Making Movies into Art Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood

Focusing on early cinema's relationship with the pictorial arts, this pioneering study explores how cinema's emergence was grounded in theories of picture composition, craft and arts education – from magic lantern experiments in 1890s New York through to early Hollywood feature films in the 1920s.

Challenging received notions that the advent of cinema was a celebration of mechanisation and a radical rejection of nineteenth-century traditions of representation, Kaveh Askari instead emphasises the overlap between craft traditions and modernity in early film.

Opening up valuable new perspectives on the history of film as art, Askari links American silent cinema with the practice of teaching the public how to appreciate fine art; charts its entrance into arts education via art schools and university film courses;
shows how concepts of artistic production entered films through a material interest in the studio; and examines the way in which Maurice Tourneur and Rex Ingram made early art films by shaping an image of the film director around the idea of the fine artist.

Kaveh Askari is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Western Washington University, USA. He is the author of numerous articles on early cinema.

IntroductionRewinding art cinema
Situating cinema among the other arts
Craft, picture, movement
Aesthetic appreciation and the modernity of picture craft
Chapter organization

1. Moving Picture Art before Cinema: Alexander Black and the Lyceum

Introductory section
1a:
The amateur and the institute
The detective lecture and the instantaneous tableau
From the horse in motion to man in motion
1b:
Picture play aesthetics: still pictures as moving pictures
Picture play reception: art cinema without the cinematograph
Conclusion: a history without an invention
2. Moving Pictures Imagine the Artist's Studio

The mise-en-scène of the studio
The moving image jumps the frame
Trilbyana: Transformation and absorption
Lejaren à Hiller's Never-Told Tales of a Studio
A lesson in studio life: The Sleep of Cyma Roget
Tri-Art Picture Company: From Trilbyana to art history
Conclusion: Patchwork methods, common goal

3. Cinema Composition: The University and the Industry

Picture study: from the art lecture to the film lecture
Movement, contemplation, and the 'tableau'
Managing pictures: the economics of film spectatorship
Beyond the tableau: inscribing movement
Conclusion: Moving pictures and new tendencies

4. Painting with Human Beings: Maurice Tourneur as Art-Film Director

In the atelier of Puvis
Quality film, imported filmmakers
The Blue Bird: from the Yellow Book to the yellow press
Conclusion: Tourneur after 1920

5. Rex Ingram's Art School Cinema

In the teaching studio
From exceptional style to cross-media appreciation
Scaramouche, or convergence
Conclusion: The limits of exceptional films

Conclusion: Moving Forward from the Slow Movie

Bibliography

Index