Author: Ivo Blom
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
ISBN: 9789053564639
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
The Netherlands Film Museum's Desmet Collection contains the estate of Dutch cinema owner and film distributor Jean Desmet (1875-1956): almost nine hundred European and American films of all genres, a collection of publicity material, and a massive business archive. These three sources form the basis of this book, the first comprehensive reconstruction of Desmet's career. From his nomadic beginnings as a traveling showman to his successful switch to permanent cinema operation and film distribution, Blom shows how Desmet's fortunes encapsulated a series of structural changes within the new culture of the cinema.
Author: Blom
Publisher: Leiden University Press
ISBN: 9789053565063
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 472
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Book Description
"Since 1957, the Netherlands Film Museum in Amsterdam has been in possession of the Desmet Collection, which contains the estate of the Dutch cinema owner and film distributor Jean Desmet (1875-1956). The history of this strangely retiring 'showman' offers not simply an abstract of an individual character and his personal ambitions and motivations, but also epitomises the transformation of cinema into a distinctively modern industry. Between 1907 and 1916, the world of cinema experienced radical structural change, which Desmet not only witnessed but also helped to bring about. Given the insufficiencies of Dutch film production, Desmet became a link between film production abroad and film exhibition in the Netherlands." "In this study, Ivo Blom uses the career of Jean Desmet as a means of exploring the history of cinema from the ground-level perspective of film distribution and exhibition. His sociologically nuanced, copiously illustrated and scrupulously documented story of 'Citizen Desmet' swells into an epic narrative of early urban cinema culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: Judith Thissen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1838715029
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 427
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Book Description
Cinema is often perceived as a metropolitan medium – an entertainment product of the big city and for the big city. Yet film exhibitors have been bringing moving pictures to towns and villages since the early days of itinerant shows. This volume presents for the first time an exploration of the social, cultural and economic dynamics of film culture in the European countryside. Spanning more than a century of film exhibition from the early twentieth-century to the present day, Cinema Beyond the City examines the role that movie-going has played in small-town and rural communities across Europe. It documents an amazing diversity of sites and situations that are relevant for understanding historical and current patterns in film consumption. In chapters written by leading scholars and young academics, interdisciplinary research is used to address key questions about access, economic viability, audience behaviour, film programming and the cultural flows between cities and hinterlands. With its wide range of regional studies and innovative methodological approaches, the collection will be of interest not only to film historians, but also to scholars in the fields of urban history, rural studies and cultural geography.
Author: Frank Kessler
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969375
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 353
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Book Description
Essays by prominent scholars examining film distribution in the early years of cinema. This collection of essays explores the complex issue of film distribution from the invention of cinema into the 1910s. From regional distribution networks to international marketing strategies, from the analysis of distribution catalogs to case studies on individual distributors, these essays written by well-known specialists in the field discuss the intriguing question of how films came to meet their audiences. Contributors include Richard Abel, Marta Braun, Joseph Garncarz, André Gaudreault, François Jost, Charlie Keil, Martin Loiperdinger, Viva Paci, Wanda Strauven, Gregory Waller, and many more.
Author: Isak Thorsen
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969308
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
This comprehensive study of the Danish film company demonstrates how it became one of the most important innovators of the silent era. Established in 1906, Nordisk Films Kompagni’s rise and fall is one of the most dramatic stories of the early film industry. Based on archival research, primarily in the company’s surviving business archives, this volume describes and analyzes how Nordisk Films became one of the leading players in the world market—and why the company failed to maintain this position. Isak Thorsen examines Nordisk Film as a business and organization, from its establishment in 1906 until 1924 when founder Ole Olsen stepped back. He covers a wide range of topics, including the competitive advantages Nordisk Film gained in reorganizing the production to multiple-reel films around 1910; the company’s highly efficient film production which anticipated the departmentalized organization of Hollywood; Nordisk Film’s aggressive expansion strategy in Germany, Central-Europe and Russia during the First World War; and the grand plans for taking control of UFA in association with the American Famous Players in the post-war years.
Author: Richard Abel
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415234409
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 824
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Book Description
One-volume reference work on the first twenty-five years of the cinema's international emergence from the early 1890s to the mid-1910s.
Author: Richard Abel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520939522
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
This engaging, deeply researched study provides the richest and most nuanced picture we have to date of cinema—both movies and movie-going—in the early 1910s. At the same time, it makes clear the profound relationship between early cinema and the construction of a national identity in this important transitional period in the United States. Richard Abel looks closely at sensational melodramas, including westerns (cowboy, cowboy-girl, and Indian pictures), Civil War films (especially girl-spy films), detective films, and animal pictures—all popular genres of the day that have received little critical attention. He simultaneously analyzes film distribution and exhibition practices in order to reconstruct a context for understanding moviegoing at a time when American cities were coming to grips with new groups of immigrants and women working outside the home. Drawing from a wealth of research in archive prints, the trade press, fan magazines, newspaper advertising, reviews, and syndicated columns—the latter of which highlight the importance of the emerging star system—Abel sheds new light on the history of the film industry, on working-class and immigrant culture at the turn of the century, and on the process of imaging a national community.
Author: Jennifer Lynn Peterson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822378914
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
In the earliest years of cinema, travelogues were a staple of variety film programs in commercial motion picture theaters. These short films, also known as "scenics," depicted tourist destinations and exotic landscapes otherwise inaccessible to most viewers. Scenics were so popular that they were briefly touted as the future of film. But despite their pervasiveness during the early twentieth century, travelogues have been overlooked by film historians and critics. In Education in the School of Dreams, Jennifer Lynn Peterson recovers this lost archive. Through innovative readings of travelogues and other nonfiction films exhibited in the United States between 1907 and 1915, she offers fresh insights into the aesthetic and commercial history of early cinema and provides a new perspective on the intersection of American culture, imperialism, and modernity in the nickelodeon era. Peterson describes the travelogue's characteristic form and style and demonstrates how imperialist ideologies were realized and reshaped through the moving image. She argues that although educational films were intended to legitimate filmgoing for middle-class audiences, travelogues were not simply vehicles for elite ideology. As a form of instructive entertainment, these technological moving landscapes were both formulaic and also wondrous and dreamlike. Considering issues of spectatorship and affect, Peterson argues that scenics produced and disrupted viewers' complacency about their own place in the world.
Author: Ernest Mathijs
Publisher: Wallflower Press
ISBN: 9781904764007
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
Films from the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg have long been regarded as isolated texts. The Cinema of the Low Countries points to the interconnectedness between these national cinemas from the point of view of genre, language and format, and their local and international importance by explicitly focusing on 24 key feature films and documentaries from the region. Building on each film's relationship with its particular cultural context, this volume presents twenty-four specially commissioned essays that explore the particular significance and influence of a wide range of exemplary films. Covering the work of internationally acclaimed directors such as Joris Ivens, Henri Stock, Paul Verhoeven and the Dardenne Brothers and featuring the films Turkish Delight, The Vanishing, Daughters of Darkness, Rosetta, Soldiers of Orange and Man Bites Dog, this collection offers an original approach to the appreciation of a diverse and increasingly important regional cinema.
Author: Rudmer Canjels
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136837353
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
Tracing the international consumption, distribution, and cultural importance of silent film serials in the 1910s and 1920s, Canjels provides an exciting new understanding of the cultural dimension and the cultural transformation and circulation of media forms. Specifically, he demonstrates that the serial film form goes far beyond the well-known American two-reel serial—the cliffhanger. Throughout the book, Canjels focuses on the biggest producers of serials, America, France, and Germany, while imported serials, such as those in the Netherlands, are also examined. This research offers new views on the serial work of well known directors as D.W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim, and Fritz Lang, while foregrounding the importance of lesser known directors such as Louis Feuillade or Joe May. In the early twentieth-century, serial productions were constantly undergoing change and were not merely distributed in their original form upon import. As adjusted serials were present in large quantities or confronted different social spaces, nationalistic feelings and views stimulated by the unrest of World War I and the expanding American film industry could be incorporated and attached to the serial form. Serial productions were not only adaptable to local discourses, they could actively stimulate and interact as well, influencing reception and further film production. By examining the distribution, reception, and cultural contexts of American and European serials in various countries, this cross-cultural research makes both local and global observations. Canjels thus offers a highly relevant case study of transnational, transcultural and transmedia relations.
