lower wages, they were also valued for their putative docility, their perceived willingness to be servants of the technology and the company".
Page 97, "Boomers who were famous both for their skillful work and for their irresponsible debauchery" (perceived image of pre-1870 telegraph operators)

From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: physiological optics, commercial photography, and the popularization of the stereoscope by Laura Burd Schiavo
1850s stereoscopes were enclosed lenticular devices with Daguerreotypes. 3.5x7" standardized due to the size of Daguerreotypes.
Page 114, The medium of the stereoscopic viewer changed from scientific (1838) to entertainment (1860) without the form actually changing. How do we read this re-appropriation?
Page 116, "Stereoscope insinuated an arbitrary relationship between stimulus and sensation. This notion challenged centuries of thought that had assumed a direct correspondence between objects and their retinal projections."
Page 117, "Wheatstone ... developed theories that cast the body, rather than the world outside it, as an active producer of sensation"

Sinful Network or Divine Service: competing meanings of the telephone in Amish country by Diane Zimmerman Umble
Page 141, Opposite of boar cult.
Page 152, Essay on Amish political debate on the telephone. Conclusion that today, no phone in Amish houses which are "at the heart of Amish faith and life, in essence, sacred space"
rejecting contact with outside which are "unmediated by ... rituals of community life"

Souvenir Foils: on the status of print at the origin of recorded sound by Lisa Gitelman
Page 165, Phunnygraph - 3 people in box repeating what was said, pretending to be a phonograph recording.
Page 166, discussion of souvenirs.

R. L. Garner and the Rise of the Edison Phonograph in Evolutionary Philology by Gregory Radick
Page 178, phonics promoted as boon to efficient colonization - Garner has radical thought of using phonics for animals (heresy!)
Page 187, Book from 1892  on "speech of monkeys.
Page 192-193, analyze sounds by slowing down, re-recording, and reversing.
Page 196-197, Conway Lloyd Morgan denounces animal intelligence - impact through 20th century.

Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: nineteenth-century reading, remaking, and recirculating by Ellen Gruber Garvey
Page 208, Scrapbookers = gleaners, not violating copyright, just moving things around.
Page 219, "John Todd's Index Rerum of 1835 encouraged readers to create a personal catalog of their own reading"
Page 212, "Links in scrapbooks do not expire" (like web links do)
Page 213, exchange sections just ran other news stories without payment or permission. Early reposting - is this like Huffington post?

Media on Display: a telegraphic history of early American cinema by Paul Young
Page 230, "in The Lonesome Operator, the reunion of operator and engineer boyfriend in a single shot after several minutes of crosscut suspense implicitly links narrative resolution to heterosexual union".
"Teh telephones of early narrative cinema often acted as screens for shared doubts about the social benefits of new technologies that banished old barriers of space and time"
Page 233, experts want to keep masses ignorant. "Media spectacles offered a working understanding of these technologies to anyone who came to look and listen, and thus infringed upon the experts' source f authority, their (mystified) electrical knowledge."
Page 251, "I'd like to conclude by suggesting that we use telegraphic-cinematic discourse to help us rethink the transition to classical narrative form as a transition between variant definitions of realism that depend in part on telegraphy's own paradoxical position as both a spectacle in itself and a transmitter of distant messages or narratives"
Page 256, "To conjure up the telegraph as these films of the 1910s do was to allegorize film's newly refined language of visual storytelling and turn it, paradoxically, into an attraction."

Benshi, Japanese Silent Film narrators, and their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei

Read first chapter of Benshi, Japanese Silent Film narrators, and their Forgotten Narrative Art of Setsumei: a history of Japanese silent film narration by Jeffery A. Dym.

"Benshi" = narrator of silent film, began as translator and explainer of foreign films but continued with domestic Japanese films once their industry formed.
Setsumei = the narration text

Page 15, Benshi compared to sports announcers on tv; that they may not be necessary but they help and we are accustomed to them.
Page 16, "The predominant complaint ... has been that benshi prevented Japanese silent movies from advancing beyond the 'primitive' stage"
Page 17, "Noel Burch ... praises the benshi [who] ... protected Japanese cinema from being colonized by western codes of cinema"

This narration only took place with Japanese cinema, not with any others. So while this seems like good book that I might return to later, I won't read the remaining chapters now. 

American Silent Film

American Silent Film: Discovering Marginalized Voices, edited by Gregg Bachman and Thomas J. Slater, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. (from Archer Library)

Movies at the Margins: the distribution of films to theaters in small-town America, 1895-1919 by George Potamianos
Historical: low density rural centres got second run films, months after cities because of shipping costs and the loss of revenue during transit. Towns paid cheaper rates but booked up to four months in advance and still didn't always get what they asked for.

Charlie Steiner's Houston Hippodrome: moviegoing on New York's Lower East Side, 1909-1913 by Judith Thissen
Yiddish theatre and nickelodeon entrepreneur Steiner in New York, a historical review.
Page 42, in 1912, Hebrew Variety Actors's Unions declared that performances be limited to five per night. This created a shift towards more film and less live performance.
"shmuts" = filth

"Have You the Power?": the Palmer photoplay corporation and the film viewer/author in the 1920s by Anne Morey
Page 50, "The [Palmer] school worked to promote a notion of self-expression that was simultaniously standardized and individual"

The Fiery Gaze: a modest proposal for better seeing by Jean Chateauvert
"prefilic address" to talking to the director or crew
"postfilmic address" is talking to the audience
Page 72, "The distinction of the object of the look ... permits the identification of no fewer than four distinct styles: (1) a look whose object is the camera; (2) a look of prefilmic address whose object is the an audience present at the filmed show; (3) a look of postfilmic address whose object is the group of film spectators; and (4) a look staged in a face-to-face encounter in a subjective shot, the object of which is another character, whose point of view the subjective shot represents."
Page 89, "The look of individuated prefilmic address has been prohibited only in fiction film ... it crosses the line between documentary and fiction"
Interesting background for Mr. Saul and Professor Delusia

John Randolph Bray: animation pioneer by Mark Langer
Page 94, intro talks about reading the names in the animation credits then looking up the animators in the New York phone book and calling them, creating his own area of research.
Page 99, Hurd's patent for cels is discussed.
Page 107-114, Bray interviewed in 1975, age 96. He died in 1978.

Sound and the Silent Film by Maureen Furniss
Page 115-116, "a rough projection is, in some ways, just as valid as a perfect one, and probably more so. Audiences of the early days very well may have seen deteriorated prints in the advanced stages of use."
Page 116, Research has shown that music and other sounds affect body rhythms such as breathing, the heart beat, blood flow, and brain functions" (AN)
Page 123, Photoplayer or "pit organ", an autmatic device for music which grew in populatiry for large theatres. Later became the Wurlitzer. 

Sex and Snow: landscape and identity in the God's Country films of Nell ShipmanS by Kay Armatage
Page 126; Paragraph describes why woman who directed popular films are not studied. "How do we account for this? Feminist film theory has developed out of studies of the classic realist text, and it has remained embedded in the classic realist text. Needless to say, like anything else considered classical, that model was created and is largely perpetuated by men. And since feminist film theory has developed as a critique of the classic realist text, demonstrating the mechanisms of its complicity in the nurturing of the patriarchal unconscious, feminist film theoreticians, rather than studying the work of women filmmakers, have contributed to the body of scholarship supporting canonical figures and the many genres directors involved in the production of melodrama, film noir, musicals, and porn films."
Page 127-8, Nell Shipman ... her films were always set in Canada -- 'God's Country' -- as the heroine she defeated the villains and rescued the heroes".
Page 129, "Regionality then functioned as an adjunct to teh founding mythology of a hegemonic nation"
Page 130-131, Canada key words in searching for films: "Alaska Highway, Arctic, bank robbers, Canadian Pacific Railway, criminals, dance halls, doctors, dogs, escape, French Canadians, fur trade, gold horses, Indians, Inuit, Klondike, lumber trade, miners, mounted police, murder, Northwest , outlaws, pioneers, prospectors, Rocky Mountains, ships, smuggling, thieves, trading posts, trappers, Yukon.".

