Volume 38, Number 10 · May 30, 1991
The Ghost Opera
By Geoffrey O'Brien
History of the American Cinema, Vol. 1: The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907
by Charles Harpole general editor, by Charles Musser
Scribner's, 613 pp., $60.00
History of the American Cinema, Vol. 2: The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915
by Charles Harpole general editor, by Eileen Bowser
Scribner's, 337 pp., $60.00
History of the American Cinema, Vol. 3: An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928
by Charles Harpole general editor, by Richard Koszarski
Scribner's, 395 pp., $60.00
Behind the Mask of Innocence: Sex, Violence, Prejudice, Crime—Films of Social Conscience in the Silent Era
by Kevin Brownlow
Knopf, 579 pp., $50.00
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative
edited by Thomas Elsaesser, edited by Adam Barker
British Film Institute, 424 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Life to Those Shadows
by Noël Burch, translated and edited by Ben Brewster
University of California Press, 317 pp., $19.95 (paper)
The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures
by Christopher Rawlence
Atheneum, 384 pp., $19.95
Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
by Miriam Hansen
Harvard University Press, 377 pp., $37.50
The centenary of movies as a public spectacle is nearly upon us. Only specialists will care whether the benchmark date ought to be May 9, 1893, when members of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences lined up to peep into Thomas Edison's kinetoscope and watch a twenty-second film of three men hammering on an anvil and sharing a bottle of beer; or December 28, 1895, when at the Grand Café in Paris the Lumière brothers inaugurated a program featuring The Arrival of a Train at the La Ciotat Station and other movies made with their camera-projector-printer the cinematographe; or any of the other candidates. What matters is that about a hundred years ago a new species of language began to alter human life irrevocably.
Review, 5787 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |