To lose one database is a misfortune; to lose four feels like a conspiracy. Recently three online databases and one audiovisual digital archive with underlying database, on each of which I worked for several years, have been removed from public access, either through policy or misfortune. Two disappeared from view a couple of years ago,Read More
I have written two more profiles for the Women Film Pioneers Project which were published this week. The WFPP is a long-running project at Columbia University to produce short online biographies of women who contributed to silent cinema, with the idea of rebalancing, or making you think again, about film history – or history inRead More
To the cinema to see a film about cinema. Is there any art form, any medium, that has been quite so sentimental about itself as cinema? There is nostalgia in the understanding of every art form or medium which has transformed through time, but cinema’s forlornness seems particular to itself. It is summed up byRead More
Nine years ago I started up a website that gathered examples of eyewitness testimony from people going to see motion pictures. I called it Picturegoing, which felt catchy, and the dot com address was available. Today, I am happy to announce, the book version has been published. The book is entitled Picturegoers – because aRead More
What a magical image this is. An audience of young people has packed a theatre, to such a degree that some are on the stage, while others sit perilously on the edge of the balcony, their legs hanging over. They are fresh-faced, eager, revelling in where they are and who they are. A man andRead More
The latest in this occasional series of themed lists of online resources is on a subject of particular interest to me. I’ve spent a good deal of my latter years as a researcher investigating cinemas, and was involved some while ago in producing a database of pre-1914 film venues and businesses in London, still availableRead More
As part of my Picturegoing survey of eyewitness accounts of going to see pictures, I have been reproducing what is among the best pieces of sustained writing on the process of cinemagoing, the ‘Continuous Performance’ essays written by Dorothy Richardson for the film journal Close Up. Dorothy Richardson (1873-1957) was a British novelist, a pioneerRead More
The art of Biography Is different from Geography. Geography is about maps, But Biography is about chaps. I thought of E.C. Bentley’s pithy poem while I was attending the What is Cinema History? conference in Glasgow. The conference was organised by the Early Cinema in Scotland project (on whose advisory board I sit), and addressedRead More
I recently bought a poetry pamphlet dating from 1908, from the extraordinary treasure trove that is NeverSeen Books & Curios. It’s an eight-page booklet, published in Hull, number 15 in a series issued by George Gresswell, ‘The Engine-driver Poet’, more of whom below. There are five poems, two of them by Bingley Wilson, three byRead More
Until now, I’d not been to one of the live video broadcasts into cinemas of theatre productions which have spread so rapidly since the New York Metropolitan Opera introduced them in late 2006. In part this was me being slow off the mark, in part it was apprehension at what I was buying into. Simply,Read More