Finding Birt Acres

Barry Anthony has written extensively about social history, particularly entertainment. His books include the ground-breaking A Victorian Film Enterprise and The Kinetoscope: A British History (both with Richard Brown) and Chaplin’s Music Hall. He has also written for periodicals such as Film History, Sight and Sound and The Stage.Peter Domankiewicz has worked professionally in film and television for decades as a screenwriter, director and producer. He has written about early film history for The Guardian and Sight and Sound, also contributing to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, The Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema and several academic journals.Deac Rossell is a historian of early cinema, magic lantern culture and chronophotography. His books include Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies, Faszination der Bewegung: Ottomar Anschütz zwischen Photographie und Kino, Laterna Magica – Magic Lantern, and Chronology of the Birth of Cinema 1833–1896. He also writes for journals, encyclopaedias and exhibition catalogues.

• 1. The Acres Enigma: An Incomplete Biography 2. Acres of Barnet 3. Finding Precedents: Acres’s Sources of Inspiration 4. Tradition and Transformation: What Acres Filmed 5. The Missing Link: Acres and R.W. Munro 6. Making an Exhibition of Himself: How Acres’s Films Were Shown 7. The Travels and Travails of Harry Short 8. A Nursery of Cinema: Acres’s Assistants and their Careers 9. How Birt Acres Got LostNotes Filmography Bibliography Index

One of the book’s pleasures is to be found in its prolific illustrations... Above all, though, it is the astonishing quality of the research and the prose in which it is recorded that is the book’s great strength in the way in which it achieves the daunting process in which the long-forgotten Acres is restored to memory.