Normalizing Stars: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and Hollywood Consolidation by Sam Stoloff
Page 150, List of sources of tension and strife in USA 1919-1922 including strikes, race riots, KKK, red scare, flu, suffrage, -- suggests Hays office colludes with studios against Arbuckle to "crack down on workers".
Page 157, "By 1913, when Arbuckle began his film career, fat bodies no longer signified power or status. Instead, they were more and more a source of shame"
Shift is from the importance of excess (money, weight, etc) to importance of control of that excess or of the body.
Page 162, "Masculinity is ... an expression of bodily control while ... the fat bod is presumed to be out of control"

The Fictionalized Ethinic Biography: Nita Naldi and the Crisis of Assimilation by Diane Negra
Page 177, Niter Naldi, vamp actress deemed "the female Valintino" was New York born Irish Donna Dooley.
Page 180, Eastern Europeans seen as inferior, not as "white" as western.

June Mathis: a woman who spoke through silents by Thomas J. Slater

Page 204, note 28, refers to "Blueprints for feature films" by Staiger and Loughrey regarding silent screenwriting. 

Page 205, "June Mathis's ideas stemmed from her belief in a strict but benevolent social hierarchy ... carrying forward the values of the nineteenth century".
Page 210, Spiritual powers brought not by adversity.
"These 'feminine' qualities defined in the 19th century as 'the cult of true womanhood'
Page 213, Mathis wrote "The Red lantern" (1919) about the boxer rebellion.

"Abstract and Brief Chronicles": The early history of MGM revisioned by Joanne E. Rapf
no notes. Reconsidered history by daughter of mogul who is now retired film academic. 

Jean-Luc Godard and Ludwig Wittgenstein

Jean-Luc Godard and Ludwig Wittgenstein in New Contexts by Christina Stojanova
Read this aloud to William following a few months of Godard as well as watching the film "Wittgenstein" by Derek Jarman that we watched together on Mubi. 

Screenwriting for the Early Silent Films

Article found online: Screenwriting for the Early Silent Films: Forgotten Pioneers, 1897-1911 by Edward Azlant, from Film History, vol.9, no.3, 1997, pp. 228-256, Indiana University Press.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3815179

A historical overview of early important screenwriters, often coming out of journalism backgrounds.

Page 238, Colonel Selig buys book rights for film to creat vluable library of Zan Gray, Winston Churchill, and others.
Page 240: "The Photoplay Author: a journal for all who produce photoplays".  a magazine of the day - does it still exist online? There is an old book for sale. This is also promising:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15383/15383-h/15383-h.htm
Or especially this one:  http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17903/17903-h/17903-h.htm

Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema

Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema by Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, Jonathon Rosen, 2015, EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam University Press.Intro by Martin Scorsese

Applying Color, creating fantasy of cinema by Tom Gunning
Page 21, "in this new ear, 'lithographic culture' became a code word for cheap, vulgarity, aimed at the sensational tastes of the masses rather than the educated tastes of the elite"
Page 22, "But the superimposition of nonphotographic colours over photographic images also creates a collision of modes that has an uncanny dimension. Even when the coloring-in of objects has been carefully done, so that the edges of colours and objects match, an impression persists that the colour hovers over the object rather than inheres in it."
Page 25, "one of the first projected colored films, Edison's Umbrella Dance shown at Koster and Bial's in March of 1896, not only presented the dancers with hand-painted costumes, but that these costumes actually changed colours as the film progressed. This effect may have been intended to replicate the ever-transforming coloured lights projected onto Loie Fuller and other performers."

Techniques of the Fantastic by Joshua Yumibe
Page 29, Anidine dye history from 1830 and impact discussed.
Page 32-34, stencil cutting practice described, from fully manual to device aided.
Page 36, in the 1910s, filmstock companies began to distribute pre-tinted positive filmstocks that were coloured at the factory ... this removed the need to tint the films in post production. Follow up with Yumibe in "Film and Media Technologies: the film archive as a research laboratory" from 2010.

The Archival Life of Early Color Films, restoration and presentation by Giovanna Fossati
Discusses issues around archiving, of how purists declared black and white to be the art of early cinema and colour being dismissed as a sideline. How the original, even when preserved, could not be shown like a restored painting was and how digital technologies allow the public to see the archival preserved colours for the first time.

Jonathon Rosen is an artist who has designed the book. 

Expressionism in Germany and France

Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky edited by Timothy Benson.

Expressionism in Germany and France by Timothy Benson
Page 52, "For German artists, "the decorative" was a complex and contradictory term with deep philosophical and historical roots that prevented them from embracing it directly"

Harry Graf Kessler's Path to Expressionism by Laird M. Easton
Page 146, "Kessler elaborated an aesthetic theory that had much in common with the goals of Expressionism. In particular, he stressed the importance of three phenomena - the role of feelings, the religious roots of art, and the uses of ornament"
Page 147, "Expressionism oscillates dramatically between moods of darkest despair and of chiliastic ecstasy"
Page 150, "Expressionist theatre in its effort to go beyond naturalism and uncover a deeper reality"
Page 152, Kessler commissions Herzfelde brothers to make an animated propaganda film in the expressionist style. Mocking the arrival of American troops in France"

Henri Matisse as Herr Professor: the academic Matisse and the Internationalization of the Avant-Garde, 1905-1914 by Claudine Grammont
Page 155, "In 1912, the terms Wilden (wild animal - another term for the Fauves) and Expressionism were essentially interchangeable"
"... before World War I when artistic internationalism could still be conceived not as a utopia but as a collective project"
Page 158, re: internationalism in art in 1908-1910: "The notion of achieving a sort of pictorial Esperanto is perhaps not alien to Matisse's ambition; during those years he simplified his pictorial vocabulary to an extreme, returning to the very roots of the language of forms."
Page 160 "art boche ('Kraut' art)"

Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, and the Fauves: Exhibitions of French Modernism in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, 1904-1909 by Peter Kropmanns
Page 167, "The art critic was able to support or weaken an artistic impression through his interpretation; his reading, which was also understood as an articulation of the understanding of the general public, was also the basis for the value judgment on which depended the public success and ultimately the existence of the work of art. If the critic believed himself obliged to conclude that a work lacked impact, in other words, lacked points of contact with the interests of the time, then he could in a way 'neutralize' such a work by denying it journalistic support or even not mentioning it at all." (quoting Bringmann)
Page 176, "The long standing dispute important to consider the broader context when taking a closer look at exhibitions of French modernism in Germany between 1904 and 1909. These events were not only part of a moment in European history and art history on the even of World War I but also part of a continuum of German-French relations spanning many centuries and having experienced many fluctuations, characterized by some peaks and many depths -- by exchange, inspirations, and osmosis at some points and by rejection, distancing, and demarcation at others. "

The Brucke and the Fauves by Magdalena M. Moeller
Page 239, "The Fauves painted in order to express something, not to depict something. That was their revolutionary approach"
"Fauves" = wild beasts.
Brucke formed in Dresden in 1905. Both groups highly influenced by early exhibitions of Van Gogh - Fauves, Paris 1901 and Brucke, Dresden, 1905.
Page 247-248, "[The Brucke] wanted to give the impression that their art had evolved autonomously and without the existence of French models. That is why Kirchner predated his drawings and pastels of 1909 in particular, in which his work is closest to that of Matisse"
"We rejected the ingratiating or salon-like taste that still clung to academicism, which was undoubtedly still present tin the work of others'' painting at the time. That was refined painting, but the refined was not our goal" (Heckel in 1958 interview)
"The artist of the Brucke are usually lumped in with Expressionism, without recognizing that there were two stages of Brucke art. ...[Dresden] colorful and cheerful qualities .... [Berlin] distortion and exaggeration bordering on the hysterical, a shattering of traditional forms".

