I’ve been producing a series of posts on my personal cultural highlights from 2017. They have covered things online, music, books and artworks. Last in the series is a list of highlights. These are some of the one-off events or publications that particularly stood out for me in 2017, and against which 2018 will haveRead More
What are filmographies for? That might seems to be an easy question to answer – a filmography is a list of films defined by a particular subject, much as a bibliography is a similarly defined list of books. But that says what a filmography is; it doesn’t say what it is for. It’s a questionRead 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
I’m delighted to be able to report that my 2013 book, Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925, is now available in paperback, from University of Exeter Press. Previously available in hardback at a price best suited to the specialist library market, or as an e-book (has anyone purchase Urban theRead More
Kinemacolor was the world’s first successful natural colour motion picture system. It was preceded by some trial colour systems that did not work in practice, and it competed against artificial systems which painted colours onto film stock. Kinemacolor was the first system successfully to achieve one of the primary goals of the pioneers of motionRead More
Of all the ephemeral objects we build for ourselves in the digital world, among the most precious and at the greatest risk of disappearing are databases. Databases are organised and queryable collections of data. The larger ones, along with their cousin the content management system, govern our world and manage who we are, since theirRead More
I have been watching the latest series of Better Call Saul, the best thing on TV just now, despite some considerable competition. The series is a prequel to Breaking Bad, the 2008-2013 series about a high-school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who takes to a life of crime by manufacturing methamphetamine. The crooked lawyer Saul GoodmanRead More
Last weekend I sat through six hours and thirty-seven minutes of of Les Misérables (France 1925), the longest film I’ve ever experienced at a single sitting. It was shown at the Barbican in London, two comfort breaks and a supper break along the way. Neil Brand provided the live piano score, as he had withRead More
This is the text of a talk I gave to a research event on newsreels at CIAC research centre, University of Algarve, Faro, Portugal, on 9 February 2017. I’ve also published it as a PDF, with footnotes instead of hyperlinks. In the original talk I ended with eight reasons for using newsreels to study history,Read More
Next up in this occasional series on handy web resources is film databases. Everyone knows about the Internet Movie Database, which has reached such a state of majesty that it doesn’t just reflect the film industry, it helps drive it. But there are plenty of other film databases out there, some loyally documenting a nationalRead More