Georges Méliès

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphane Tralongo
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
New Production ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Family ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
Technical Innovations ◽  
First World

Georges Méliès (b. 1861–d. 1938) was a magician and a French cinema pioneer with an extensive, inventive, and protean body of work. His films have been celebrated for both their technical innovations and their imaginary worlds, having at times a fantastic air and at others the appearance of fairy plays. The son of a manufacturer who made his fortune in the production of luxury footwear, in the 1880s Méliès went against his father’s wishes by learning the art of magic. With his share of the family business, he acquired and from 1888 to 1914 ran a famous Parisian theatre specializing in magic, the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. Méliès worked mostly behind the scenes, where his administrative activities went hand in hand with the creation of a repertoire of illusions. Keeping a foot in the magic field as president of the Chambre syndicale de la prestidigitation from 1904 to 1934, he became interested in the cinematograph early on, and added films to his theatre’s programming in April 1896. From 1896 to 1912 he worked intensively in the manufacture of films, employing an artisanal mode of production: he took on the roles of author, draftsman, painter, actor, and director, and he financed his own work. Distancing himself from the Lumière model, Méliès preferred to produce “artificially arranged scenes” in the studio he built in 1897, and later in a second studio built in 1907. Although his output of around 520 films was extremely varied, he specialized in “fantastic pictures” based on both stage tricks and the reiteration of these tricks thanks to the technical possibilities of cinema. In 1902, his film A Trip to the Moon was seen around the world, but largely at Méliès’ expense because of the massive pirating of the film in the United States. As chair of two international congresses of film producers in Paris in 1908 and 1909, Méliès helped organize the film industry, but new production, distribution, and exhibition methods forced him to suspend the manufacture of films in 1909. He made a final six films for the Pathé company in the years 1911 and 1912. During the First World War, he acted in dramatic and lyric plays in his second studio, which was converted into the Théâtre des Variétés artistiques from 1917 to 1923. When he was rediscovered in the mid-1920s, numerous filmmakers paid him tribute (René Clair, Abel Gance, Hans Richter, etc.), and he himself contributed to valorizing his work.

Downton Abbey

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Byrne
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Family ◽  
Popular Television ◽  
First World

Certainly the most successful period drama, indeed perhaps the most popular television show, of the 21st century, British series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) has become a force to be reckoned with in popular culture. It borrows the format of popular 1970s series Upstairs Downstairs (ITV), following the lives of a fictional Edwardian family and the servants who look after them in the eponymous house. Season 1 opens in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic, in which the heir to Downton is lost: the plot then follows the family coming to terms with the arrival of the next in line, a middle-class lawyer with a very different view of life from their own. The next five seasons—there are six in total—follow the inhabitants as they cope with the change the 20th century brings, including the First World War; the woman’s movement, which liberates some of the female characters; and the changes in taxation and society, which make the estate increasingly difficult to maintain and run. The last episode is set in 1925, and a film based on the show is due out in 2019. The series was loved by fans both in the United Kingdom and the United States, but received very mixed critical reception. Critics on the left criticized the show for its glossy and nostalgic view of the past, and of interclass relations, linking its ideology to the politics of its writer, Conservative peer Julian Fellowes. Others praised its positive view of human nature and escapist charm, at a time when austerity was making itself felt in the United Kingdom. Either way, it undoubtedly rekindled viewers’ appetite for period drama on a scale not seen since the 1970s, and has also stirred up debate about the part played by television in representing, accessing, and understanding the past.

Stowaways at Bohemia's Shores: Undocumented Emigration and People-Smuggling Networks in Interwar East Central Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-583
Author(s):  
Allison Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The People ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Migrant Smuggling ◽  
First World

AbstractThis article investigates interwar people-smuggling networks, based in Germany and Czechoslovakia, that transported undocumented emigrants across borders from east-central Europe to northern Europe, where the travelers planned to sail to the United States. Many of the people involved in such networks in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands had themselves been immigrants from Galicia. They had left a homeland decimated by the First World War and subsequent violence and entered societies with limited avenues to earn a living. The “othering” of these Galician immigrants became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those on the margins of society then sought illegal ways to supplement their income. This article concludes that the poor economic conditions and threat of ongoing violence that spurred migrant clients to seek undocumented passage had driven their smugglers, who also faced social marginalization, to emigration and the business of migrant smuggling.