Expanding the Boundaries of Modern Art: the Blaue Reiter, Parisian Modernism, and Henri Rousseau by Katherine Kuenzli
Page 251, "By introducing Impressionistic aesthetic in Germany, both men [critic Julius Meier-Graefe and museum curator Hugo von Tschudi] sought to change the course of German art away from the allegorical and mythological subjects towards a concentration on optical sensation and the material properties of the medium, including line, colour, and surface."
"[later] contributors to the almanac, especially Marc and Kandinsky, focused less on modern art's formal qualities  and more on underlying spiritual affinities that they believed  united artworks from all cultures and historical ages."
Page 253, "Macke ... insists ... that modern art originated in individual sensation"
Page 257, "The complement of the great realism is the great abstraction, according to Kandinsky"

A Byway for Sure: Cubism's reception and impact on the Brucke, 1910-1914 by Sherwwin Simmons
Page 263, "The Cubists" a poem in magazing Lustige Blatter:
"This is a new direction,
Ideally Partisian
This is an artistic school,
That paints three-dimensionally.
The crude poem ended by ridicculing the "Kubik" idiot who would buy such art."

Remainder of YouTube

The Carnival of the New Screen: from hegemony to isonomy by Bernard Stiegler
Page 40, "I ascribed a philosophical virtue to be the power of repetition".
Page 42, "Grammatization is what allows ... individuals and groups to individuate themselves ... through utterances ... gestures, perceptions"
What is "dailymotion"?

YouTube at the End of New Media by Richard Grusin
Page 61-62, Remediation - Youtube is a medium that remediates tv.
Page 64, end of new media
Page 66, "dividuated"

Videos of Affinity on Youtube by Patricia G. Lange
Page 72, problem of "face to face"
Page 74, "how movies ... were often recorded by fathers and focuses on ... Christmas, birthday and weddings"
Page 77, Patricia Zimmerman on father-based home movies.
Page 81-82, Phatic meaningless introduction with apologies containing communication without critical information.

The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: participatory culture beyond the profssional-amateur divide by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green
Page 95, "The possibilities of inauthentic authenticity are now a part of the cultureal repertoire of Youtube", re: vlogger Lonelygirl15 (Bree).

Where Quality Matters: discourses on the art of making a Youtube video by Eggo Muller
Page 127, Jenkins lists 3 challenges participation gap (access), transparency problem (conventions and protocols), ethics challenge (knowledge). Article discuses online video production advice/training videos.

Breaking the Age Barrier in the Internet AGe: the story of Geriatric 1927 by Bjorn Sorenssen
Geriatric 1927: an 80 year old vlogger learned tools during process through comments to his videos.

Digital Attractions: reloading early cinema in online video collections by Joost Broeren
Page 154-156, summarizes Gunning and others on "attractions" and narrative/documentary split in early cinema.
Page 158, "Kessler notes three characteristics of the cinema of attractions (and thus the cinema of attractional display) which "appear to be directly linked to this general orientation towards the spectator", namely "the gaze and gestures of actors directed towards the camera, the temporality, the frontality".
Page 158, The short length of films in early cinema and on YouTube compared.
Page 164, compares producer/exhibitor control of order of audience exhibition - early cinema to Youtube.

Tales of Epiphany and Entropy: around the worlds in eighty clicks by Thomas Elsaesser
Page 168, "If you cannot find it on Google or Youtube, many people now seem to believe that it either doesn't exist, or not worth knowing or having".
Page 168, post-human condition
Page 169, "post human 'human-machine symbiosis'" and automatic writing experiment.
Page 174, "... very traditional in the ideology of its creation: in the making-of video one recognizes all the cliches of commercial filmmaking as well as of auteurism.
Page 178, Tim Fort, who spends his time devising Rube Goldberg hybrids which turn out to be little allegories of cinema itself.

Home Dance: mediacy and aesthetics of the self on YouTube by Kathrin Peters and Andrea Seier
Page 187, "Whatever we know about ourselves we know through and from the media"
Page 195 "[the word] talent is used as a basically empty signifier wherever the writer is in a loss for words. .. series of exclamation points or the repetition of a single letter often also point to the void of not having anything substantial to say"

'Hey Man, Nice Shot': setting the Iraq war to music on Youtube by Christian Christansen
Page 214, "When the occupation ends ... the music video will remain in suspended online animation as cyber-relics: then novelty value gone, but their personal, subjective testimonies to history intact".

YouTube Commemoration: private grief and communal consolation by Malin Wahlberg
Page 221, "The presence of absence enacted by photographs, and the contrast between the happiness suggested by family footage and the irrevocable fact of death, repreent the universal content of the memorial tribute video."
Page 222, "The memorial is a place where rituaal acts meet with the politics of preservation and historical represention."
MONUMENT (victory) vs MEMORIAL (defeat)
Page 225, "The crucial function of family photography ... is to construct a unified image of the past"
Page 231, "On youtube, the perverse voyeurism implied in the suicide memorial is emphasized by the archival logic of sorting videos into a cluster according to a specific theme. As a result, tributes to victims of suicide appear side by side with videos promising spectacular suicides in realtime".

Sports on YouTube by Markus Stauff
Page 239, Mid 19th century shaping of sports and media with telegraph and newspaper lead to leagues and standardizing and serializing.
Page 240, "in contrast to history or science programs on television, the goal of knowledge production in sports is to enable audiences to form their own opinions".

YouTube and the Aesthetics of Political Accountability by Vinzenz Hediger
Page 259, "Youtube create a public sphere or sub-sphere, that is relentlessly unforgiving to those who slip up. It forces a new degree of restraint and self control on politicians"
Page 257, Colbert Report - the McCain speech "green screen challenge".

The Appearance of Archives by Rich Prelinger
Page 268, "[Youtube] problematizes and threatens the canonical mission of established moving image archives throughout the world"
- Library of Congress pre-1915 film in "American Memory Project"
Page 271, I would argue that the low-res appearance of most Youtbe videos map help foster a sense of immunity amoug users, a sense that Youtube viewing doesn't really violate any owners' rights because it's just watching a picture of a video. Youtube places the viewer in permanent preview mode."

Navigating YouTube: constituting a hybrid information management system by Frank Kessler and Mirko Tobias Schafer
Page 283, tagging "a form of deliberate misinformation."
Chapter about how the labels are key to indexing because machings cannot interpret film, only the description.

The Archival Cloud by Pelle Snickars
Page 296, citing Nicolas Carr "The Big Switch": 1901, 50,000 American companies had their own plant for the production of electrical current.

In the Kingdom of Shadows: cinematic movement and its digital ghost by Trond Lundemo
Page 314, pre-cinema films made by inventor Louis LePrince desribed. Short paper images exist and are seen widely for the first time on Youtube.
Page 315, Erik Barmouw wrote of "voices on the ether", "it is also a matter of phantoms".
Page 321, "the return of the loop. As demonstrated by the techniques of the Praxinoscope, the Zoetrope and the Vitascope, as well as the Kinetoscope, the loop was the dominant screening practice in the pre-cinema years".
Page 325, Albert Kahn "Archives of the planet" initiated in 1909.

On the Logic of the Digital Archive by Jens Schroter
Page 341, "Why isn't pornography a central content of YouTube? ... Youtube allows other forms of audiovisual desire to appear".

