Dutch cinema owner and film distributor Jean Desmet (1875-1956). The collection comprises almost nine hundred European and American films in all genres, a collection of publicity material and a dauntingly large business archive. These three sources form the basis of this first comprehensive reconstruction of Desmet's career: from his nomadic beginnings as a traveling showman, working the season…
Among the abundant Alfred Hitchcock literature, Hitchcock's Motifs has found a fresh angle. Starting from recurring objects, settings, character-types and events, Michael Walker tracks some forty motifs, themes and clusters across the whole of Hitchcock's oeuvre, including not only all his 52 extant feature films but also representative episodes from his TV series. Connections and deeper inflec…
Ernst Lubitsch, the German film director who left Berlin for Hollywood in 1923, is best remembered for the famous "Lubitsch touch" in such masterpieces as Trouble in Paradise and Ninotchka, featuring Greta Garbo. Kristin Thompson's study focuses on Lubitsch's silent films from the years between 1918 and 1927, tracing the impact this director had on consolidating classical Hollywood filmmaking. …
This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial…
In From Grain to Pixel , Giovanna Fossati analyzes the transition from analog to digital film and its profound effects on filmmaking and film archiving. Reflecting on the theoretical conceptualization of the medium itself, Fossati poses significant questions about the status of physical film and the practice of its archival preservation, restoration and presentation. From Grain to Pixel attempt…
Film is in a state of rapid change, with the transition from analog to digital profoundly affecting not just filmmaking and distribution, but also the theoretical conceptualization of the medium film and the practice of film archiving. New forms of digital archives are being developed that make use of participatory media to provide a more open form of access than any traditional archive has off…
Before the advent of television, cinema offered serialised films as a source of weekly entertainment. This book traces the history from the days of silent screen heroines to the sound era's daring adventure serials, unearthing a thriving film culture beyond the self-contained feature. Through extensive archival research, Ilka Brasch details the aesthetic appeals of film serials within their con…
The first book-length account of the symbolic chains that link remakes and explain their disguises, Film Remakes as Rituals and Disguise is also the first book to explore how and why these stories are told. Anat Zanger focuses on contemporary retellings of three particular tales-Joan of Arc, Carmen, and Psycho-to reveal what she calls the remake's "rituals of disguise." Joan of Arc, Zanger demo…
Rich in detail, this is a study of the interrelationships between film historical discourse and archival practices. Exploring the history of several important collections from the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam, Bregt Lameris shows how archival films and collections always carry the historical traces of selection policies, restoration philosophies, and exhibition strategies. The result is a compe…
This first book-length study shows how Germany tried to reconcile the horrendous experiences of the FirstWorld War through the films made in 1919-1933. Drawing on the analysis of twenty-five such films, and covering a wide range of documentaries as well as feature films on the reasons for the outbreak of the war, life at the front,war at sea and the home front, the author sketches out the histo…