The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material

In The Image in Early Cinema, the contributors examine intersections between early cinematic form, technology, theory, practice, and broader modes of visual culture. They argue that early cinema emerged within a visual culture composed of a variety of traditions in art, science, education, and image making. Even as methods of motion picture production and distribution materialized, they drew from and challenged practices and conventions in other mediums. This rich visual culture produced a complicated, overlapping network of image-making traditions, innovations, and borrowing among painting, tableaux vivants, photography, and other pictorial and projection practices. Using a variety of concepts and theories, the contributors explore these crisscrossing traditions and work against an essentialist notion of media to conceptualize the dynamic interrelationship between images and their context.

Scott Curtis is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University. He is author of The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany.

Philippe Gauthier lectures in cinema and media at the University of Ottawa. He is author of Le montage alterné avant Griffith.

Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity.

Joshua Yumibe is Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism, and author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema.