- Introduction
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Technology, Knowledge, Worldviews
- Early Modern Authority
- Feedback Patterns in 19th-Century Ideologies
- The Railroad & Photography
- Competition in the Development of R&D
- Op-Ed: The Internet and Information
- Op-Ed: Photography, Editing, and the Destabilization of Truth
- Op-Ed: The Effects of Technological Immersion
- Op-Ed: Artificial Intelligence Is a New Kind of Technological Beast
- Technology, Empire, War
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Technology, Popular Culture, Gender
- Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe
- The Trial of Marion Gage
- Nando's
- Women and Magazines in the Nineteenth Century
- Cold War Propaganda and Television
- Reproductive Repression
- Op-Ed: The Theatre Experience in the Age of Streaming
- Op-Ed: Compulsory Sterilization in Women's Prisons
- Op-Ed: The Future of Meat
- Creating Lives
- The Toolbox of Invention
- A&SC Highlights
For Further Reading
Analytical Paragraph
These are a few journal entries from Lina Toussaint, a fifteen-year-old girl who was present at the first ever public film screening. (She is, of course, fictional.) She was born in 1880 in Munich to a German mother and a French father. When Lina was quite young, her family moved to Paris. There, her father and some friends of his opened a wax museum that ended up being a huge success. The Lumière brothers were mentioned in Vanessa Schwartz's "From Journal Plastique to Journal Lumineaux" chapter from her book Spectacular Realities, but I wanted to learn more about their screening at the Grand Café, mentioned on page 185. For the majority of those who attended the screening, this was their first time seeing proper moving images. I imagined how shocking that must have been and I wanted to try and convey that mixed feeling of awe and confusion. Dennis Karwatka’s “The Lumiere Brothers and Their Motion Picture Projection Equipment,”Deac Rossell’s “A Chronology of Cinema 1889-1896,” and Luke McKernan’s “Victorian “Cinemas’” were quite helpful in obtaining additional information about the screening and the technology debuted there.
Glossary
Le Rèveillon- A meal had after midnight mass on Christmas Eve. Traditional rèvillon in Paris consists of oysters, foie gras, and a Yule log, or bûche de Noël.
Christkindlmarkt- German Christmas market
Sources
“Cinématographe.” Encyclopædia Brittanica, July 20, 1998. https://www.britannica.com/technology/Cinematographe.
“French Christmas Customs.” France in the United States: Embassy of France in Washington, D.C. (blog), November 7, 2007. https://franceintheus.org/spip.php?article557.
“French Name for Grandmother.” The Spruce (blog), December 1, 2016. https://www.thespruce.com/french-name-for-grandmother-1695373.
“German Christmas Traditions.” The German Way & More (blog), n.d. https://www.german-way.com/history-and-culture/holidays-and-celebrations/christmas/.
Karwatka, Dennis. “The Lumiere Brothers and Their Motion Picture Projection Equipment.” Tech Directions 66, no. 6 (January 2007): 10.
“Lumière Brothers.” Encyclopædia Brittanica, February 6, 2008. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lumiere-brothers.
Lumiére, Louis. The Waterer Watered/The Sprinkler Sprinkled/The Gardener. Lumiére, 1895.
Lumière, Louis. Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon. Lumière, 1895.
McKernan, Luke. “Victorian ‘Cinemas.’” Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema (blog), 2017. http://www.victorian-cinema.net/venues
.
Rossell, Deac. “A Chronology of Cinema 1889-1896.” Film History 7, no. 2 (1995): 119–78.
Schwartz, Vanessa. “From Journal Plastique to Journal Lumineaux.” In Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de Siecle Paris. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1998.