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.