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Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative

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This is an incredibly informative and interesting collection of essays exploring the beginnings of cinema from a mixture of perspectives. While attention is paid to social history and the material conditions of early films, apparatus and venues, most of these essays also do a fine job of theorizing cinematic narrative. Often, books on silent film offer only a contextul and historical analysis, often because critics think of the early cinema as "primitive." These essays take these early films on their own terms and read them suggestively. As a result, this volume allows film scholars and anyone interested in early film to see how the lessons and experiments of silents not only contributed to but often predicted and surpassed the "classical" cinema's traditional notion of what cinematic narrative could and should be.