2011
First Published
3.83
Average Rating
224
Number of Pages
Establishing a new vision for film history, Film and From Kinematography to Cinema urges readers to consider the importance of complex social and cultural forces in early film. André Gaudreault argues that Edison and the Lumières did not invent cinema; they invented a device. Explaining how this device, the kinematograph, gave rise to cinema is the challenge he sets for himself in this volume. He highlights the forgotten role of the film lecturer and examines film's relationship with other visual spectacles in fin-de-siècle culture, from magic sketches to fairy plays and photography to vaudeville. In reorienting the study of film history, Film and Attraction offers a candid reassessment of Georges Méliès' rich oeuvre and includes a new, unabridged translation of Méliès' famous 1907 text "Kinematographic Views." A foreword by Rick Altman stresses the relevance of Gaudreault's concerns to Anglophone film scholarship.
Avg Rating
3.83
Number of Ratings
12
5 STARS
8%
4 STARS
67%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
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Author
André Gaudreault
Author · 5 books
André Gaudreault is a professor in the Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques at the Université de Montréal, where he is director of GRAFICS (Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique). His books include studies of narratology in film (From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, 2009) and film history (American Cinema, 1890-1909, ed., 2009; Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, 2011; The Blackwell Companion to Early Cinema, co-ed., 2012). He is also the director of the bilingual scholarly journal Cinémas.