An Ocean of Sound and Image: Youtube in the context of supermodernity by Gunnar Iversen
Page 347, Marc Auge's non-lieu or non-space applied to Youtube where "you are everyweher and nowhere at the same time"

Economics of Sharing Platforms: what's wrong with the cultural industries? by Joelle Farchy
Page 360, "from an economic standing, Web 2.0 is ... based not on control of access via intellectual property rights but on the abundance of resourses available".
Page 367, "A famous incident resulted from France's 1847 law intended to protect musical composers' performing rights: the successful composer Ernest Bourget categorically refused to settle his bill in a Parisian concert cafe where one of his works was playing, defending his position by pointing out that the cafe was using the music to attract customers without offering him the slightest compensation."

The Political Economy of YouTube by Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson
Page 373, 2006 Time article cited: "Early on Chad and Steve made a crucial good decision: despite pressure for advertising, they would not force users to sit through ads before videos played".
Page 381, "in the fall of 2007, Youtube introduced content-identification technology"
- Mashup contests described.
Page 382, "various techniques adapted by the site ... privilege some videos over others"
"The term 'most viewed' is relative. When video views can be easily manipulated by those who can afford to pay for the privilege".

Digital Discords in the Online Media Economy: advertising versus content versus copyright by Paul McDonald
Page 402, fair use argued.

Exploiting YouTube: contradictions of user-generated labor by Mark Andrejevic
Page 417-418, Marxism, are content creators exploited and forces or freely giving?
Page 420, comparison to women's unpaid domestic labour.

Cybertarians of the World Unite: you have nothing to lose but your tubes! by Toby Miller
Page 424, great writing on this page; a bit of a manifesto.
Page 426, culture and copyright sector employs 12% of the US workforce.
Page 427, debunking the Youtube boon to diversity, showing numbers (in USA) of white male posters versus others (women and non-white).

From YouTube to RuTube or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love All Tubes by Andrei Gornykh
Page 441, Russian Youtube is RuTube.
Page 447, "debloids are teenagers who try to 'express themselves' in bizarre and stupid ways"

YouTube as a Mirror Maze by Giovanna Fossati
Page 458, curating 100 videos from millions on Youtube results in mirror themed set found at www.youtubereader.com

William Kentridge by Kate McCrickard

Read William Kentridge by Kate McCrickard from 2012 Tate publishing.
Great overview with many illustrations.
Page 17; "his bond with the German Expressionists is reciprocal, and the references are looped; the Expressionists took stylistic inspiration from African tribal masks, and now Kentridge looks back to them for his own formal requirements.
Page 20-22, "To him, the art of revered South African landscape painters ... smacked of 'dishonest', unnatural ordering, a propagation of a 'plague of the pastiche'"
Page 29, ... evolving characters, which may be described as leitmotifs, work less through narrative than through associative reference."
Page 45 "Looking at shadows is always finding something we already know. A rational descriptions would be imperfect and arrived at with difficulty. Recognition is immediate and effortless. It describes a different kind of knowledge. It is truth behind the trite adage, 'I know it when I see it'. It understands that the relationship between seeing and knowing is not simple. It proclaims that one does not have to translate what one has seen into a rationalist model before it becomes a usable piece of knowledge". (Kentridge)
Page 55, "The fortuity of failure, so crucial to Kentridge's creative findings, may be linked back to the formal significance of the tear, the shadow and indirect ways of seeing. Tearing and reconstructing images, looking through shadow, and ripping out spreads of antique books, are ways to uncork the creative process and permit an unexpected propagation of images through accident."
Page 62, Kentridge's phenakistoscope described.
Page 65, ants, in negative, used as stars on black sky.
Page 68, re: "Black ox", Brechtian stage work - it's not the traditional view of a willing suspension of disbelief, it's much stronger, more like an unwilling suspension of belief ... look at the pleasure you get from allowing yourself to be deceived" (Kentridge)
Page 77, "Whether you like it or not, who you are is going to come out in the work" (Kentridge).
Page 84, His Majesty the Nose - Kentridge with nose head after Gogol's "The Nose of 1836.
Page 101-103, "An abstract painter might insist their work is just paint but I am saying that's a complete distortion of what it is to be human. It's not a mistake to see a shape in the cloud. That's what it is to be alive with your eyes open: to be constantly, promiscuously putting things together, getting shapes to have a coherence. IT's a kind of act of aggression against the self to try to stop that? (Kentridge)
Page 117, "Nabokov, writing on Gogol, comments that, 'with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent'. The same could be said of Kentridge, who comes to his work through the underbelly, through accident, through 'failure', through fortuna and through others. ... Kentridge is the first to recognize that the dichotomies, flaws and struggles of the early works are what made them."

The Silent Cinema Reader

The Silent Cinema Reader, edited by Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer

At the Beginning: motion picture production, representation and ideology at the Edison and Lumiere companies by Charles Musser
Page 16, Points out constructed nature of barber and blacksmith scenes in early Edison (they were sets inside the studio)
Page 17, Blacksmith and drunk on job as nostalgia and ironic.
Edison failed in the iron ore business - effect outlined.

"Now you see it, now you don't": the temporality of the cinema of attractions by Tom Gunning
Page 41-42, early assumptions of primitive cinema: evolutionary (trying to become cinema),  cinematic (discovering cinematic essence), and narrative.
Page 43, "narrative invokes the spectators interest by posing an enigma. The enigma demands a solution ... the art of narrative is delaying the resolution"
Page 44, "Attractions directly addresses the spectator, acknowledging the viewer's presence and seeking to quickly satisfy a curiosity"
Page 45, Role of magician on screen.
Page 49, "enthusiasm the early avant garde had for the aesthetic of attractions ... The gesture of display figured a time that seemed to escape from a linear or successive configuration of time. The potential shock of the cinema of attractions provided a popular form of an alternative temporality based not on the mimesis of memory or other psychological states but on an intense interaction between an astonished spectator and the cinematic smack of the instant, the flicker of presence and absence".

The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), G.A.Smith and the emergence of the edited film in England by Frank Gray
Page 51, Albert Smith 1st edition of Narrative Sequences, re: not just editing to create trick "Kiss in the Tunnel" (11899) from background as a magic lantern slide presentation.

The Cinema of Attractions in France, 1896-1904 by Richard Abel
no notes

Moving Towards Fictional Narratives: story films become the dominant product, 1903-1904 by Charles Musser
Page 99, "The rapid adoption of the 3-blade shutter on projectors in late 1903-1904 made viewing more pleasurable" suggests part of rise of Nickelodeons and narrative film tied together with tech.

Pathe Goes to Town: French films create a market for the nickelodeon, 1903-1906 by Richard Abel
no notes

Manhattan Nickelodeons: new data on audiences and exhibitors by Ben Singer
no notes

From the Opium Den to the Theatre of Morality: moral discourse and the film process in early American cinema by Tom Gunning
Page 149, "The Biograph Company discontinued production of mutoscopes in 1909, a primary outlet for erotic films" [following censorship board forming]
Page 151, "The redeeming possibilities of motion pictures through the act of being a spectator"
Notes: evolution of narrative form and censorship and moralizing in silent films

How Many Times Shall Caesar Bleed in Sport: Shakespeare and the cultural debate about moving pictures by Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio

Fighting Films: race, morality , and the governing of cinema, 1912-1915 by Lee Grieveson
page 170, 1912 fight film transport law sidestepped by "the film was projected from the Canadian side of the border and recorded in the United States, across a border measuring just a few centimeters."
Page 175, Court decision in 1915 held that film was commerce, not protected under free speech ... "In effect ... motion pictures should avoid documenting ... real life issues and events ... moving pictures should be fictional, entertaining, harmless, and apolitical".

