The Dream That Kicks

Science and film-making

“…It is historically contingent, situated in time and space, and neither Janssen, Marey, Muybridge nor their audiences experienced it 'as [a milestone] on the way to twentieth-century cinema' (Morus, 2006: 104). Nonetheless, in the 1890s, Edison and the Lumière Brothers built on chronophotography to produce what eventually became entertainment cinema, and a source of profit (Chanan, 1996). Part of their strategy was to emphasise cinema's scientific origin, capitalising on the taste of the day for combinations of entertainment and edification (Morus, 2006).…”

Listening in combat – surveillance technologies beyond the visual in the First World War

“…Just as cinema came to embody sound in its visual operations by the 1930s, so did aural technologies from telecommunications broaden the sensory spectrum of military epistemology a decade earlier. 38 Overall our approach to analyzing extended modes of listening epitomizes the cumulative integration of the senses in modern technologies and thus in correlated developments in modern psychology too. As reviewers of this issue have helpfully pointed out to us, just as military and civilian activities are no longer fully separable (if they ever were before), so we can see that the sensorium of sound and sight were not siloed separate senses: they co-evolved and complemented each other.…”

Flicker Alley: Cecil Court and the Emergence of the British Film Industry

“…In this respect agglomeration can ensure that 'firms, workers and suppliers know, and are accustomed to, the ways in which business is conducted'. 8 Michael Chanan noted that 'Cecil Court became the site of the first concentration of film businesses in one location' [my emphasis], 9 and through this concentration it became the site for the localisation economy of the film trade. Significantly the companies that moved into Cecil Court were almost exclusively new film companies which grew up within the emerging film industry, as opposed to the Holborn companies which were already in existence and which adapted.…”