Optical magic (November 2009)

The Magic Lantern Society and the University of Westminster are presenting a second series entitled 'Professor Pepper´s Ghost': Six MORE evenings of optical magic at the old Polytechnic. The talks take place fortnightly from Thursday 12 November - Thursday 10 December 2009 and from Thursday 28 January - Thursday 25th February 2010, at The Old Cinema, University of Westminster 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW. Admission is free and talks commence at 7pm sharp. Among the talks are Who's Who of Victorian Cinema contributors Mervyn Heard, 'Phantasmagoria-mania'(12 November), Frank Gray, 'Visualising the Marvellous: G.A. Smith and his film 'Santa Claus' (1898)' (10 December), and Stephen Herbert, 'From Anorthoscope to Zoopraxiscope - an A-Z of Victorian animated cartoons'(25 February). More details from the Magic Lantern Society site.

Pacchioni at Pordenone (September 2009)

This year's Giornate del cinema muto, the festival of silent film held each year at Pordenone, Italy, including a section on Italo Pacchioni. Pacchioni was one of the pioneer of Italian cinema, producing his first films in 1896 with a camera made by himself and his brother Enrico after they failed to get their hands on a Lumière Cinématographe. Pacchioni continued making films til 1901, and experimented with stereoscopic cinema, but then bowed out of the business. Pordenone is showing eleven films, five dating 1896-1901 and six of uncertain date (details here). The festival runs 3-10 October 2009.

Pathé catalogue online (June 2009)

The Fondation Jérôme Seydoux Pathé is an organisation deciated to collecting documents and artefacts relating to the Pathé company. Its Paris-based collection includes photographs, posters, business documents, cinematograph machinery, books, periodicals, scripts, brochures, designs. Now its informative and well-illustrated website has added the start of a filmography, based on the seven-volume Pathé catalogue produced by Henri Bousquet. The filmography (in French) covers 1896-1913 so far, and lists every Pathé film year-by-year, with full descriptions (where these exist) from original catalogues and journals. It is searchable by title, person, genre and year.

Overhauling Who's Who of Victorian Cinema (May 2009)

The Who's Who of Victorian Cinema website is five years old, and we are going to have a major overhaul of the website. We welcome any suggestions for additions or improvements from interested parties as to how we can make the site more useful. We are keen to hear from potential new contributors, and to recieve ideas for new features. We are keen to make the site useful not only for those interested in early film history but for those working in Victorian studies generally. Find out more here about our plans and how to get in touch. The new version of the website will be published in late 2009.

Library of Congress on YouTube (April 2009)

The Library of Congress has launched a channel on YouTube. Among the seven playlists offering seventy videos is one dedicated the 1904 films of the Westinghouse industrial works and one dedciated to the early film productions of Thomas Edison and colleagues. So far twenty-one titles have been published, dating 1891 to 1894. All of these titles have been available online for a number of years via the Library of Congress' American Memory site, but the YouTube videos are new digitisations. Among the titles available are Leonard-Cushing Fight (1894), Sandow (1894) and Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, Jan. 7, 1894.

Visual Delights (February 2009)

The fourth Visual Delights conference, Visual Empires, will take place at the University of Sheffield between 3-5 July 2009. Popular visual cultures have been central to the construction and propagation of imperial and colonial narratives and have helped define the nature of Empire. They have been intrinsically linked to discourses about the rise and fall of Imperial fortunes in the 19th and early 20th centuries and have been studied as both evidence of imperial attitudes to race and colonial subjects and as propaganda texts which helped spread and cement imperial and colonial ideologies. This conference seeks to explore this rich visual archive and to examine the roles played by popular visual culture in the construction of narratives concerning issues of race, identity, colonial and imperial ideologies, nationalism, patriotism and the 'Visual Empire'.

Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects (February 2009)

The Ninth Biennial Conference of International Gothic Association is entitled Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects, and takes place at Lancaster University, UK, 21-24 July 2009. Subjects to be covered by the conference include Early visual technologies (phantasmagoria/ magic lantern shows/spirit photography), Gothic embodiments (staging, smoke and mirrors, automata and mechanical curiosities), Gothic on screen, Digital Gothic (web, video games, hypertext), Visualising Gothic narrative (graphic novels, comics and illustration), Monstrosities (subjects, texts, bodies, forms), Media monsters, Spectralities (subjects, spaces, environments, images) and Transgeneric crossings (cyborgs, science, fictions).

Who's Who in The Times (January 2009)

Who's Who of Victorian Cinema is proud to have been recognised by The Times, which in its 8 January 2009 edition, in its 'Daily Universal Register' section of interesting things to see and do, recommended this website to its readers. We are grateful for the honour, and hope that the notice encouraged some curious at such a strange endeavour to pay us a visit and toleave with an interesting discovery or two.