Omschrijving
Provides a theoretical reconceptualization of the paradigms of early cinema, highlighting the latest methods in studying the period.
This outstanding collection, expertly curated by the editors, interrogates the current state of early cinema study by re-examining how we have come to understand this complex phenomenon and suggesting what more there is to learn. Adopting distinct approaches, uncovering novel sources, and providing exciting scholarly discoveries, New Perspectives on Early Cinema History more than fulfills the promise of its title.
Fifty years ago, studying the first decades of film claimed a special place in the wider history of cinema. Since then, it has become one of the liveliest and most productive areas for theorising not only old but increasingly also new media, as this welcome collection of new studies demonstrates.
“New Perspectives on Early Cinema History breaks new ground in the study of early cinema by offering theoretical reconceptualizations that showcase the latest methods and tools for analysis and cast new light on early cinema audiences in different regions of the world.”
“We could say that Slugan and Biltereyst’s collection embodies the encounter of early film history with new cinema history – or maybe the transmutation of the former into the latter, as its line-up smoothly moves from Gaudreault, who contributed to all the new film history anthologies cited above, to Biltereyst, well-known for his involvement in new cinema history projects (not least as co-editor of similar collections). Emerging, in the middle, is a new generation of scholars mostly coming from continental Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Russia). What the book proposes, in sum, are new cinema history perspectives on early cinema history.”
Mario Slugan is Lecturer in Film Studies, Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is the author of Montage as Perceptual Experience (2017), Noël Carroll on Film (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Fiction and Imagination in Early Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2019). He is also the editor of the open-access peer-reviewed academic journal Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe and book review editor for Early Popular Visual Culture. Daniël Biltereyst is Professor in Film and Media Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. He is editor of Mapping Movie Magazines (2020) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to New Cinema Audiences (2019), Moralizing Cinema (2015), Silencing Cinema (2013), Cinema, Audiences and Modernity (2012) and Explorations in New Cinema History (2011).