Virgilio Tosi: Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography (2005)

This classic history of early film and photography, first published in 1984, describes the scientific impulses behind sequence photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and E.J. Marey, whose work led directly to the birth of cinema. Now entitled Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography, the book has been updated to include recent research in the field. The English translation was done by BUFVC Library and Database Manager Sergio Angelini. The BUFVC is the distributor of the English-language version of the film series THE ORIGINS OF SCIENTIFIC CINEMATOGRAPHY, which Tosi produced over 1990-1993 to complement his written researches. The BUFVC has produced a DVD edition of the films, to mark the publication of the English edition of the book.

Publisher British Universities Film & Video Council, 2005
Film Studies series
ISBN 0901299758, 9780901299758
234 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-1-23)

Michael North: Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (2005)

Camera Works is about the impact of photography and film on modern art and literature. For many artists and writers, these new media offered hope of new means of representation, neither linguistic nor pictorial, but hovering in a kind of utopian space between. At the same time, the new media introduced a dramatic element of novelty into the age-old evidence of the senses. For the avant-garde, the challenges of the new media were the modern in its most concentrated form, but even for aesthetically unadventurous writers they constituted an element of modern experience that could hardly be ignored.

Camera Works thus traces some of the more utopian projects of transatlantic avant-garde, including the Readie machine of Bob Brown, which was to turn stories and poems into strips of linguistic film. The influence of photography and film on the avant-garde is traced from the early days of Camera Work, through the enthusiasm of Eugene Jolas and the contributors to his magazine transition, to the crisis created by the introduction of sound in the late 1920’s.

Subseguent chapters describe the entirely new kind of sensory enjoyment brought into modern American fiction by the new media. What Fitzgerald calls “spectroscopic gayety,” the enjoyable diorientation of the senses by machine perception, turns out to be a powerful force in much American fiction. The revolutionary possibilities of this new spectatorship and its limitations are pursued through a number of examples, including Dos Passos, James Weldon Johnson, and Hemingway. Together, these chapters offer a new and substantially different account of the relationship between modern American literature and the mediatized society of the early twentieth century.

With a comprehensive introduction and detailed particular readings, Camera Works substantiates a new understanding of the formal and historical bases of modernism. It argues that when modern literature and art respond to modernity, on a formal level, they are responding to the intervention of technology in the transmission of meaning, an intervention that unsettles all the terms in the essential relationship of human consciousness to the world of phenomena.

Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2005
ISBN 0195173562, 9780195173567
255 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-2-24)

Gábor Bódy, 1946-1985: A Presentation of His Work (1987) [Hungarian/English]

Gábor Bódy was a Hungarian film director, screenwriter, theoretic, and occasional actor. A pioneer of experimental filmmaking and film language, Bódy is one of the most important figures of Hungarian cinema.

This publication appeared on the occasion of the Gábor Bódy life-work exhibition organized in Budapest at the Ernst Museum, the Tinódi Cinema and the Palace of Exhibitions, 19 January – 8 February 1987.

Project and coordination: László Beke and Miklós Peternák
Publisher Műcsarnok, Budapest, 1987
ISBN 9637162704
335 pages

PDF, PDF (64 MB, updated on 2019-10-30)
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