Books in the Exeter Studies in Film History series

This book analyses the diverse historical and geographical circumstances in which audiences have viewed American cinema. It looks at cinema audiences ranging from Manhattan nickelodeons to the modern suburban megaplex, and from provincial, small-town or rural America to the shanty towns of South Africa.

The Big Show looks at the role played by cinema in British cultural life during World War One.In writing the definitive account of film exhibition and reception in Britain in the years 1914 to 1918, Michael Hammond shows how the British film industry and British audiences responded to the traumatic effects of the Great War.The author contends that the War's significant effect was to expedite the cultural acceptance of cinema into the fabric of British social life. As a result, by 1918, cinema had emerged as the predominant leisure form in British social life. Through a consideration of the films, the audience, the industry and the various regulating and censoring bodies, the book explores the impact of the war on the newly established cinema culture. It also studies the contribution of the new medium to the public's perception of the war.

In this innovative study of early film exhibition, Joe Kember demonstrates that prior to the emergence of a specific discipline of screen acting and the arrival of picture personalities, the early cinema inherited its human dimensions from diverse earlier traditions of performance, from the magic lantern lecture to the fairground and variety theatre.Uncovering new sources, including previously neglected films, industrial documentation, memoirs, trade and popular periodicals, the book reveals a rich landscape of popular entertainments during the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and charts the development of film institutions in relation to this complex industrial context.Marketing Modernity re-evaluates the relationship between early film and the broader cultural conditions of industrial modernity. Investigating such diverse topics as performance practices in music hall and magic theatre, the celebrity of adventurer-cameramen, and the exhibition of everyday life on screen, Kember argues that early film shows offered new opportunities to recover a sense of intimacy a quality that was popularly considered to be under threat in the rapidly modernising world of the 1890s and 1900s.

British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years offers an understanding of British Cinema between 1928 and 1939 through an analysis of the relationship between the British film industry and other ';culture industries' such as the radio, music recording, publishing and early television.This relationship has been seen as a weakness of the British film-making tradition, but Lawrence Napper stages a re-appraisal of that tradition, arguing that it is part of a specific strategy of differentiation from Hollywood cinema, designed to appeal to the ';middlebrow' aesthetic of the most rapidly expanding audience of the periodthe lower middle class.Lawrence Napper argues that the ';middlebrow' reputation for aesthetic conservatism masks an audience and popular culture marked by dynamism. ';Middlebrow' texts addressed a British audience on the move, physically (into the new suburbs), socially (as upwardly mobile consumers), economically (employed in new and developing industries, and involved in new modes of living), and culturally (embracing new forms of mass cultural consumption, such as the cinema, the wireless and the best-selling novel). The ability of these audiences to adapt cultures of the past to the media of modern life (through stage or screen adaptations) ensured their negative reputation amongst Modernist commentators and intellectual elites.

In the first book-length study to concentrate specifically on Britain, Jamie Sexton examines the rise of avant-garde and experimental film-making between the wars.The book provides a detailed view of how modernist and anti-mainstream currents emerged in the film industry in Britain.Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain is the first book-length study of a number of currents which opposed mainstream filmmaking and which championed film as an intellectual, modern art. It traces the growth of new approaches to film through exhibition and writing on cinema, and looks at how this cultural formation shaped certain areas of filmmaking. As such, it takes an interdisciplinary approach in which a study of independent filmmaking in this era is firmly placed within a cultural context, linking the ways in which films were presented, received and produced.This is the first in-depth look at 'alternative film culture' in Britain between the wars will excite many in the film, and film studies, worlds. It combines the history with analysis of the films themselves, and of their reception. It looks at the operations of a key contemporary institution, the original Film Society.

This is the first new book-length study of British cinema of the 1910s to be published for over fifty years, and it focuses on the close relationship between the British film industry and the Edwardian theatre. Why were so many West End legends such as Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Ellen Terry repeatedly tempted to dabble in silent film work? Why were film producers so keen to employ them? Jon Burrows studies their screen performances and considers how successfully they made the transition from one medium to the other, and offers some controversial conclusions about the surprisingly broad social range of filmgoers to whom their films appealed.

