Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema

By Charles Kahn

Book Overview

The early years of film were dominated by competition between inventors in America and France, especially Thomas Edison and the Lumi re brothers . But while these have generally been considered the foremost pioneers of film, they were not the only crucial figures in its inception. Telling the story of the white-hot years of filmmaking in the 1890s, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema seeks to restore Robert Paul, Britain's most important early innovator in film, to his rightful place.

From improving upon Edison's Kinetoscope to cocreating the first movie camera in Britain to building England's first film studio and launching the country's motion-picture industry, Paul played a key part in the history of cinema worldwide. It's not only Paul's story, however, that historian Ian Christie tells here. Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema also details the race among inventors to develop lucrative technologies and the jumbled culture of patent-snatching, showmanship, and music halls that prevailed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both an in-depth biography and a magnificent look at early cinema and fin-de-si cle Britain, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema is a first-rate cultural history of a fascinating era of global invention, and the revelation of one of its undervalued contributors.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226105628
• ISBN13: 9780226105628
• Release Date: December 2019
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 1.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

New Ideas! New Thinking and New Research!

The brief book is a real gem for those looking for ideas on how to best do church in a changing culture. I am the pastor of a young church in New York City and we studied this book as a team. The chapters are brief, tied directly to local churches who are doing it and full of in your face questions to get you thinking. The chapters on 'team teaching' and 'church the city' (vs. being one church in a city) were very challenging...