In 1892 American dancer Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) initiated a highly publicized copyright injunction to challenge an imitator of her work in court and safeguard ownership of her Serpentine Dance; it was a case she lost. Taking this copyright case as a starting-point, this article explores how the judge’s ruling – that Fuller’s work was non-narrative and, therefore, not eligible for copyright – lays the foundation for responses to Fuller’s performances in popular media, which often reveal the spectator-reviewer at a loss for words when tasked with describing her dancing: modern dance is presented as an art form that is verbally inimitable. However, Fuller’s imitators demonstrated otherwise: the multitude of live and filmic versions of Fuller’s Serpentine Dance contextualize Fuller’s movement style within popular visual culture, which hails Fuller as a popular culture icon of modernity – imitable and consumable for a myriad of women who figure their own identities through the vehicle of Fuller’s dancing body. Ultimately, this contradiction reveals a crucial tension inherent in modern dance that was reinforced through both its criticism and popular reception.

The clearly delineated but fleeting pictures of the natural world glimpsed in the camera obscura had intrigued artists as well as those interested in the natural sciences for centuries before the i...

While film historians have applied Foucauldian notions of discipline and surveillance and Habermassian ideals of a public sphere to studies of early cinema and its audiences, there has been less emphasis on the fact that makeshift and purpose-built theaters alike were designed and operated to make the identities of the audience opaque. Even though some reformers attempted to introduce technologies and regulations that would ensure the lighting of theater auditoriums, exhibitors successfully pushed back against this initiative, leaving theaters in semi-darkness. At the same time, exhibitors and many other agents of the nascent motion picture industry encouraged moviegoers to visibly participate in the cinema, often through entering screenwriting and star contests. Using the work of Édouard Glissant and Gilles Deleuze, I suggest that these discourses of transparency and opacity in early cinema presaged a ‘society of control’ in which an individual modulates their own identity in relationship to a complex and intersecting set of institutions, each of which was reflected and reproduced in the cinema.

Between February 1912 and February 1913, J.C. Lamster made a few dozen films for the Dutch Colonial Institute in the Netherlands East Indies. The films served as propaganda for audiences in Holland and were screened in non-theatrical venues, subordinated to introductions and explanations spoken before and during the films’ projection. The publication, in 2010, of a DVD and an accompanying book of Lamster’s work formed the occasion to reflect on the measures of control that the sponsor of the films, and the archive currently holding them, did or did not wish to exert over their screening and other forms of publication. The following article takes issue with a line of thinking related to today’s possibilities opened up by digital technologies that propagates a so-called ‘pull’ model of digitally enabled archival access. By taking as a case study Lamster’s film records and their particular characteristics, as well as the Colonial Institute and its particular way of handling them, I argue that digital archival access, unencumbered by archival contextualizations and other forms of knowledge transfer, not only fails to exhaust the possibilities digital technology offers, but also inhibits an archive’s users from adequately and productively understanding the cultural heritage archives are supposed to safeguard.

This archive article documents the career of lightning cartoonist Erskine Williams, known as 'Little Erskine', and follows on from my previous article that gave an historical overview of this stage act, which played a central role in the development of animation. This archive article begins with Daphne Jones' own account of her father’s career. There are then a number of reproductions of the most interesting visual items within the collection. It ends with a number of excerpts from Erskine’s diaries, presenting his experiences as recorded at the time and providing a unique insight into the lightning cartoon act, music hall in general, and the arrival of moving images.