A Star is Born: American culture and the dynamics of Charlie Chaplin's star image, 1913-1916 by Charles J. Maland
Chaplin modification of his humour from vulgar to sympathetic due in part to critics.

An Awful Struggle Between Love and Ambition: serial heroines, serial stars and their female fans by Shelly Stamp
Page 212, with heroine's serials, "at the beginning of many serials, a heroine's seeming independance is conspicuously marked by the loss of a parent or guardian"
Page 213, "only by claiming their lineage or their inheritance can heroines free themselves from danger"  RANIA

Traffic in Souls (1913): an experiment in feature-length narrative construction by Ben Brewster
Early feature "Traffic in Souls" made secretly at Independent Motion Pictures against wishes of head who didn't believe in features. It contains significant amount of parallel action and shorter shots and fewer titles.
Page 229, In 1911, most nickelodeons had only one projector and couldn't do reel changes.

Race, Melodrama, and the Birth of a Nation (1915) by Linda Williams
no notes

The International Exploration of Cinematic Expressivity by Kristin Thompson
In teens, clarity and expressivity in film narrative approach. Essay outlines methods expression improves including lingering on performances, with holding expressions, close up of expression/performance. AN

The Making of a Comic Star: Buster Keaton and The Saphead (1920) by Peter Kramer
Page 281, SLAP STICK "originally referring to two flat pieces of wood joined together at one end, used to produce a loud slapping noise creating the impression of someone having been dealt a hard blow on stage, the term 'slapstick' came to cover various forms of violent comedy"
Page 282, "Keaton's performance stood out both in those scenes where he engaged in traditional slapstick tumbling, that is an excess of activity, and in those where he acted straight, that is with an excess of restraint."

"The Perfect Lover"?: Valentino and ethnic masculinity in the 1920s by Gaylyn Studlar
"molly coddle" = man-woman, also included lounge lizards, cake eaters, boy flappers, tango pirates, flapperoosers.
Page 294, "Radway argues that in Harlequin romances, the male object of desire must undergo 'the imaginative transformation of masculinity to conform to female standards" ... this is accomplished by introduction a feature of softness that tempers the hero's hard masculinity".

The New Woman and Consumer Culture: Cecil B. Demille's sex comedies by Sumiko Higashi
Page 310, "a proliferation of mirror shots in DeMille's Jazz Age films attests to the increasing importance of style over substance"

The Open Door: Hollywood's public relations at home and abroad, 1922-1928 by Ruth Vasey
Page 323, from 1923 onward, Hollywood was shooting abroad as political move by MPPDA.
Page 324, Ethnic villains recast/rewritten as Russians in 1920s. "indeed, as villains, the Russians offered the rare combination of minority market status and recognizable national characteristics. ... In dollars and cents, Russian indignation was cheap".
Page 325, "The American Association for the Advancement of Atheism got short shrift when it complained aout the prejudicial treatment of atheism in The Godless Girl (DeMille, 1929)."

New Notes on Russian Film Culture Between 1908 and 1919 by Yuri Tsivian
Page 340, "in 1912 those film companies in Russia which had a market abroad .. supplementing their films with an export [happy] ending"
Page 342, "Happy End as a program, as Richard Abel has recently shown, began to crystallize around 1908 as part of the American film industry's effort to win its home market from Pathe"
Page 345, "Nie Goni Kartinu! (don't speed up the picture) - still exists in colloquial Russian, now meaning simply "not so fast". "

Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production: implications for Europe's Avant-Gardes by Kristin Thompson
Page 356, [1926] German filmmakers provides a detailed sample budget for a feature film ... no expenditure for an editor.
Suggest primary unique qualities of Hollywood are the continuity script (established by 1914) and the job of editor separate from the director. Rob

Art and Industry: German Cinema of the 1920s by Joseph Grncarz
no notes

The Sounds of Early Cinema

The Sounds of Early Cinema, edited by Richard Abel and Rick Altman, 2001, Indiana Press (from UofR library).

Early Phonograph Culture and Moving Pictures by Ian Christie

Page 7, "L'Eve Future", a novel in which a fictional Edison creates a duplicate person.

Early history of sound recording and association with images including idea of artificially preserving the dead. 

Doing for the Eye What the Phonograph Does for the Ear by Tom Gunning

Page 14, (re: Frankenstein) "The nineteenth -century attempt to capture a modern vision involves redefinitions of the act of seeing and of perceptions's relation to the outside world. Key among these, as Crary has shown, was the separation of the senses, the treatment of the human sensorium no longer as a single whole in which the various senses converged to produce a "true" representation of the outside world, but as a bundle of processes, each subject to different physical conditions and processes of stimulation."

Page 15, Charles Cros, poet/inventor, an interesting figure.

Page 16, 1877 phontograph recorded onto tin foil, unsuccessful, was shelved until 1889. 

Page 18-19, Reproduced human beings. 

Page 23, describes American Gothic writing in which characters cannot trust their senses. "The separation of voice from the body ... becomes a dangerous tool that upsets the moral order of the universe". 

Remarks on Writing and Technologies of Sound in Early Cinema by Mats Bjorkin

Page 34, Citing 1987 novel "Inferno", suggests that one man repeating all actions and sounds of another could be a medium himself. 

Pag 35, "Losing control of hearing is more complicated than losing control of vision, because sound normally has to be verified by vision". 

Page 36, When sounds and images could be stored through any medium, the memories of these sounds and images no longer were necessary;p their "liberation" became their end. 

Page 37, "after the phonograph, writing no longer was the only means of representing sound"

'Next Slide Please': The Lantern Lecture in Britain, 1890-1910 by Richard Crangle

Page 39, [turn of the century] contemporary representation show few differences between the lantern lecturer and the moving picture commentator. 

Page 43, word count of lectures was 150 - 200 words per slide (1-2 minutes) for a total of one hour. 

The Voices of Silence by Francois Jost

Page 48, "in spite of standard terminologies, sounds are never produced by images" <see three conditions for An>

Page 49, "The falling stone makes a noise as it drops"

Page 51, Brisson quoted: "Characters must act and must do so clearly and not confusedly, and each of their movements must be expressive as well as produced with an overall coherence through a constant relation of cause and effect". 

"transparency of souls could be achieved only as long as human beings could communicate without resorting to language."

The Event and the Series: The Decline of Cafes-Concerts, the Failure of Gaumont's Chronophone, and the Birth of Cinema as an Art by Edouard Arnoldy

- no notes

Dialogues in Early Silent Screenplays: What Actors Really Said by Isabelle Raynauld

Early films- amateur acting, inprov and random talking on screen. However, later when professional actors from state moved into film, they stuck to the script even when there was no sound recorded. 

The First Transi-Sounds of Parallel Editing by Bernard Perron

Page 84, College Chums (1907) "to express their [telephone] exchange, Porter animates letters, which seem to drift in the air toward the man and the woman, creating a wave connecting the interlocutors. This is a lovely example of a literal transi-sound"

Sound, the Jump Cut, and "Trickality" in Early Danish Comedies by John Fullerton

Page 88, Look for Danish Nordisk Films by Viggo Larsen and photographed by Axel Sorensen (aka Graatkjaer).

Page 90, "often excitement, fear, frustration or anger is figured through gesture"

Setting the Pace of a Heartbeat: The Use of Sound Elements in European Melodramas before 1915 by Dominique Nasta

Page 96, "Subception, or subliminal auditive perception, when voices or music are only simulated visually, one has to find a justification for the inaudible sound"

Page 105, "contrary to what happens in the twenties when the interest shifts to sophisticated scores written for the films, in the early teens the dominant trend is not to pursue the synchronizing practices developed by the Gaumont Chronophone, but to visualize significant pieces of music in films."

Talking Movie or Silent Theater? Creative Experiments by Vasily Goncharow by Rashit M. Yangirov

Page 111, Film/stage combination in 1906 Russia discussed. 

for Rania?

