1926 and Beyond

2021 ◽  
pp. 201-218
Author(s):  
Andrew A. Erish
Keyword(s):  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film History ◽  
Second Career ◽  
Santa Monica ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Physical Assets

This chapter tracks Vitagraph's physical assets after its sale to Warner Bros., including the Brooklyn and Hollywood studios, as well as the actual films themselves, about 20% of which survive in archives. The post-Vitagraph activities of the company's founding partners is examined, from Blackton's profligacy that resulted in dire poverty, to Smith's second career as owner of the iconic Chateau Marmont hotel and receipt of an honorary Academy Award in recognition of his fundamental contributions to motion pictures. Several post-Vitagraph reunions and the fate of many of its key personnel are covered, including Margaret Gibson, a former ingénue at the Santa Monica and Hollywood studios who led an especially troubled existence. The chapter concludes with an in-depth discussion of how and why Vitagraph has been so utterly absent from the canon of film history.

Disability Portrayal in Film: Reflecting the Past, Directing the Future

1998 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen P. Safran
Keyword(s):  
Learning Disabilities ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Descriptive Study ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
Education Professionals ◽  
The Past ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Special Education Professionals ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Influence Perceptions

Going to the movies and viewing videos are very popular forms of entertainment. Cinematic stories and characters influence perceptions and opinions of many viewers. Studying film depictions, therefore, provides a unique perspective on society's views of individuals with disabilities. The purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate trends in Academy Award winning films that portray persons with disabilities. Over the decades, there have been an increasing number of awards involving “disability” movies; psychiatric disorders have been most frequently portrayed. Only two of the motion pictures identified presented children or youth with impairments, while none featured learning disabilities. Implications for special education professionals, with particular emphasis on using films for instructional purposes, are discussed.

Between Copyright and Creativity

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-121
Author(s):  
Amanda Egbe
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film History ◽  
Copyright Law ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
New Materials ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Primary Form ◽  
Archaeological Approach

Focusing on Edison’s early cinematic apparatus and the optical printer, this chapter explores how copyright law intersects with creativity, providing an alternative to teleological accounts of moving-image technologies. Thomas Edison attempted to control the film industry through patents and copyright. Edison’s first film experiments were registered as a series of photographs on card by his assistant, W. L. Dickson. In protecting these contact copies as paper prints with copyright, the new medium of motion pictures was being formalized. The necessity to duplicate film to support the development of exhibition and distribution was also necessary for copyright purposes. An archaeological approach is utilized to explore how paper prints enabled innovation in the area of the optical printer, a primary form of duplication in cinema. In developing approaches that could bring to life the remaining examples of early cinema, novel solutions in the form of innovations were required. The overlapping concerns of the copyright clerk, the film entrepreneur, and the film historian thus provide a basis for new materials and new innovations in moving-image technology and film history.

Controlling the Cut

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. E. Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film Criticism ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Academy Award ◽  
Studio System ◽  
Contemporary Film ◽  
Studio Era

Despite being a founding member of her union, Barbara McLean worked sixty-hour weeks. She supervised her male colleagues, had more Academy Award nominations than anyone, and was known as “Hollywood’s Editor-in-Chief.” But McLean—who arguably had more control over her studio’s feature output than all of Twentieth Century-Fox’s directors—was not alone. During the studio system, Hollywood’s top female editors were formidable auteurs, and were unafraid of acknowledging, as Anne Bauchens did in 1941, “Women are better at editing motion pictures than men.” Regardless of their fame within the industry and the syndicated press in the 1930s and 1940s, studio-era Hollywood’s top female editors have become obscure footnotes in Hollywood history. As women and as editors, they are doubly “invisible” in the director-driven agendas of contemporary film criticism. But during the studio system, they were at the creative center of Hollywood filmmaking. This chapter puts them back where they belong.

scholarly journals The Origins of Recycled Films

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tünde Bodoni-Dombi
Keyword(s):  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film History ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Film Culture ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
Film Representation ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Original Motion ◽  
Film Language

At the beginning of cinema, in his early twentieth-century research the Soviet director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein developed his theory of associative montage “1+1=3.” Nowadays, new methods have been added to this theory. These variables include the creative re-use of allusions to film history. In contemporary cinema, when a new archive film uses sequences from cinema heritage, it quotes from the past and can activate visually and content-wise complex cultural memories. In these films, the successive placement of two sequences, beyond their association, creates new associative meaning, thus, it calls forth metacinematic associations. This additional meaning is the imprint of cinematic heritage. Final Cut by György Pálfi and Péter Lichter’s works make use of the archives of cinematic heritage through a reinterpreted film language, attempting to create independent, innovative works of art. They use the same starting point, based on a directorial concept, but the two attempts resulted in completely different motion pictures. Due to the approach at the basis of their conception, these films illustrate both the linear, i.e., the archetypal narrative film representation and the nonlinear narration. However, these films are not only defined by the scenes they are compiled of, but also bear the particularities of the original motion pictures, referring to and going far beyond the individual characteristics of the scenes themselves. Despite being linear narrative films, the cinematic rhetoric of neither motion picture is continuous but associative - they bring into play layers of film culture. Overall, Eisenstein’s formula can be extended in the following way: 1 afs (archive film sequence) + 1 afs (archive film sequence) = 3 mca (metacinematic associations).

Four

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherri Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film History ◽  
Christian Science ◽  
Serious Illness

This chapter sheds light upon Reatha’s preteen and early teenage years after her father takes a newspaper job in California and the Watsons move to Fresno. Reatha is forced to abandon stock theater, resumes her education in a convent school, and again feels called to be a nun. Simultaneously struck by a serious illness, she then turns to Christian Science, developing a yearning to become a Christian Science practitioner. Increasingly rebellious, she is expelled from the convent and discards her plans to become a Christian Science practitioner when newly developing motion pictures awaken a new aspiration within her. Reatha travels with her mother to Los Angeles for a chance at a film career. The chapter also includes a treatise on early film history as it pertains to the trajectory of Reatha’s life.

The Style of Sleaze

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calum Waddell
Keyword(s):  
Motion Pictures ◽  
Film History ◽  
American Film ◽  
Complex Motion ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Thematic Approach ◽  
Exploitation Film ◽  
The Aesthetic

What is an exploitation film? The Style of Sleaze reasons that the aesthetic and thematic approach of the key texts within three distinct exploitation demarcations - blaxploitation, horror and sexploitation - indicate a concurrent evolution of filmmaking that could be seen as an identifiable cinematic movement. Offering a fresh perspective on studies of marginal cinema, The Style of Sleaze maintains that defining exploitation cinema as a vaguely attributed 'excess' is unhelpful, and instead concludes that this period in American film history produced a number of the most transgressive, and yet morally complex, motion pictures ever made.

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