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How the Movies Got a Past
A Historiography of American Cinema, 1894-1930
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Book Presentation:
• Provides a wealth of material on early and silent American cinema rarely before discussed in a scholarly context
• Captures the ways the movies' past was understood, compiled, and preserved in media res during their first few decades of life
• Contains 50 rare images drawn from archival sources, early publications, and studio advertising
• Features a companion website hosted by the author that provides access to all primary sources discussed in the book, further illustrations, and full-length versions of the films
How the Movies Got a Past presents a comprehensive survey of the rise of historiographical discourse on cinema in North America as it is reflected in publications, exhibitions, lectures, and films about the cinema as a technology, form of art, and source of entertainment, from its inception up to 1930. This pioneering historiography of American movies proposes a typology of genres of historical knowledge and examines the role that its articulation played in legitimating the moving image as a form of cultural heritage and a field of study.
How did early studios seek to understand and promote their own activities as part of a brand-new form of entertainment with its own traditions, "founding fathers," and ambitions? How did early writers modulate between retrospection and analysis, between nostalgia and ballyhoo, between journalism and research into the "relics" of the nascent film industry and what were their motivations and influence on subsequent historians? What rhetorical and material platforms were deployed to talk about and show the history of cinema and for what audiences were they meant? In teasing out answers to these and other questions, this book makes an argument for early cinema historiography as an emergent genre with its own conventions and goals instead of a "primitive" version of today's historical writing on the movies. With a wealth of case studies, and illustrations, How the Movies Got a Past will appeal to media historians, silent movie buffs, film archivists, and students alike.
About the Author:
Dimitrios Latsis, Assistant Professor in Digital and Audiovisual Preservation, School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alabama Dimitrios Latsis is a historian and digital humanist working at the intersection of archiving and visual culture. He is Assistant Professor in Digital and Audiovisual Preservation at the University of Alabama's School of Library and Information Studies. His work on American visual culture, early cinema, archival studies, and the Digital Humanities has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution, Domitor, Mellon, and Knight Foundations, and Canada's Social Studies and Humanities Research Council, among others. He is the co-editor of Art in the Cinema: The Mid-Century Art Documentary (2020) with Steven Jacobs and Birgit Cleppe.
Press Reviews:
Winner, 2023 Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
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