Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames: The Art of Early European Cinema

Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames explores the intermedial context of early cinema, revealing how it interacted with other art forms such as painting, theater, and photography to establish itself as an artistic medium. It argues that the long nineteenth century was a period of Bourgeois Realism, which influenced the visual and narrative strategies of early European feature films.

Format: Unspecified
Length: 224 pages
Publication date: 30 November 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Sheds new light on the late 19th and early 20th century's cultural context

Innovatively brings together different media, their artistic traditions, and their respective theoretical and discursive paradigms

Presents an alternative history of early European cinema by analyzing it from an inclusive art historical perspective

Thoroughly explores the first European feature films cinematic form and function

Velvet Curtains and Gilded Frames explores the intermedial context of early cinema.

It tackles the first European feature films intricate relationship with its sister arts to reveal that the period referred to by historians as the long nineteenth century was one in which Bourgeois Realism reigned supreme.

The nineteenth-century rise of the middle class coincided with realism becoming the dominant artistic mode in both form and content, leading to a revival of genre painting in the art academies; the supremacy of the social melodrama on the stage; and the advent of Pictorialism in photography.

In its quest for artistic legitimacy, European filmmakers sought to win over middle-class audiences with films based on popular works of art - the first art films - by employing similar visual and narrative strategies as its artistic counterparts.

Weight: 490g
Dimension: 161 x 242 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474406987