Sleighbells and Moving Pictures: On the Trail of D.W.Robertson by Gregory Waller

Page 123, Chautauqua is a traveling tent variety show t. They had some that held 2000 people. 

The Story of Percy Peashaker: Debates about Sound Effects in the Early Cinema by Stephen Bottomore

Page 136, "selectively indicate the car through a horn, not to imitate it with an engine sound"

This was an entertaining article on history of sfx being performed live at films by "effects boys" from around 1905-ww1

That Most American of Attractions, the Illustrated Song by Richard Abel

Page 150, "Well into 1908, often a majority of the moving pictures shown in nickelodeons were "foreight" (most of them from Pathe). By contrast, illustrated songs were expressly, blatantly "American." If y 1908, as I have argued elsewhere, American films tended to be characterized in teh trade press as "upbeat" in comparison to French films, whose stories increasingly were denounced as "depressing" or "in bad taste, " the distinction was equally in not more valid for illustrated songs. 

"The Sensational Acme of Realism": "Talker" Pictures as Early Cinema Sound Practice by Jeffrey Klenotic

Page 157, "'Talker' films with live actors behind screen, 1907-1908 companies of touring performers esp Humanovo, Actologue, Dramagraph"

"Bells and Whistles": The Sound of Meaning in Train Travel Film Rides by Lauren Rabinovitz

Page 174-175, "Hale's Tours ... were the first virtual realities of the 20th century"
"Early industry accounts reported rather apocryphal stories ... reminiscent of reports about Lumiere films ... members of the audience frequently yelled at pedestrians to get out of the way"

The Noises of Spectators, or the Spectator as Additive to the Spectacle by Jean Chateauvert and Andre Gaudreault

Page 184, [1908-1913] "the sound space of the screening is being organized"
Page 186, "the close up begins to play a crucial role in cinematographic expression at the time the lecturer declines in importance"

Early Cinematographic Spectacles: The Role of Sound Accompaniment in the Reception of Moving Images by Jacques Polet

Page 195, describers 19th century piano imporv leading to virtuosos performing free cadenzas but by 1900, cadenzas were "codified, fixed, rigid" ... "classical music then appears too serious a matter to be left to its performers". ... "Cinema ... did, in a way, re appropriate for itself this area of performative freedom". FOR JONATHAN 

Sounding Canadians: Early Sound Practices and Nationalism in Toronto-Based Exhibition by Marta Braun and Charlie Keil

Page 201-202, "Owen Smily became the most distinguished of the Toronto lecturers".
""Smily not only spoke with a Canadian accent but he directed a school of elocution in which he taught his students the Canadian way of pronunciation. Smily's "Canadian" accent - neither British nor American but something in between - reflects the aspirations of his class at the beginning of the century. A Canadian accent was not an indigenous accent, but rather the product of trying not to be something else.

The Double Silence of the "War to End All Wars" by Germain Lacasse

Page 210-211, Walter Benjamin quoted about silence after war "a necessity because the experience ... was not translatable"  AN

Domitor Witnesses the First Complete Public Presentation of the [Dickson Experimental Sound Film] in the Twentieth Century by Patrick Loughney

- no notes

A "Secondary Action" or Musical Highlight? Melodic Interludes in Early Film Melodrama Reconsidered by David Mayer and Helen Day-Mayer

Page 222-223, Panic of 73 leads to evolution of touring variety theatre in USA, influencing early film.

The Living Nickelodeon by Rick Altman

Music for Kalem Films: The Special Scores, with Notes on Walter C. Simon by Herbert Reynolds

The Orchestration of Affect: The Motif of Barbarism in Breil's The Birth of a Nation Score by Jane Gaines and Neil Lerner

A Geology of Media

A Geology of Media by Jussi Parikka, Electronic Mediations, volume 46, University of Minnesota Press, 2015
Page 14-15, Underground: hell, work.
Page 16, "Underground is the place of repetitious, exploitative and even absurd work of arrangements and rearrangements of partial objects, without a view of the big picture"
Page 17, Anthrpocene = Anthrobscene. refers to 1800 onward period with humans and their interaction with nature.
Page 24-25, Data is literal storage discussed with its need to stay cool "differs from the literary genre of steampunk"
Page 47, Adam Minter cited regarding China and metal. "China leads the world in the consumptionof steel, copper, aluminum, lead, stainless steel, gold, silver, palladium, zinc, platinum, reare earth compounds, and pretty much anything else labeled "metal""
Page 51, list of uses for various metals within electronics/media.
Page 54, Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" (2006), a novel ... focused on ... light for the use of ... photography"
Page 70, Dial-a-glacier +44(0)775.7001122
Page 75-76, Telluric currents - "underground flows of electricity"
Page 77, Bram Stoker's Dracula - soil special in London - metaphor of viral code.
Page 83, Snow hills in Finland - first personal story in book that helped me connect to subject matter.
Page 85, ".. dust; not quite of the ground, not quite of the atmosphere"
Page 88, "Material things are often mistaken as modest .. yet the immodest countlessness of dust signals something else"
Page 89, "Molleindustria's Phone Story .... banned on the itunes"
Page 100, Kodak - cotton dust created through use of cotton in base.
Page 101-102, large quote talks about how the residue is not part of what is created.
Page 112, The $40 tablet he purchased in China. Someone asks "Who made it?" to which he replies "Who cares?"
Page 117, Nazi architecture design "in such a way that leaves only honorable lasting ruins for future archaeologists"
Pae 123-124, "Paleofuturism is most dearly articulated in the blog Paleofuture by Matt Novak: it maintains a discourse of past futures that are the fossils of the contemporary"
Page 142-143, History of planned obsolescence
Page 144, "trailing-edge" opposite of cutting edge.
Page 144-145, How to circuit bend.
Page 147, The circuit, not the past, is where media archaeology starts.

The Great Art of Light and Shadow

Finished reading The Great Art of Light and Shadow by Laurent Mannoni (1995, translated from French in 2000). It has an introduction by Tom GUnning and preface by David Robinson. We have a copy in the UofR library but it looked so interesting and important that I wanted to own one. However, it was out of print in Canada so I bought it through amazon.com and had it shipped to Thomas while I was visiting him in Portland in 2013. It is a hefty tome (500+ pages) and is primarily a historical overview of optical devices, beginning with things like shadow and camera obscura and leading up to the beginning of the 20th century. I poked through it slowly for nearly two years then dove in and ready 2/3 of it this month.

Page 55, discussion of first use of word "magic" in regards to magic lantern.
Page 57, lenticular lens or lenticular glass.
Page 58, points out errors in published illustration of lantern from page 57.
Page 72, Chinese emperor introduced to magic lantern and camera obscura.
Page 86, Zograscope - mirror reflecting box.
Page 104, painting water colour vs oil on glass
Page 114, "[Crespi] had learned to touch his fingers lightly onto the paint so that his fingerprints would suggest the marks of an engravers tool"
Page 124, Water filled ball inside projector to magnify light and cool system. Also, early attempt at rectangle frame instead of circular.
Page 151, Glass harmonica described
Page 155, cloth and wax screen built
Page 156, Film "L'Histoire du Cinema vue par le Cinema: Cinema History seen by the Cinema. A 1927 film.
Page 195, steps of making a Degeurotype
Page 203-204, spinning coal to measure persistence of vision - cool exercise.
Page 248-249, ghost mirror
Page 290, etching transfer to glass described vaguely in terms of magic lantern slide production.
Page 309, Muybridge shutter described.
Page 323, Marey and scientific motion studio
Page 325, Proof of four horse hoofs off ground prior to Muybridge
Page 338, Marey's strange series photograph with black paint and shiny metal attached to joints of a performers body called "chronophotographed"
Page 341, Kodak paper negs with first perforations.
Page 402, serpentine dance is "Annabelle Moore imitating the performane of Loie Fuller"
Page 404, Start stop camera to cut off head in "execution of Mary Queen of Scots" film.
Page 425, Lumiere first screening described.
Page 429, Loop in projector invented. 

Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications

Introduction: an archaeology of Media Archaeology by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka
Page 1: "Studies of new media often share a disregard for the past."

Dismantling the Fairy Engine: media archaeology as Topos study by Erkki Huhtamo
Page 28, "The Little People is a topos - a stereotypical formula evokes over and over again in different guises and for varying purposes. "  (the idea that little people are inside the machine).
page 31, "The continued usefulness of the notion of the topos for media archaeology must rely on the assumption that its origins and manifestations are both created and conditioned by cultural forces. "
Page 33, Curtius: "Specialization without universalism is blind. Universalism without specialization is inane".
Page 36-37, cyborgs discussed.

On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media by Erik Kluitenberg
Page 49, "Book of imaginary media" from 2006
Page 55, Peter Blegvad play "On Imaginary Media" distinguishes three general types of media: media remembered, media observed, and media imagined.
Page 56, Siegfried Zielinski on three categories of imaginary media: untimely, conceptual, and impossible.
Page 58, strange prayers described as media.
- EVP: Electronic Voice Phenomena
Page 59, Edison and EVP
- Zoe Beloff on spirit photography. Find Dr. Charles Richet who documented seances with multiple stereoscopic cameras.
Page 60, talking with the dead
Page 61, universal translator from Star Trek.
- Sex substitution through "machines celibataires" or "bachelor machines".  (Karka, Duchamp, Barbarella, Metropolis)
Page 62, being in two places at once.

On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine by Jeffrey Sconce
Page 71, "technical delusion - the electronic manifestation of 'thought insertion' and/or 'thought broadcasting',  providing subjects with plausible technical explanations as to how their thoughts might have become implanted".
- 1919 paper "On the origins of the influencing machine in schizophrenia"
Page 73-75, early paranoid case study.
Page 81, "Schizophrenics ... identified by inability to process metaphors".
Page 83-84, Radio Mania, radio and thought transferal/surveillance.
Page 85-87 (especially 87) Freud belief in telepathy
Page 89-90, biting critique of blogging.

Freud and the Technical Media: the enduring magic of the wunderblock by Thomas Elsaesser
Much on "mystic writing pad" - the peel off pad, Freud's memory metaphor.
Page 96, archaeology of Freud: "What were the problems Freud thought that his new science of psychoanalysis might help to answer?"
Page 100, Freud as media theorist "body/mind are storage and recording medium"
Page 108, "Time, in Freud, is the protective-compensatory effect of a subjective experience of intermittence of rupture, a failure and loss of signal even, occurring in the transition between recording and storage."
Page 112 Dracula (1897) as commentary on media origins.

The "Baby Talkie," Domestic Media, and the Japanese Modern by Machiko Kusahara
Page 125, "The zograscope is seen in use in a famous woodblock print by Harunobu, Tamagawa inkoya"
Page 130, Kinora - mini-mutoscope for home.
"In Japan there are patent applications from 1932 and 1933 introducing panorama toys for which gramophones are used to automatically scroll the pictures".
Page 137, [Suiho] Tagawa was a former Dada artist, best known for his comic story Norakura (see animation in Pervasive Animation book).

The Observer's Dilemma: to touch or not to touch by Wanda Strauven
Page 152, Thaumatrope, zoetrope etc, interactivity through use of hands.
Page 152-153, Reynaud's praxinoscope theatre (1892) no longer a toy since viewer is not manipulating it.
Page 154, choreutoscope? "The eye is dependent on the hand" Piano/video game correlation.
Page 157, "Rube" film marks evidence and decline of audience /device interaction in early cinema, examples on page 158.

The Game Player's Duty: the user as the gestalt of the ports by Claus Pias
Page 169, Early computer "wirlwind" treats user as a device.
Computer decision making all compared to duty. If you do not follow rules exactly, you lose, just as Homberg is executed for breach of protocol in a war even though he won (page 167).
Page 180 "The discourse elements of the computer game are not called 'killing people' or 'catching gold nuggets' but timeliness, rhythm, or control. And these are continuously tested in a symbolic identity of the player.".

The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future is a Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Page 184, "a nonsimultaneity of the new, which I argue sustains new media as such"
Page 187, "one must act as though future predictions were fact in order to prevent the predicted future from taking place"
Page 196, "[Mercury delay] tubes memory and RAM explained/compared.
Page 198 "The internet wayback machine (IWM) is necessary because the internet, which is in so many ways about memory, has no memory!"
Page 199, "What makes a blog uninteresting is not necessarily its content, which often reads like a laundry list of things done or to do, but rather its immobility. The ever-updating, inhumanly clocked time in which our machines and memories are embedded and constantly refreshed makes its material stale. "

Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation by Paul DeMarinis
Page 212, Analog and digital ... are two concepts with a common origin, although they have been cast as a contra-distinctive pair"
Page 220, Philadelphia's panopticon prison pipes don't go cell to cell so tapped signalling won't happen.
Page 227-228, artist Yasunaotone might relate to Eric Hill.
Page 230, with Sound Designer II software you can draw a waveform using a tablet.

Media Archaeography, method and machine versus history and narrative of media by Wolfgang Ernst
Page 245, tape recorder compared to Ulysses - he had to be tied up to resist temptation of sound while tape can pay equal attention to beautiful and other voices but be unmoved.
Page 247, wire recordings from 1950s available at Milman Parry Collection or Oral Literature at Harvard (web site)
Page 150, "be aware ... that ... human voices or images of the past replayed from media recordings we are not communicating with the dead; rather, we are dealing with the past as a form of delayed presence, preserved in a technological memory."
Page 253, "Since technologies changed from tools to machines, these techniques have comprised not only texts and images but numbers as well. Media archaeology therefore is close to mathematics".

Mapping Noise, techniques and tactics of irregularities, interception, and disturbance by Jussi Parikka
Page 256, "technical media are posthuman media in the sense of addressing a whole other sensorium than that of the human being".
Page 260, 50% redundancy in English "helps combat noise".
Page 268, "As Carolyn Marvin notes, poems that served as light filler in electrical journals often identified woman as technological objects under male control. Yet the huge number of women working as interconnectors in telegraph offices, as secretaries with typing machines, and later as telephone operators were uncertain elements, probably because of their imagine cultural status as unreliable and emotional".
Book: Haunted Media by Jeffery Sconce
Page 268-270, ghosts, spirits, aliens inmachine.
Page 271, "I love you project to archive viral code"

Objects of Our Affection, how object orientation made computers a medium by Casey Alt
History of computers from"computing" machine to "media" machine, mainly through evolution of object orientation and systems theory.
Page 287, "Thus, for Kay, who understands object orientation at such a deep and intimate material level, the question of the relationship between object orientation and mediality is so obvious as to be tautological and, therefore, a nonquestion".
Page 295, "Like Bergson before him, Deleuze thus considered the material universe to be a vast, vibrating assemblage of all material movement-images acting and reacting to one another in a jittery field of unfolding relationality."
Page 297-298, McLuhen interpretation.

Digital Media Archaeology, interpreting computational processes by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Page 302, "Christopher Strachey's 1952 loveletter generator for the Manchester Mark I"
Page 310, Queneau and Le Lionnais's "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" generator using flip strips for each line of sonnet.

Afterward, media archaeology and re-presencing the past by Vivian Sobchak
Page 328 "... media archaeologists are still romantics - albeit also self satirists." 

