Provenance and Early Cinema (Early Cinema in Review: Proceedings of Domitor)

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. Cover 1 Title page 4 Copy right 5 Contents 6 Domitor Series – Précis 12 Introduction: Provenance and Early Cinema: From Preservation and Collection to Circulation and Repurposing 14 Part I. Studying Provenance: From Analog to Digital 32 1. Film Provenance: A Framework for Analysis 34 2. Origins: Early Films and Archival Collections 45 3. From Provenience to Provenance: The Kerstrat-d’hauterives Collection 58 4. Provenance and Film Historiography: 1910s Films at the George Eastman Museum 70 5. Issues of Provenance and Attribution for the Canon: Bookending Robert Paul 81 6. Shattered Provenance in the Digitization of Early Colorfilms 91 Part II. Preservation and Collection 102 7. Dreaming in Color: The Image and the Artifact 104 8. Where Did the Costumes in Early Cinema Come From? 117 9. Thinking With Provenance: Drawing Trajectories in the Francis Doublier Collection at the George Eastman Museum 129 10. Revisiting the Films of Albert Kahn’s Archives De La Planète: a Material Survey 140 11. The Thanhouser Studio Filmography: Analysis and Extant Prints 154 12. The Great War at Scale: New Opportunities for Provenance in World War I Collections at the National Archives (Nara) 166 Part III. Circulation 178 13. Chicago’s “censored Casualties” and the Provenance of Archive Prints 180 14. What Made the Mechanicals Move? Postcards in Transit 190 15. “The End of a Foreign Monopoly”: Bausch and Lomb and the Wartime Provenance of Optical Glass 203 16. Pathé Films in Brazil: The Archives of Marc Ferrez & Sons (1908–1916) 214 17. Establishing the Provenance of Early Advertising Films: Film Catalogs and the Creation of the Nontheatrical Market 225 18. A Journey on the World’s Most Northerly Railway: The Renaming and Remaking of Swedish Industrial Films 234 19. In Search of “The Edison Biograph Company”: Film History through Philippine Archives 247 20. Ownership, Exploitation, Stewardship: Tracking the Footage of the 1911–1913 Australian Antarctic Expedition 258 Part IV. Repurposing 270 21. Finding Early Cinema in the Avant-Garde: Research and Investigation 272 22. Ernie Gehr’s The Collector (2003) and Ernie Gehr the Collector 286 23. Flicker: Thom Andersen Takes Muybridge to the Movies 298 24. Provenance on Ice: Dawson City: Frozen Time and the Dawson City Collection 316 25. Praxis as Media Historiography: The Peep Box’s “expanding View” as Virtual Reality 328 26. How Newspaper Novels and Their Illustrations Shaped Japanese Films 340 27. Archival Object or Object Lesson? Bricolage as Process and as Concept in the Edmundo Padilla Collection 351 Appendix: French Language Essay 364 28. La Collection De Kerstrat-d’hauterives, De Sa Provenience À Sa Provenance 364 Appendix: French Language Essay 376 29. D’où Viennent Les Costumes Du Cinéma Des Premiers Temps? 376 Appendix: Dryden Theatre Screening Program 388 Index 418 "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 -- Contracubierta