Early Cinema Research Articles

The Charm of Transcending Times: Aesthetic Value Trends and Current Significance of Early Chinese Film Classics ——Taking 'Street Angel' as an example

Against the historical background of internal and external difficulties, early Chinese films did not give up exploration and growth, but instead emerged a batch of masterpieces that combine ideological connotation and artistic expression, demonstrating the charm of crossing the times. This article takes "Street Angel" as an example to explore the aesthetic tendencies of early Chinese film classics and their implications for contemporary cinema. By analyzing the film's grasp of the dual structure of reality, critical examination of modern cities, and display of humanistic care, its unique artistic charm is revealed. The film not only represents the peak of early Chinese film creation, but its aesthetic tendency also transcends the times and has a profound impact on contemporary film creation and social culture.

Technologies in the History of the Movie Industry

The paper titled “Technologies in the History of the Movie Industry” examines the evolution of film technologies and their profound impact on the industry. It explores key technological advancements, from early silent films to talkies, black-and-white to colored films, and the rise of CGI and 3D technology. Each advancement not only enhanced the visual and emotional experience for audiences but also helped filmmakers convey complex ideas and create immersive worlds. The success of iconic films like Avatar, Metropolis, and Jurassic Park demonstrates how innovations in special effects, sound, and imagery have shaped the industry’s growth. The paper emphasizes that these technologies not only improved film quality but also allowed for deeper connections between audiences and the stories being told, ultimately expanding the possibilities of cinematic expression. Through historical analysis, the paper reveals how each technological milestone contributed to the artistic, cultural, and economic success of the film industry.

Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema

Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema

Ireland Bros.’ Pan-American Electric Carnival: Canadians’ border-crossing circuits of early cinema

ABSTRACT Early cinema exhibitors George H. and Egerton L. Ireland were better known in Jamaica and Trinidad than in their homeland of Canada. Named the Pan-American Electric Carnival, after a failed bid to show moving pictures at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, between 1900 and 1908 they toured Canada, the United States, across the Caribbean and into South America. Almost absent from Canadian film history, los hermanos Ireland are mentioned in at least eight national and local film histories from across Latin America, and even in a US history. Yet, few of these recognize connections to each other, let alone the brothers’ roots in Canada. I take the Ireland brothers’ peripatetic travels throughout the Western hemisphere as a curious case that is uniquely Canadian. Although Ireland Bros.’ motivations are unknowable, their inter-colonial journeys can only partly be explained by wanderlust, seeking escape from rural Canadian roots. I propose their significance is the provision of modern entertainment that was not simply a conduit of British colonialism nor merely a channel for American imperialism. Instead, I conclude speculatively that the brothers’ circuits of cinema along Pan-American trade routes reflect an ethos of Pan-Americanism emergent at the turn of the twentieth century.

A Study of the Aesthetic Art of New Patriotism in Red Film and Television Drama

Red cinema and television works have long been pivotal components in the propagation of Chinese culture and the inculcation of patriotic education. These productions chronicle the trajectory of historical evolution, conveying the spirit of patriotism in the new era through intense emotions and strikingly impactful visuals. Against the backdrop of globalization, where cultural exchanges among nations are increasingly prevalent, the question of how China's red cinema and television can inspire the younger generation through the aesthetics of new patriotism has become a focal point of attention. From early revolutionary story films to modern epic masterpieces, red cinema and television employ unique aesthetic expressions, innovative narrative techniques, and visual arts to seamlessly blend patriotism with art, offering audiences of the new era a series of visual and spiritual feasts.

Metabolic Cinema: From Hollywood to Socialist China

Drawing on Karl Marx’s ecological concepts of the “metabolic rift” and the “emancipation of senses”, this paper explores an alternative ecocinema that integrates the ecological with the social and the economic. Early Hollywood films, such as Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and The Good Earth (1937), represent the metabolic rift in human relationships as a byproduct of the metabolic rift with nature created in the process of urbanization; hence, they can be regarded as precursors to an alternative ecocinema, which I refer to as “metabolic cinema”. The Story of the Golden Bell (Jinling Zhuan), a comedy film produced during the Chinese Great Leap Forward in 1958, offers an intriguing case for socialist metabolic cinema as a multisensory medianature that participates in and facilitates the metabolic process between humans and nature, as well as the social metabolism among humans, despite the period’s notorious ecological record. The film not only consciously moves away from the visual-centric model associated with capitalist consumerism by using the aural to rectify the once-aberrant visual but also demonstrates how romantic love, as one of the human senses, must be emancipated along with other senses through denouncing utilitarianism and commercialism and, subsequently, returning to need-based labor as the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between humans and nature.

BIOPOWER PRACTICES IN THE CINEMA OF YORGOS LANTHIMOS

Yorgos Lanthimos is one of the prominent directors of modern cinema, known for his unique narrative style and visual aesthetics. His films, which are included in the "Greek Weird Wave" movement, are shaped around themes that question social norms, power relations, and the individual's place within these structures. Michel Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and biopower, which explain how the state controls social life, provide a powerful theoretical framework for analyzing Lanthimos' filmography. The absolute control of parents over their children in Dogtooth, the forced societal couplehood in The Lobster, and the dependence of individuals' fates on the decisions of others in The Killing of a Sacred Deer illustrate how Lanthimos addresses power relations. This study aims to show that the director's films offer a deep critique that questions power structures in modern society, especially by analyzing Lanthimos' early films and his latest film Kind of Kindness in the context of Foucault's concept of biopower.

