The Muybridge Bequest (October 2004)

The Projection Box has published Eadweard Muybridge: The Kingston Museum Bequest. Eadweard Muybridge donated and bequeathed an important collection of his work to the the Royal Borough of Kingston, the town where he was born and where he died in 1904. The book, published to accompany an exhibition at Kingston Museum, gives details of the collection and is richly illustrated with examples of Muybridge's sequence photographs at Palo Alto, the Animal Locomotion sequences of humans and animals taken at the University of Pennsylvania, and beautiful illustration from the moving image discs used in his Zoöpraxiscope projector. The editor, Stephen Herbert, contributes an essay based on extensive new research concerning Muybridge's lectures and Zoöpraxiscope discs. For further details, click here.

Giornate del Cinema Muto (August 2004)

The programme for the annual festival of silent film, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, traditionally held at Pordenone in Italy but currently hosted by the nearby town of Sacile, has been announced. Themes for this year include Dziga Vertov, Britain's 'Forgotten Men' (including Anthony Asquith), the eighth year of the D.W. Griffith Project (a project to show all of Griffith's surviving films, running over a number of years), filmmakers in New Jersey (including Alice Guy, arguably the world's first woman filmmaker), the conclusion of the Mitchell & Kenyon project featuring restorations from the National Film and Television Archive, and silent filmmaking today. The festival runs 9-16 October. For further details, visit the festival website.

Transit of Venus (June 2004)

8 June 2004 sees the transit of Venus across the Sun, the first time that this event has been witnessed from Earth since 1882. On 8 December 1874 the transit was recorded by the French astronomer Jules Janssen using a multi-expsoure camera of his own invention. Janssen's clockwork 'revolver' took forty-eight exposures in seventy-two seconds on a daguerrotype disc. Janssen's work in turn greatly influenced the chronophotographic experiments of E-J. Marey and served as part of the technological chain that lead to the full invention of cinematography. Janssen's images can be viewed on the Anima website, while the photographic sequences taken by Professor David Peck Todd (pictured) in 1882 can be seen in animated form at SkyandTelescope.com

Azerbaijan's first filmmaker (March 2004)

The launch of the Who's Who of Victorian Cinema website has seen a flurry of new information being offered by users. Among the most interesting is news of A.H. Mishon, Azerbaijan's first filmmaker. Previously unknown to early film historians, and not even known about in his native land until 1996, Mishon was a French-born photographer who had been a photographer in Baku for many years before bringing a Lumière Cinématographe to the town in 1898, where he gave a show of locally-filmed scenes (including oil fires and a comedy filmed in a local park) on 2 August. His films were subsequently featured at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900.

Launch of Who's Who of Victorian Cinema website (February 2004)

A website based on the 1996 publication Who's Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey, edited by Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan, went live on 22 February 2004. The website, available at www.victorian-cinema.net, reproduces all of the original book, with nearly 300 biographies of Victorian film pioneers, and adds a number of new names as well as additional features and background resources. The entries have been written by twenty-six contributors from around the world, and further contributions are being actively sought by the editors. The site includes a number of new features, including illustrations of types of Victorian film technology and a Resources section.

Has Le Prince been found? (January 2004)

A Yorkshire Television programme, Inside Out, may have solved the 114-year mystery of what happened to Louis Augustin Aimé Le Prince, arguably the first person to take a motion picture film. Le Prince disappeared after catching a train from Dijon to Paris on 16 September 1890. Retired detective Robert Taylor, employed by the programme, located Paris police records which record the body of a man taken from the Seine at this date. A photograph exists which bears a strong resemblance to Le Prince. It cannot be said with certainty that the Le Prince mystery has been solved, but it does now seem very likely that he died from drowning soon after his disappearance.