New Perspectives on Early Cinema History

Mario Slugan is Lecturer in Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is the author of Montage as Perceptual Experience (2017), Noël Carroll on Film (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2019). He is also the editor of the open-access peer-reviewed academic journal Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe and book review editor for Early Popular Visual Culture.Daniël Biltereyst is Professor in Film and Media Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. He is editor of Mapping Movie Magazines (2020) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to New Cinema Audiences (2019), Moralizing Cinema (2015), Silencing Cinema (2013), Cinema, Audiences and Modernity (2012) and Explorations in New Cinema History (2011).

• List of figuresList of contributorsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: New perspectives on early cinema - Mario Slugan and Daniël BiltereystPART ONE: CONCEPTS AND THEORIES1. Animated pictures according to Georges Méliès: A sober and unpretentious remediation, or when Méliès took a stand against … the cinema! - André Gaudreault2. Attraction/narration/illustration: A third paradigm for early cinema - Valentine Robert3. ‘The very act itself, even to the smack’: Early cinema, presence and experience - Gert Jan Harkema4. Lost love on a hot summer day: The absorptive experience of the first film show in Denmark - Casper TybjergPART TWO: APPROACHES, METHODS AND SOURCES5. Revisiting the fiction/non-fiction distinction: Early cinema and the philosophy of imagination - Mario Slugan6. Using Mediathread for gesture analysis in the cinema of attractions - Danae Kleida7. Librettos as source material for film history: The case of early Russian cinema - Anna KovalovaPART THREE AUDIENCES AND EXPERIENCES8. Narrative cinema as a separate attraction: Archie L. Shepard’s newspaper publicity - Paul S. Moore9. Mapping Black moviegoing in Harlem, New York City, 1909–14 - Agata Frymus10. Attraction, narration, performance: A historical-pragmatic perspective on early cinema - Frank Kessler and Sabine Lenk11. The other panicking audience: A New Cinema History approach to early cinemagoing, cinema fires, disasters and panics - Daniël BiltereystBibliographyIndex

This outstanding collection, expertly curated by the editors, interrogates the current state of early cinema study by re-examining how we have come to understand this complex phenomenon and suggesting what more there is to learn. Adopting distinct approaches, uncovering novel sources, and providing exciting scholarly discoveries, New Perspectives on Early Cinema History more than fulfills the promise of its title.