Iterative Modernism

Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greet De Block ◽  
Bruno De Meulder
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
New Order ◽  
World War ◽  
Urbanized Territory ◽  
Access Road ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
New Infrastructure

This article traces the implicit spatial project of Belgian engineers during the interwar period. By analyzing infrastructure planning and its inscribed spatial ideas as well as examining the hybrid modernity advocated by engineers and politicians, this article contributes to both urban and transport history.Unlike colleagues in countries such as Germany, Italy and the United States, Belgian engineers were not convinced that highways offered a salutary new order to a nation traumatized by the First World War. On the contrary, the Ponts et Chaussées asserted that this new limited access road would tear apart the densely populated areas and the diverse regional identities in Belgium. In their opinion, only an integration of existing and new infrastructure could harmonize the historically fragmented and urbanized territory. Tirelessly, engineers produced infrastructure plans, strategically interweaving different transport systems, which had to result in an overall transformation of the territory to facilitate modern production and export logics.

THE ORIGINS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1253-1271
Author(s):  
TALBOT C. IMLAY
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Öffentliche Meinung ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.

scholarly journals An unbroken connection? New Zealand families, duty, and the First World War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rachel Patrick
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
World View ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Geographical Separation ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Private Beliefs ◽  
First World

<p>This thesis explores the topic of families during the First World War through a single New Zealand family and its social networks. The family at the core of the thesis, the Stewarts, were a well-to-do Dunedin family who moved in the most exclusive circles of colonial society. As members of the elite, and as prominent figures in the leadership of wartime patriotic organisations, they conceived of their wartime role as one of public benevolence and modelling patriotic virtue for others. Yet, like countless other families, their personal lives were shattered by the war. Drawing upon the extensive records left behind by the Stewart family, as well as associated archives, the thesis advances a number of larger arguments.  It is the overarching claim of this study that families – in their emotional, material and symbolic manifestations – formed an integral part of the war experience and provide a significant way of understanding this global event and its devastating human consequences. The Stewart family’s extensive surviving archive of personal correspondence provides a window into the innermost emotions, beliefs and values of the family’s individual members. Episodes in their wartime lives shape the wider thesis themes: the impact of family separations, grief and bereavement, religious faith, duty and patriotism, philanthropy, the lingering shadow of war disability – and the inflection of all of these by gender and class. Analysing the letters that the family exchanged with other correspondents demonstrates the embeddedness of family in larger networks of association, as well as identifying the aspects of their world view they shared with others in their predominantly middle- and upper-class circles. The records of patriotic organisations members of the family were associated with provide a means of examining how they translated their private beliefs into public influence.  The continual interplay between mobility and distance forms another of the study’s substantive themes. The distance created by the geographical separation between battlefronts and homefronts was a defining feature of the war for families in far-flung dominions such as New Zealand. But distance could be overcome by mobility: through the flow of things, money and people. Such movements, the thesis argues, blurred the boundaries between home and front. Thus, the correspondence members of the Stewart family exchanged during the war enabled them to sustain intimate ties across distance and helped them to mediate their own particular experience of wartime bereavement. The informal personal and kinship networks sustained by the female members of the family formed an important constituent of wartime benevolence, providing a conduit for the flow of information, goods and financial aid across national boundaries. During the war, the leadership of women’s patriotic organisations promoted an essentialised vision of feminine nature to justify their organisations’ separate existence and to stake a claim for women’s wider participation in the war effort. In doing so, they drew upon enlarged notions of kinship to argue that their female volunteers were uniquely qualified to bridge the distances of war, and to bring the emotional and practical comforts of home to frontline soldiers.  An alternative perspective to the Stewart family’s story of war is provided in this thesis through counterpoints from casefiles of the Otago Soldiers’ and Dependents’ Welfare Committee, with which the Stewarts were involved. Here, the economic interdependence and mutual reliance of working-class families is laid bare in ways that differ markedly from the experience of the Stewarts, but which nevertheless underscores the centrality of the family as an institution for people of all social backgrounds. For some families the geographical separation imposed by the exigencies of war proved insurmountable. The very different kinds of families in this thesis illustrate that whether through their successes, or the sometimes dire consequences of their failures, families are nonetheless indispensable to understanding the First World War.</p>

scholarly journals Carrying their native land and their new home in their hearts Mihailo Pupin and Bishop Nikolai of Zica between their native and adopted country