Die Politik von Caligari: Totalitarian Anxieties in Adaptations of Robert Weine’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

Contemporary politics is filled with anxiety about the survival of democracy—particularly within a framework pitting liberal representative democracy against authoritarianism. In times of anxiety about authoritarianism, Western artists repeatedly return to a masterpiece of relatively early cinema: Robert Weine’s silent film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This essay examines three twenty-first century adaptations: David Lee Fisher’s 2005 remake of the film; James Morrow’s 2017 novel, The Asylum of Dr. Caligari; and Georgie Bailey’s 2022 play Caligari. I argue that while the direct politico-cultural anxieties of Weine’s film have often been overstated, the emergence of adaptations during periods of heightened concern about authoritarianism reflects a deep-seated reception of the film as anticipating autocratic governance. However, for all its fears about power, control, and the loss of self-determination, Weine’s movie also contains the seeds of liberation. Cesare ultimately sacrifices his own life rather than murdering Jane. And it is this gesture that the adaptations examined here seek—a gesture of resistance. The sleepwalker can awaken and assert a form of just resistance in the world, even if the penalties are steep.

Enhancing public entertainment with touch: Possibilities and pitfalls.

There has long been interest in augmenting cinematic and other forms of public entertainment through tactile and/or bodily (i.e., vestibular) stimulation. In this narrative historical review, the early history of touch (or haptics, as it is sometimes called) and other forms of bodily stimulation (e.g., motion platforms) in the context of entertainment is critically reviewed, with a focus on early cinema as well as other early examples of immersive virtual reality travel experiences. Critically, various challenges have limited the introduction of such additional channels of sensory stimulation. These include technological, financial, cognitive, creative, ethical/artistic, and also legal considerations, given the many patents that currently exist covering commercial digital tactile stimulation (e.g., in the gaming context). Taken together, these challenges help to explain why it is that despite the early interest in "the feelies" (e.g., an envisioning of film that includes tactile sensations by Aldous Huxley, in his novel Brave New World), touch-enhanced cinema and storytelling have never really caught on in the mainstream in the way that, say, the talkies so obviously did following the introduction of sound into cinema in the early decades of the 20th century. Nevertheless, identifying the potential successful use cases that have emerged from previous attempts to augment public entertainments with tactile/bodily stimulation will likely provide useful guidelines for the future tactile augmentation of home entertainment.

Combining and Defining Auteur Film and Film Auteurism

This paper provides a concise overview of the history of film as a dynamic visual medium, analyzing European cinema of the nineteenth century and Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s. It argues that early films cannot be classified as auteur films due to the lack of a systematic auteur theory guiding their creation. Furthermore, it highlights that although Alfred Hitchcock is widely recognized as the first auteur director of Hollywood cinema, his relationship with producers at the time was notably strained. The paper concludes that the concept of auteur film necessitates that the director is entirely responsible for the artistic achievements of the film and consistently reflects their worldview and philosophy of life in their work. Additionally, auteur theory serves as a logical framework for directors to create films and as a methodology for critics to retrospectively analyze a director’s creative style and interpret their films.

Erotic countermapping and queer urban publics: the hardcore cinema of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr

ABSTRACT This article offers an analysis of hardcore films by Arthur J. Bressan, Jr, whose status as a pioneer of HIV/AIDS cinema has overshadowed his prolific work as a director of gay pornography. By focusing on the urban landscape of San Francisco as central to the dramaturgy of his early pornographic films, the article considers the documentary impulse evident in Bressan’s representation of urban queer topographies as inseparable from the films’ erotic charge. The article puts critical pressure on representations of cruising, the closet of sexual secrecy, and the prison as a site of sexual fantasy as erotic and spatial tropes central to Bressan’s queer countermapping of San Francisco. The urban landscape and its infrastructures are analyzed as central to Bressan’s cinematic mediation of San Francisco, and are reframed in this article as the scaffolding for the films’ thematic interest in queer pedagogy, gay visibility, and sexual liberation.

Between Shenguai and Science: The Visual Imagination of Technical Objects in Republican China

Abstract This article first examines the technical objects in three Chinese graphic novels (lianhuanhua) during the Republican era: Scientific Investiture of the Gods (Kexue fengshenbang), Scientific Demon King (Kexue mowang), and Black Bat (Hei bianfu). I regard the visual construction of technical objects in these works as a prehistory of Chinese-styled science fiction films between the 1930s and 1940s. I argue that early Chinese science fiction films share the same resources of traditional shenguai xiaoshuo with these graphic novels in Republican China. Scrutinizing the information about several early Chinese science fiction films, I locate the visual imagination of technical objects in the context of Chinese art history combined with local and imported conventions. I attempt to answer the following questions about the visual construction of technical objects in Republican-era artworks: how does the visual tradition of shenguai xiaoshuo connect to graphic novels and films in Republican China? To what degree could the hybrid modernity of shenguai combined with Hollywood films become a unique legacy for visualizing the technical objects in Chinese science fiction arts?