Lovers of Cinema

Over past couple weeks, I read; "Lovers of Cinema; the first American film avant-garde, 1919-1945", edited by Jan-Christopher Horak, 1995.


The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945, by Jan-Christopher Horak
Page 14-15, "the 1950s avant-gardists proclaimed themselves to be independent filmmakers, actively engage in the production of 'art', while the earlier generation viewed themselves as cineastes, as lovers of cinema, as 'amateurs' willing to work in any arena furthering the cause of film art, even if it meant working for hire"
Page 19, "Professionalism was equated with commercialism, while amateurism connoted artistic integrity. This discourse also identifies personal expression with formal experimentation, a dualism repeated continually in contemporary  aesthetic manifestos and reviews, and echoed in the polemics of the second American avant-garde.""
Page 21, 1926 re-release of Caligari.
Page 27, shady distributors.
Page 29, [early avant-garde] "demonstrated a certain wild eclecticism, innovativeness, and at times naivete that was only possible for American filmmakers."
Page 30, American romanticism, which manifests itself in a longing for (wo)man's reunification with nature".
Page 33, neoriealist 1931 "Cityof Contrasts" with comical soundtrack.
Page 36, "Nature as a visual metaphor for the expression of human subjectivity"
Page 44, "introspection" by Sara Aledge
Page 45, "Lullaby" by painter Boris Deotsch is "reminiscent of Caligari" (image on page 46).
Page 51, Theodore Huff parody films "starred children, giving the films an ambiguous sexuality and implicating the subject in the director's slightly perverse gaze".
Page 51, William Vance's "Hearts of the Age" (1934) was, according to Orson Wells, a parody of "Blood of a Poet".
Page 52, Satirical film about making surreal film "Evan As You and I" by Roger Barlow, Harry Hay, and Leroy Robbins.

The Limits of Experimentation in Hollywood by Kristin Thompson
Page 84-85, "Beggers on Horseback" (1925) was widely seen as the first major Hollywood film influenced by German Expressionism"

Robert Florey and the Hollywood Avant-Garde by Brian Taves
Bio and stories about Robert Florey who made four films with enthusiastic help from Hollywood.

Americans in Paris, Man Ray and Dudley Murphy by William Moritz
Page 120, funny story about Man Ray having dispute over distribution and then stealing and disassembling a film.
Page 126, more Man Ray stories.
Page 121-127, Dudley Murphy story - who would be the deleted collaborator on the Legar film "Ballet Mechanique".
Page 130, "Sports Parade" by Murphy in 1932 is compared to "Wavelength".

Startling Angles: amateur film and the early avant-garde by Patricia Zimmermann
Page 137, 1923 article "The Importance of Doing Things Badly" (find?)
Page 139, "amateur film, whether reproducing Hollywood narrative style or experimenting with film form, was located within a discourse searching for a revival of artistic dignity through the integrity of individual filmmaking"
Page 149-150, "Cinematic Design", 1931 book by Leonard Hacker, "explicated form, rhythm, color, and relativity in motion pictures".

U.S. Modernism and the Emergence of "The Right Wing of Film Art"; the films of James Sibley Watson, Jr., and Melville Webber by Lisa Cartwright
Page 157, "Watson claims that he and Webber selected the Poe story as the basis for their first film collaboration precisely because they had not read it in ten or fifteen years, and therefore would be free of its influence".
Page 159, The Dial: "a transcendentalist quarterly of religion and the arts ... explores mysticism and progressive revision of Christian doctrine in the light of modern science".
Page 169-170, EE Cummings' role in The Fall of the House of Usher.
Page 171, Ezra Pound influence on ee cummings via Vortisism.
"attachment of a gyroscope to the shutter, and the substitution of a prismatic ring in place of the shutter"
Page 172, Geometry and poetry and film.
Page 173, Photo of Sodom optical printer.

Theodore Huff; historian and filmmaker by Chuck Kleinhans
Page 183, Huff is an intellectual generalist and "an intellectual handyman". Wrote first book on Chaplin.
Page 187, "amateur contests ... reveal a gap between ambition and accomplishment"
Page 197, Huff collected stills and large collection of silent film music and cue sheets.
Page 202, "FOOF" = Friend of old film.

Ralph Steiner by Scott MacDonald
Page 209, "the 87 second passage that immediately follows the 'question mark' is, in my view, teh most beautiful in the film ... exquisite imagery".
Pge 212, "effects that some independent and industry filmmakers labor years to create ... are, Steiner proves, available to anyone willing to look more carefully at he world".
Page 220, "organized religion and the film industry ... ignored the realities of hunger in favor of empty illusionism"
Pie In The Sky: "subjective camera images became self reflexive moments"
Page 222, Hands: government propaganda film by Steiner.
Page 224-225, The City; compared to Koyaanisqatsi.

Straight Shots and Crooked Plots: Social documentary and the avant-garde in the 1930s by Charles Wolfe
Page 235, Grierson's and others one line definitions of "documentary", a new term in the 1930s.
Page 237, Leger's writings quoted on fundamental materials of photographic art.

Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta by Jan-Christopher Horak
Page 267, "Manhatta is in fact central to film modernism's project of deconstructing Renaissance perspective in favor of multiple, reflexive points of view"
Page 278, argument supporting the intertitles as part of the original plan.

The City Viewed; the films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg by William Uricchio
Page 287, list of city films of the 1930s.
Page 288, alternatives to description (travelogues) or interpretation (Nanook of the North) is offered by avant-garde.
Page 292, shift from an essentially romantic tradition of self-expression to a socially engaged and often critical aesthetic.

Mary Ellen Bute by Lauren Rabinovitz

Page 317, "Tension between film's elitist modernist aesthetics and their popular reception as pretty amusements."  (thought: is this why McLaren is not written about as a/g filmmaker?)

Page 319, Brute and Leon Theremin with the color organ. 

Page 324, Collaboration with McLaren (Spook Sport)

Page 326, "she adopted the oscilloscope as her 'true pencil of light'"

Page 328, "her publicity statements especially opposed the modernist distanciation from mass tastes"

Machines That Give Birth to Images; Douglss Crockwell by Tom Gunning
Page 335, A/G flmmakers "filmmaking not only defined [his/her] lifestyle, it also subsumed it"
Page 336, "Charles Ives ... noted that innovative ideas seem to be more readily accepted in business than in official American culture and academia" (then more discussion of affect of teaching careers).
Page 337, "[Crockwell's] commercial work ... was produced with the traditional hand directed tools ... his experimental work .. was a product of machines".
Page 340, "Crockwell's machines were created... in imitation of, and homage to... the mutoscope"
Page 341, "While the projected motion pictures ... were inspired by ... magic lantern slides ... the peep show devices ... derive from such single-viewer devices as the stereoscope".
Page 342, Mutoscope remained limited to brief doses of scopic pleasure, an attraction associated with either eroticism or pure curiosity, lacking clearly defined social benefits."
Page 343, discuss sequential art in terms of mutoscope. Word: "simulacrum" which Christine cites "Disneyland" as an example.
Page 346-347, quoting Crockwell: "others have allowed the music to dominate, even to keying every motion to a musical beat. I believe the beauties of abstract animation in their own right"
Page 352, Crockwell describes wax animation he patented: "this solid block contains within itself the past, present and future of an animated sequence suspended in time" and goes on to refer to 4 dimensional objects.
Page 353, "enduring paradoxes of modern culture - the extraordinary exchange of connotations that take place between machines and sexuality"
Page 355, "At the turn of the century, motion pictures were initially exhibited as demonstrations of the apparatus that photographed and projected them, rather than simply images on the screen. ... Quite rapidly, however, the subject matter of the film or the name of the production company took pride of place, and the apparatuses were tucked away, far from the public's view. Except, of course, for the amusement arcade mutoscope.."