Balcanica ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 245-259
Author(s):  
Maxim Vasiljevic
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Native Land ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

The present study gives us an opportunity to look at the Christian heritage that the Serbian immigrants brought to the new land of Americas through the examples of Mihailo Pupin and Nikolai Velimirovic, Bishop of Zica, since these two names are indelibly inscribed in the history of the so-called Serbica Americana. The paper is divided into two sections dealing specifically with their Serbianism and Americanism to show that a distribution of love and loyalty between their native and adopted country functioned in a fruitful way. Based on a detailed analysis of their writings, the author suggests that Serbians and Americans remember Pupin and Velimirovic because they enjoy the benefits of their remarkable contributions. The following aspects of Pupin?s and Nikolai?s lives are examined: their deep concern with the fate of Serbia during and after the First World War; their leading roles among the Serbs in the United States through their assistance in establishing Serbian churches and communities, through their scholarship funds, philanthropic work, etc. Their genuine care for Serbia and Serbs was in no way an obstacle in their adjustment to their adopted country.

Oil and International relations

1976 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Penrose
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Middle East ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
World War ◽  
Oil Reserves ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
Important Objective

Oil is a highly political commodity and has more than once taken the centre of the stage in international affairs. This is not surprising in view of its importance in industry and transportation as well as for military activities. Mesopotamian oil was a crucial consideration in a number of the political settlements in the Middle East after the First World War, with the French, British and Americans playing the leading roles, just before that war the British navy had converted to oil, and Britain considered the security of her oil supplies to be an important objective of foreign policy. She had no domestic production. In the 1920s the United States began to fear that her oil reserves were becoming dangerously depleted and she also felt that her security as well as her prosperity depended on obtaining control of oil abroad. The United States sought access to oil concessions in the Middle East, and the diplomatic skirmishes were sharp as the British and Dutch tried to keep her out, not merely from the Middle East, but from south-eastern Asia as well, where production was dominated by the Dutch. Thus oil was an important source of controversy in the foreign policy of a number of countries in the inter-war period.

African American Soldiers in World War I

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda M. Nagel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Military Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
African American Soldiers ◽  
First World

In the midst of the long black freedom struggle, African American military participation in the First World War remains central to civil rights activism and challenges to systems of oppression in the United States. As part of a long and storied tradition of military service for a nation that marginalized and attempted to subjugate a significant portion of US citizens, African American soldiers faced challenges, racism, and segregation during the First World War simultaneously on the home front and the battlefields of France. The generations born since the end of the Civil War continually became more and more militant when resisting Jim Crow and insisting on full, not partial, citizenship in the United States, evidenced by the events in Houston in 1917. Support of the war effort within black communities in the United States was not universal, however, and some opposed participation in a war effort to “make the world safe for democracy” when that same democracy was denied to people of color. Activism by organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged the War Department’s official and unofficial policy, creating avenues for a larger number of black officers in the US Army through the officers’ training camp created in Des Moines, Iowa. For African American soldiers sent to France with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), the potential for combat experience led to both failures and successes, leading to race pride as in the case of the 93rd Division’s successes, and skewed evidence for the War Department to reject increasing the number of black officers and enlisted in the case of the 92nd Division. All-black Regular Army regiments, meanwhile, either remained in the United States or were sent to the Philippines rather than the battlefields of Europe. However, soldiers’ return home was mixed, as they were both celebrated and rejected for their service, reflected in both parades welcoming them home and racial violence in the form of lynchings between December 1918 and January 1920. As a result, the interwar years and the start of World War II roughly two decades later renewed the desire to utilize military service as a way to influence US legal, social, cultural, and economic structures that limited African American citizenship.

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