Provenance and Early Cinema

Joshua Yumibe editor Paolo Cherchi Usai editor Tami Williams editor Joanne Bernardi editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Indiana University Press

Published:1st Feb '21

Should be back in stock very soon

Provenance and Early Cinema cover

Remnants of early films often have a story to tell.

As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film archives to ask, "How did these moving images get here for me to see them?"

This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.

At a critical moment like this for international research, putting our artifacts back into their productive context seems to be an increasingly urgent duty. This volume has the merit of questioning the search for a new point of view, a new way to study film sources: a perspective that is more than ever necessary in the digital age, in which copying and sharing have become lightning-fast operations.

-- Coraline Refort * Drammaturgia *

The scope of the text is such that a researcher with a pre-existing interest in provenance will undoubtedly find both definition and inspiration here, while scholars from other areas will likely find new and novel ways by which to integrate prove- nance into the frameworks of their research.

-- James Lewis Shelton * Early Popular Visual Cultu

ISBN: 9780253052995

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 630g

430 pages