Lost Visionary now available as ebook at last!
Only took eleven years!
Only took eleven years!
At long last, The Lost Visionary will be available on Amazon as a Kindle book. Pub date is August 14, 2014, but you can pre-order the book now here.
A great article-length bio about Buster Keaton by Loren Kantor on Spice Today.
Why write about Buster Keaton in a blog dedicated to early cinema and Alice Guy? Because Herbert Blaché, Alice's husband, directed a few films in Hollywood before the transition to sound, and one of them was The Saphead, the first feature film starring Buster Keaton.
One thing that is true of all early cinema, silent cinema, and early talkies: without preservation and conservation, the films eventually disintegrate. That's if we even know where they are to begin with.
Alice Guy was born on July 1, 1873, in a Parisian suburb. It was the first day in what would be an incredible, adventurous, and ground-breaking life.
For a complete chronology of her life and accomplishements, go here.
While doing research for a chapter on the Third Annual New York Exhibitors Ball of 1913 for Inventing the Movies, I had a sudden insight.
The New York Exhibitors Ball of 1913, third of its kind, was an event of extraordinary liminality, a crossroad between the old and new worlds of the cinema that even the thousands of film manufacturers and fans were probably not aware of at the time.
British Pathé Archive has put much of its archives online. This is a great bonanza for early film fans.
For example, you can see pre-1910 footage here:
— Nearly 100 years after the death of silent film star Florence La Badie, a headstone with her name has been unveiled at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.