This project runs
for two years and started in Autumn 2001 when Dr John Plunkett took up his position
as Junior Research Fellow. The reserach emerges out of two specific questions
posed by the existence of the Bill
Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture:
- As a popular
entertainment medium just how much of a novelty, or break from the past, did
cinema constitute?
- How much influence
did the comparative context of other optical entertainments, such as the camera
obscura, the magic lantern, the panorama & diorama and the peep show,
have on the cinema's formation?
The Bill Douglas
Centre has been founded on a conceptual link between the cinema and pre-existing
forms of optical entertainment and visual media. It houses a collection of some
50,000 books and artefacts relating the the cinema's history and pre-history in
a combined research centre and public museum.
Particular issues
will be explored in detail, including:
- The industrial
practices and regulatory frameworks relating to the cinema and other optical
entertainments - their emergence, organisation and operation.
- The distinct
technologies on which these media were founded - the technologies economic
and social significance (i.e. did the technology itself constitute the economic
potential and attraction of the specific medium or was it primarily a delivery
system for particular kinds of images?).
- The economic
and social organisation of audiences and the consumption of these media in
both a public and a domestic context
- The dominant
aesthetic and ideological formations determining the kind of images produced
and consumed including dominant kinds of subject matter and generic categories
Two key issues
within the context of the consumption of pre-cinematic optical media will be
given particular consideration:
- The identification
and mapping of distinct public and domestic spheres of consumption. This not
only acknowledges that these media were produced for different kinds of markets
but also that the public popularity of such entertainments as the panorama,
peep show or lantern was complemented by the consumption of domestic versions
of these media. This also provides an opportune link with research into domestic
image production and consumption in the 20th century.
- The particular
history of large format and projected images from the panorama to the magic
lantern to early cinema to wide and big screen cinema formats up to and including
Imax. This foregrounds the issue of spectacle as a key element in the constitution
and functioning of popular entertainment. The organisation of large screen
spectacle also poses interesting questions concerning the organisation and
regulation of audiences and the social and psychological aspects of the spectating
process itself.
