Description
Book SynopsisAriel Rogers rethinks the history of moving images by exploring how experiments with screen technologies in and around the 1930s changed the way films were produced, exhibited, and experienced. She challenges conventional narratives about the novelty of the twenty-first-century multiscreen environment.
Trade ReviewThere is no other book remotely like this.
On the Screen is original in the material it unearths and discusses, offering an innovative history of film and technology. It strikes an easy balance between big ideas and focused analysis, addressing unmapped screen dynamics as crucial elements of cinema. -- Haidee Wasson, author of
Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art CinemaOffering an extensive and systematic exploration of screen practices in the 1930s, Ariel Rogers recharacterizes this seemingly solid, coherent era by analyzing its multiplicity and heterogeneity. The screen becomes a kaleidoscopic reality. -- Francesco Casetti, author of
The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to ComeFilm theory's classic question "What is cinema?" often gets a (stereo)typical answer around the idea that movies exist when projected on standard screens in theaters. With her well-known and lauded attention to archival research, Ariel Rogers revises this received account of cinema and essentially rewrites it from the ground up. This is a rich and rewarding study that combines sharp scholarship with compelling new interpretation to change the field. -- Dana Polan, New York University
A thoroughly documented account of the broad culture of synchronicity in screen culture over the long 1930s. * Choice *
On the Screen is a major achievement that insists on screen technology as an integral component of film history. * Technology and Culture *
Rogers’s detailed and impressively supported account of how film screen technologies have proliferated is a timely and relevant study. * Film Criticism *
Rogers provides a vivid sense of the historical particularity of screens in the long 1930s. * Film Quarterly *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Production Screens in the Long 1930s: Rear Projection and Special Effects
2. Theatrical Screens, 1926–1931: Transforming the Screen
3. Theatrical Screens, 1931–1940: Integrating the Screen
4. Extratheatrical Screens in the Long 1930s: Film and Television at Home and in Transit
Coda: Multiplicity, Immersion, and the New Screens
Notes
Bibliography
Index