Against observation: the panoramic legacy of Sergei Loznitsa

ABSTRACT Critical reception of Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s documentary films typically concludes that the director privileges observational techniques to depict historical events and political movements, resulting in conflicting judgements on his films’ significance and reducing Loznitsa’s own involvement in the depicted events. This article addresses the techniques and visual grammar of Loznitsa’s 2014 film Maidan and challenges the film’s status as an example of the observational documentary mode. This article proposes approaching Maidan through a recognition of the influence of the panorama on realist representation from its inception in the late eighteenth century to its transformation of cinema in the twentieth century, showing how Loznitsa has developed a panoramic filmmaking language since his early short films. Maidan contrasts the ideas of objectivity and passivity typically assigned to observational films by constructing a historical narrative about the events that occurred in Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti during the Euromaidan movement of 2013–2014. This renegotiation of Loznitsa’s filmmaking mode reveals Maidan’s unique contribution to non-fiction representational forms as well as to narratives of national identity within the post-Soviet context.

Ambedkar and the cinema of reconstitution

ABSTRACT The article analyzes an interview with Ambedkar, published in Filmindia, in 1942 as an insightful deliberation on the idea of decolonial cinema. The singularity of the interview derives from its anti-caste premise, occasioning the enunciation of the intersectional operations of caste in cinema as much as its being the only document in English (so far) that records Ambedkar’s views on the modern medium. His concept of cinema as corrective marks a significant shift in the way early cinema was perceived in pre-independent India. Contrary to the restorative function attributed to the modern medium during the time, Ambedkar found in it a potential for reconstitution. Cinema, according to him, held the possibility of reimagining a conceptual space that was taken over by Brahminical religion in India. Elaborating on four aspects of cinema in particular—its potential to reconstitute a liberating culture of joy in the place of an ensnaring culture of asceticism, its capacity for social reform, the exigency of narrative justice in the depiction of Dalits, and the fashioning of modern spectatorship, Ambedkar describes cinema’s possibility of conceptualizing an anti-caste, decolonial space.

A Digital Archaeology of Early Hispanic Film Culture: Film Magazines and the Male Fan Reader

As a sociologically-oriented study, this project contributes to an archaeology of cinema fandom broadly, and early Spanish fan culture specifically, by spotlighting male readers of popular film magazines. Taking as an exploratory case study reader interactivity with the magazine Popular Film, analysis of correspondence and published photos of readers participating in reader contests demonstrates that the magazine’s cinema fan base was composed of a strikingly large proportion of readers who were male and that these were ardent enthusiasts of celebrity consumer culture. This is a notable contradistinction to the widely-held idea of the star-struck female movie fan. Methodologically, in conducting this study we reflect on the challenges of digital approaches to historical periodical research, where particular challenges are posed when working with magazines in a non-anglophone language, and when there are few baseline studies to rely on to guide and contextualize patterns picked up through strictly macro methods. We advocate for the affordances of a mixed macro-micro approach that combines distant reading with traditional textual studies of close reading. By adopting such a hybrid framework, digital methods provide new opportunities towards reconstructing profiles of magazine readerships and to unearth evidence of male movie fans in Spain.

The relationship between diegetic music and memory in two early Hitchcock films

The relationship between diegetic music and memory in two early Hitchcock films

Artificial Intelligence in Early Science Fiction and Films: A Literary Exploration

Artificial Intelligence in Early Science Fiction and Films: A Literary Exploration

The making of ‘the Hollywood of China’: A preliminary social network analysis of the early Hong Kong film industry (1914–1941)

This study conducts a digital social network analysis (SNA) of the early Hong Kong film industry from 1914 to 1941, focusing on the connections between directors and actors in different periods. Using Gephi and the online ‘Hong Kong Film Search System’ launched by the Hong Kong Film Archive, it attempts to identify, visualize, and analyze the different structural features of the industry, including nodes, connections, and communities. This structural analysis also helps reflect on the existing historical writing about the early Hong Kong film industry, especially the notable discourse on the Shanghai–Hong Kong connection.

La figura del periodista en el nacimiento del film noir. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940, Boris Ingster)

This article summarises the results of an investigation into the figure of the journalist and the importance of journalism in early film noir in the United States. To this end, we analyse the film Stranger on the Third floor (1940, Boris Ingster), a low budget feature (a so-called B-movie) produced by RKO. This film should be considered the first full-blown example of the US film noir genre and in it, the press and the carácter of the journalist are key to understanding its plot, internal narrative, and even the structure of the film. Here, we propose a three-fold análisis encompassing the historical context, plot, and form of the film to examine how Boris Ingster and the RKO cinematic production team succeeded in making Stanger on the Third Floor into a stylistic model for US film noire in which journalism plays a key role.

The BiographScope: Exploring Early Cinema in an Immersive Environment

The BiographScope: Exploring Early Cinema in an Immersive Environment