Silent Features is a collection of essays on seventeen feature-length silent films and two silent serial features, their diverse stylistic, generic and structural characteristics, and the national, historical and industrial contexts from which they emerged. Of the 17 films discussed, 15 are still currently available on DVD. 200 b&w illustrations.

British Instructional Films was at the centre of a number of issues important to Britain and the Empire in the 1920s: the memory and history of the Great War, national and imperial identities, the role of cinema as a shaper of attitudes and identities, power relations between Britain and the USA and the nature of popular culture as an international contest in its own right.

This book offers an industrial, economic and aesthetic history of the early years of the British film industry from 1899-1911, through a case study of one of the most celebrated pioneer film makers, Cecil Hepworth.

The birth of cinema coincided with the heyday of the short story. This book studies the relationship between popular magazine short stories and the very early British films.

The birth of cinema coincided with the heyday of the short story. This book studies the relationship between popular magazine short stories and the very early British films.

This is the first full-length study of one of the most popular, profitable and persistent genres in British cinema. It redraws the map of British film history by arguing that comedy was the most successful, and important, genre of the 1930s, and that the very qualities which ensured the comedy film's low status are also its particular strengths.

Charles Urban was a renowned figure in his time, and he has remained a name in film history chiefly for his development of Kinemacolor, the world's first successful natural colour moving picture system. He was also a pioneer in the filming of war, science, travel, actuality and news, a fervent advocate of the value of film as an educative force, and a controversial but important innovator of film propaganda in wartime.The book uses Urban's story as a means of showing how the non-fiction film developed in the period 1897-1925, and the dilemmas that it faced within a cinema culture in which the entertainment fiction film was dominant. Urban's solutions - some successful, some less so - illustrate the groundwork that led to the development of documentary film. The book considers the roles of film as informer, educator and generator of propaganda, and the social and aesthetic function of colour in the years when cinema was still working out what it was capable of and how best to reach audiences.Luke McKernan also curates a web resource on Charles Urban at www.charlesurban.com

Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet is the first book to explore in detail the vital connections between today's digital culture and an absorbing history of screen entertainments and technologies. Its range of coverage moves from the magic lantern, the stereoscope and early film to the DVD and the internet.By reaching back into the innovative media practices of the nineteenth century, Multimedia Histories outlines many of the revealing continuities between nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century multimedia culture. Comprising some of the most important new work on multimedia culture and history by key writers in this growing field, Multimedia Histories will be an indispensable new sourcebook for the discipline. It will be an important intervention in rethinking the boundaries of Anglo-American film and media history.

This book brings together the study of silent cinema and the study of British cinema, both of which have seen some of the most exciting developments in Film Studies in recent years. The result is a comprehensive survey of one of the most important periods of film history.

This is the first book to study representations of the non-Western world in European modernist cinema. In offering new perspectives on the history of Soviet montage cinema and on the British documentary movement, it connects with the growing body of work analysing manifestations of orientalism, Eurocentrism and colonial discourse in the cinema.

This highly original work reveals the profound impact that the railroad and the cinema have had on Western society and modern urban industrial culture.

In the 1930s there were close to a billion annual admissions to the cinema in Britain and it was by far the most popular paid-for leisure activity. This book is an exploration of that popularity. The book establishes similarities and differences between national and regional tastes through case study analysis of cinemagoing in Bolton and Brighton.

The World According to Hollywood examines the world-wide influence of the American film industry during its golden age - the 1920s and 1930s - and investigates the business policies that shaped the fictional universe of Hollywood movies.

For the first time, this book tells the 'lost' story of the 1930s Western. Written from a concern to understand Western films primarily as products of Hollywood's studio system, it recovers the context in which Westerns were produced, exhibited and viewed in the 1930s.

A volume of specially-commissioned essays dealing with the attempts to create a pan-European film production movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and the reactions of the American film industry to these plans to rival its hegemony.

This book brings together the study of silent cinema and the study of British cinema, both of which have seen some of the most exciting developments in Film Studies in recent years. The result is a comprehensive survey of one of the most important periods of film history.

This book offers the first full account of the film society movement in Britain and its contribution to post-World War Two film culture. It brings to life a lost history of alternative film exhibition and challenges the general assumption that the study of film began with university courses on `Film Studies'.