Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames

Vito Adriaensens is a scholar and filmmaker. He is currently Assistant Professor of Experimental Film and Media at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

• List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: History, Intermediality and Early European Cinema The Birth of a Sixth Art: The Art Film and the Film-as-Art Discourse Behind the Velvet Curtain: The Cultural Communion between Stage and ScreenAn Actress for Our Age: Betty Nansen, Modern Media IconIn Another Light: Academic Painting, Pictorial Photography, Bourgeois Cinema Old Masters Endure: Victor Sjöström’s Netherlandish TableauxConclusion: Towards a Cultural Poetics of Early European CinemaBibliography and FilmographyAbout the AuthorIndex

Historiographically informed and buttressed by archival sources, Vito Adriaensens’ intermedial investigation of silent European cinema from the 1910s sheds new light on underexplored producers of the era, primarily Gaumont and Nordisk. The cultural poetics approach anchoring Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames reminds us that we still have much to learn about this key period.