ABSTRACT This article presents an exploration of the mechanisms that underpinned simulacrum in the 19th century. To do so, I take as a case study an attraction presented at the Universal Exhibition of 1900: the multi-sensory panorama known as the Maréorama. This device offered audiences the experience of a half-hour boat trip across the Mediterranean Sea. In this paper I shall argue that this simulation combines period-relevant codes that link with other artistic and cultural practices of the period – early cinema, prestidigitation, Wagnerian ‘total work of art’ – and a component of technological innovation oriented towards perfecting multi-sensoriality. This combination turned the Maréorama into one of the most sophisticated mimetic immersion devices at the time, blending the tradition of the great rotundas with the effects of mobile panoramas. Other features of this panorama were the physical shocks generated by the motion of the supporting platform and the interactive role assumed by the spectator, which, along with the mimesis, added an element of fiction. I shall argue that the simulation of new realities was stimulated by the imaginaries generated by contemporary novels such as Julius Verne’s, which illustrated future scenarios and the exploration of unknown landscapes. The Maréorama allowed the spectator to travel across the Mediterranean from the shores of the Seine in a record time. Panoramas, including the Maréorama, became exponents of the utopian capacity of conquering the world, overcoming the limitations of time and space.

ABSTRACT Late in 1914, Universal released The Master Key, a motion picture serial in 15 installments. Robert Z. Leonard directed and starred, and the project was marketed as the ‘most expensive serial yet’. The weekly film release was paralleled by a syndicated newspaper feuilleton, illustrated by stills from the motion pictures. Stills were also incorporated into an illustrated reissue of Fleming Wilson’s story, as well as in promotional materials, like illustrated ads and a 20-page poster stamp album published by the Wentz Printing Company. By way of a cross-media investigation of the (1914) serial The Master Key, this study contributes a case in point of how film stills circulated outside the movie theater. The film material has been reported lost, but some reels have been preserved at the Library of Congress. One of the preserved reels contains the episode set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. For this paper, various materials from The Master Key’s-cross media release have been acquired through online fan forums and collectible auctions. Following recent historical studies on film serials and the ”seriality” of stock characters, Chinatown scenes and the picturesque and efforts to write spatial film history, this paper argues that the proliferation of film images across media formats conceptualized The Master Key’s imagery of San Francisco Chinatown as a ”serialized” space, standardizing cinematic iconography in the public eye.

ABSTRACT This article explores the quickening pace of visual time in the nineteenth century from ‘slow’ portrayals, evidenced in long series showing gradual change over time, to ‘fast’ visual time conveyed through ‘before-and-after’ jump cuts. Drawing from film studies, it argues that popular image makers not only played a central role in creating innovative ways to represent people’s new experiences of accelerated time, but also, in the process, contributed to that acceleration themselves. Often using state-of-the-art printing and distribution technologies, image makers exposed Americans, and particularly nascent consumers, to ever-more-sophisticated forms of commercial representations that helped not only to accustom them to the faster pace and disorientation of mass transportation, communications, and production but also to embrace it. Radically different from their pictorial precursors, before-and-after images, which became common visual tropes late in the century, were key to this new temporality. Because they compressed time by distilling its passage into two succinct images – using what film historians refer to as ‘the cut’ – these illustrations did not simply function as innovative forms of commercial information selling specific goods. More significantly, they encouraged consumers to place themselves at the center of a much larger story of modernity, progress, and transformation.

ABSTRACT Scholars of cinema history have long identified the variety-theater tradition of lightning artistry among the most crucial influences upon the emergence of motion-picture animation. This article looks specifically at the work of the prominent illustrator and animator Winsor McCay, and examines his popular vaudeville routine entitled “The Seven Ages of Man”, first performed in June 1906, both as an innovative lightning-sketch routine and as a proving ground for his trailblazing techniques of motion-picture animation. The article surveys the history of the lightning-sketch performance mode prior to McCay, then considers what can be gleaned about McCay’s own theatrical career as a lightning artist from written descriptions of his vaudeville appearances, and concludes with a discussion of how McCay’s years of frequent lightning-sketch performances may have influenced his approach to cinematic animation.

ABSTRACT This article examines the way that early female film stars from both Britain and America are portrayed in the popular magazine The Red Letter. It argues that even in 1920, there was already a common pattern to notions of female stardom that essentially revolved around ideas of class, and that rather than being newly minted, these notions of the female star were in several ways appropriated from the music hall, a form of entertainment that was firmly established by this time.

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Originating from the proceedings of the Fifteenth International Domitor Conference that took place in 2018, Provenance and Early Cinema represents a collection of papers organised on the subject of...

Several years ago, I had the rare experience of examining a short early film preserved in the BFI National Archive on nitrate stock. Getting to see it on the editing bench involved an elaborate rit...