A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, lntertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s (Charles Musser)

Latest addition to the Library page at Unspoken Cinema:

"To examine the many connections between early film and painting enables us to explore the ways that cinema often times embraced the principles of detached contemplation. These affinities were foregrounded in the museum exhibition Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880-1910, in which curator Nancy Mathews identified a wide variety of visual rhymes involving specific films and specific art works, suggesting that some early films were conceived as paintings that move (thus the title of her exhibition -"Moving Pictures")."

Charles Musser; A Cinema of Contemplation, A Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, lntertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s (2006)