The excitement and hilarity of the early years of filmdom are recounted by a cameraman who has been in the motion picture industry for 47 years.

A history of the Hollywood film industry as a modern system of labor, this book reveals an important untold story of an influential twentieth-century workplace. Ronny Regev argues that the Hollywood studio system institutionalized creative labor by systemizing and standardizing the work of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers, meshing artistic sensibilities with the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism. The employees of the studios emerged as a new class: they were wage laborers with enormous salaries, artists subjected to budgets and supervision, stars bound by contracts. As such, these workers--people like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and Anita Loos--were the outliers in the American workforce, an extraordinary working class. Through extensive use of oral histories, personal correspondence, studio archives, and the papers of leading Hollywood luminaries as well as their less-known contemporaries, Regev demonstrates that, as part of their contribution to popular culture, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM cultivated a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy.

The camera’s movement in a film may seem straightforward or merely technical. Yet skillfully deployed pans, tilts, dollies, cranes, and zooms can express the emotions of a character, convey attitude and irony, or even challenge an ideological stance. In The Dynamic Frame, Patrick Keating offers an innovative history of the aesthetics of the camera that examines how camera movement shaped the classical Hollywood style. In careful readings of dozens of films, including Sunrise, The Grapes of Wrath, Rear Window, Sunset Boulevard, and Touch of Evil, Keating explores how major figures such as F. W. Murnau, Orson Welles, and Alfred Hitchcock used camera movement to enrich their stories and deepen their themes. Balancing close analysis with a broader poetics of camera movement, Keating uses archival research to chronicle the technological breakthroughs and the changing division of labor that allowed for new possibilities, as well as the shifting political and cultural contexts that inspired filmmakers to use technology in new ways. An original history of film techniques and aesthetics, The Dynamic Frame shows that the classical Hollywood camera moves not to imitate the actions of an omniscient observer but rather to produce the interplay of concealment and revelation that is an essential part of the exchange between film and viewer.

Well illustrated book on history of silent movies

On the age of silent movies

Includes Part 1, Number 1: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals (January - June)

"This monograph is a study in the use of film as historical evidence. It is based on films and film scripts as well as on more traditional forms of evidence. The subject comprises those motion pictures that concerned the American World War I experience, although the focus could be on any historical topic that has both accumulated a considerable historiography and has been extensively treated on celluloid. The study is divided into five sections, following an introductory chapter on the widespread popularity of film in the interwar period. Part one discusses in general the relationship between films and history. It provides a background for succeeding chapters by relegating aesthetic film criticism to s position of secondary importance and advocating traditional historical methodology as the most rewarding approach to the examination of history in films. Part two discusses 'factual' films of World War I, including documentaries, and newsreels. Part three is concerned with the nature of the war as it appeared on American screens. Included are treatments of democracy and war, war-as-adventure, and war as a promoter of pacifism. Part four is an analysis of the imagery of the war film as it concerned the enemy, the ally, and the American homefront. Part five treats other varieties of the war experience. In includes chapters on screen views of women in war and war humor"--Abstract