The Projectionists
The Projectionists

Author: Stephen Barber

Publisher: Diaphanes

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783035802894

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Eadweard Muybridge is among the seminal originators of the contemporary world's visual form, with its concentrated image-sequences of bodies in movement and its ocular obsessions. This book examines an almost unknown dimension of Muybridge's work, as a moving-image projectionist, who toured Europe's cities to enthral beyond-capacity audiences with unprecedented projections and who built a moving-image auditorium - long before cinemas were created - in which to project his work at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. That final invention of Muybridge's was both an all-engulfing catastrophe and the vital precursor for the following century's worldwide manias for projection. Based on entirely new research into Muybridge's travels, audiences, auditoria and projectors, this book explores his initiating role in moving-image projection and also maps Muybridge's driving inspiration for subsequent artists and filmmakers preoccupied with the volatile entity of projection, from 1890s Berlin to contemporary Japan, via further spectacular World's Exposition events and cinemas' overheated projection-boxes. The book looks closely at the enigmatic figure of the moving-image projectionist, from its origins in Muybridge's experiments, across glass, celluloid and digital projections, to the contemporary moment. Moving-image projection formed a crucial determinant in the imagining of new corporealities and new urban spaces, through its irrepressible capacity to envision future bodies and cities. The cinema projectionist - a solitary figure of compulsion and restlessness, inhabiting a profession touched with the multiple addictions and deaths of the moving image - was once a pivotal presence for global cinema audiences but is now consigned to near-obsolescence. The book investigates contemporary urban projections as aberrant manifestations derived from Muybridge's first conjurations of projection's power for its spectators. Throughout, the book interrogates.

Practices of Projection
Practices of Projection

Author: Gabriel Menotti

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0190934115

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To many, the technological aspects of projection often go unnoticed, only brought to attention during moments of crisis or malfunction. For example, when a movie theater projector falters, the audience suddenly looks toward the back of the theater to see a sign of mechanical failure. The history of cinema similarly shows that the attention to projection has been most focused when the whole medium is hanging in suspension. During Hollywood's economic consolidation in the '30s, projection defined the ways that sync-sound technologies could be deployed within the medium. Most recently, the digitization of cinema repeated this process as technology was reworked to facilitate mobility. These examples show how projection continually speaks to the rearrangement of media technology. Projection therefore needs to be examined as a pivotal element in the future of visual media's technological transition. In Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies, volume editors Gabriel Menotti and Virginia Crisp address the cultural and technological significance of projection. Throughout the volume, chapters reiterate that projection cannot, and must not, be reduced to its cinematic functions alone. Borrowing media theorist Siegfried Zielinksi's definition, Menotti and Crisp refer to projection as the "heterogeneous array of artefacts, technical systems, and particularly visual praxes of experimentation and of culture." From this, readers can understand the performative character of the moving image and the labor of the different actors involved in the utterance of the film text. Projection is not the same everywhere, nor equal all the time. Its systems are in permanent interaction with environmental circumstances, neighboring structures, local cultures, and social economies. Thus the idea of projection as a universal, fully autonomous operation cannot hold. Each occurrence of projection adds nuance to a wider understanding of film screening technologies.

Reel Change
Reel Change

Author: Richard Wallace

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2022-08-16

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 0861969839

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Ten years ago, a technological revolution swept through cinemas around the world, as analogue projectors were replaced with digital equipment. It was not just the plastic medium of film that was removed from projection boxes during this transformation; most cinemas took this opportunity to also evict the human projectionists who were hitherto in charge of screenings. Projectionists had been hidden from the sight of audiences for most of the history of photographic moving image projection, and their redundancies went largely unnoticed and unremarked upon. This book focuses attention on what has been happening behind film spectators' heads for the past 130 years, and attempts to write the history of cinema in Britain from the perspective of its habitually overlooked and undervalued projectionists, beginning in the silent era and continuing to the present day. Drawing upon extensive archival research and lengthy interviews with former projectionists, it documents the key facets and challenges of their work, and how these evolved in response to previous waves of significant technological change. It evaluates how projectionists helped to design and maintain key aesthetic characteristics of the 20th century big screen experience. It shows how the institution of cinema in Britain has been historically underpinned by the harsh exploitation of projectionists by many employers, detailing inadequate wage levels and poor working conditions that formerly provoked government investigation, and explaining why these problems were never successfully ameliorated by trade unions. It also charts in depth the recent fateful transition to digital projection, delineating how and why projectionists were so swiftly and ruthlessly consigned to the past, and assessing whether this form of entertainment should be considered diminished by their super session.

Congressional Record
Congressional Record

Author: United States. Congress

Publisher:

Published: 1970

Total Pages: 1226

ISBN-13:

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The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)

The Performing Arts in Contemporary China
The Performing Arts in Contemporary China

Author: Colin Mackerras

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-05

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1136573577

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First published in 1981. The overthrow of the 'gang of four' in October 1976 had profound effects in all areas of Chinese society, and probably nowhere can this be more clearly seen than in the performing arts. Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's widow, was strongly interested in the performing arts and exercised great influence over them. This book describes her influence and the effects its removal had on the arts. Although the period covered is mainly that since the death of Mao, there is also considerable reference to the years following the Cultural Revolution.