Books by Colin Williamson
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This book explores why audiences have invoked "magic" and "trickery" to explain cinematic illusio... more This book explores why audiences have invoked "magic" and "trickery" to explain cinematic illusions throughout film history. Broadly, I situate film within a long tradition of magical practices that combine art and science, involve deception and discovery, and evoke two forms of wonder—both awe at the illusion displayed and curiosity about how it was performed. I thus consider how, even as they mystify audiences, cinematic illusions also inspire them to learn more about the technologies and techniques behind moving images. Tracing the overlaps between the worlds of magic and filmmaking, I examine how professional illusionists and their tricks have been represented onscreen, while also considering stage magicians who have stepped behind the camera, from Georges Méliès to Ricky Jay.
Using a media-archaeological approach I investigate how the cinema has functioned as a “device of wonder” for more than a century, while also exploring how several key filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, employ the rhetoric of magic. Examining pre-cinematic visual culture, animation, nonfiction film, and the digital trickery of today’s CGI spectacles, the book offers a new perspective on the many powerful ways that magic has shaped our modes of perception and our experiences of the cinema.
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Papers by Colin Williamson
Thinking in the Dark
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Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film
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The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 2019
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Hidden in Plain Sight, 2019
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Philosophies
From the 1910s through the 1930s, the American naturalist and photographer Arthur C. Pillsbury ma... more From the 1910s through the 1930s, the American naturalist and photographer Arthur C. Pillsbury made time-lapse and microscopic films documenting what he, in common parlance, called the “miracles of plant life”. While these films are now mostly lost, they were part of Pillsbury’s prolific work as a conservationist and traveling film lecturer who used his cameras everywhere from Yosemite National Park to Samoa to promote both public understanding of plants and a desire to protect the natural world. Guiding this work was Pillsbury’s belief that the nonhuman optics of the film camera, which revealed the animacy of plants, could also incite viewers to sympathize with them. In the context of the early American conservation movement, that sympathy stemmed in complicated ways from longstanding transcendental and pastoral ideas of nature that were entangled with imperialist visions of controlling nature. With an eye to that context, I show that Pillsbury’s filmmaking was not simply about usi...
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Hamlet Lives in Hollywood, 2017
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New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2022
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Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies/revue d'études interculturelle de l'image, 2018
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This book explores why audiences have invoked "magic" and "trickery&am... more This book explores why audiences have invoked "magic" and "trickery" to explain cinematic illusions throughout film history. Broadly, I situate film within a long tradition of magical practices that combine art and science, involve deception and discovery, and evoke two forms of wonder—both awe at the illusion displayed and curiosity about how it was performed. I thus consider how, even as they mystify audiences, cinematic illusions also inspire them to learn more about the technologies and techniques behind moving images. Tracing the overlaps between the worlds of magic and filmmaking, I examine how professional illusionists and their tricks have been represented onscreen, while also considering stage magicians who have stepped behind the camera, from Georges Méliès to Ricky Jay. Using a media-archaeological approach I investigate how the cinema has functioned as a “device of wonder” for more than a century, while also exploring how several key filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, employ the rhetoric of magic. Examining pre-cinematic visual culture, animation, nonfiction film, and the digital trickery of today’s CGI spectacles, the book offers a new perspective on the many powerful ways that magic has shaped our modes of perception and our experiences of the cinema.
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This chapter examines John Barrymore’s performance as the titular character in Sherlock Holmes (1... more This chapter examines John Barrymore’s performance as the titular character in Sherlock Holmes (1922), focusing on the reception of Barrymore’s performance as the titular title character. The chapter shows how Barrymore’s star image was taking shape at the same time as the Holmes character was being adapted to visual culture. Barrymore’s performance is explored in the context of Sherlock Holmes as an adaptation.
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Film History, 2019
ABSTRACT:This article sheds light on the films of a now-obscure popular science film-maker named ... more ABSTRACT:This article sheds light on the films of a now-obscure popular science film-maker named John Ott who was widely known in the 1950s for making time-lapse films about plant life that intersected with everything in postwar America from Walt Disney’s animations to computer science and natural theology. Drawing on original archival research, I show how Ott used the spectacle of nature to cultivate popular interest in the innovative automated moving-image techniques and technologies he developed to photograph the secrets of nature. In the process, I consider how Ott reanimated early cinematic aesthetic, exhibition, and reception practices that invite us to see the popular science film as a genre that is as much about exploring the nature and possibilities of new moving-image forms as it is about science education.
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The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, 2016
It is undeniable that digital technologies are dramatically reemphasizing the importance of film ... more It is undeniable that digital technologies are dramatically reemphasizing the importance of film archives to the study of early cinema. Large-scale digitization of film elements, such as the Turconi Collection Database, and of periodicals, such as the Media History Digital Library, is expanding access to the early history of the cinema. As new collections of materials are being discovered and others are becoming newly available, expectations about how deeply we can explore this history are changing. For film scholars, the implications of these changes are significant as cinema studies transitions from a celluloid past to a digital future. Recognizing that the vast majority of silent films are lost, unsalvageable, or deteriorating rapidly, noncelluloid objects are increasingly central to understanding this period. A major resource from this perspective has been the Paper Print Collection (PPC) at the Library of Congress. The collection consists of complete visual representations of films that were deposited at the Library as the copyright records for films made primarily between 1894 and 1912. The paper prints hold a prominent place in scholarship on early cinema in part because Kemp Niver’s seminal catalog, published in 1967, brought the collection firmly within the purview of film historiography. The understandable interest garnered by the complete films in the PPC, however, has contributed to the obscurity of an equally rich archive of related copyright materials known as the paper print fragments. As Packard Humanities Institute director Patrick Loughney explains, unlike the complete records of films in the PPC, the less familiar paper fragments consist “of selected positive images printed from each scene of the original camera negative on short 35mm photographic paper strips.” Here “fragment” does not refer to specific “incomplete” archival prints of films but rather a method of submitting static images to the Library for the purpose of copyrighting individual films. Understanding precisely what fragments were submitted from year to year and by whom is difficult because of the significant amount of terminological confusion surrounding them. References to “fragments,” “prints,” “copies,” “reels,” and “rolls” all crop up in the language used to describe the copyright system and its components. However, some of what was expected for copyrighting is clarified by the actual copyright application form instructions for submitting a “Motion Picture Photoplay” following a 1912 change in copyright law:
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Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2014
acting and demonstrates the necessity of analyzing it through its contemporary reception rather t... more acting and demonstrates the necessity of analyzing it through its contemporary reception rather than using retrospective criteria. Queen of the Movies inspires and motivates to conduct research about Mary Pickford, in part thanks to the beautiful illustrations. They give an overview of the available archival material, including film stills, posters, and costumes. The photos of Pickford’s costumes, here to be seen for the first time (as far as I know) gives one an impression of the importance of costumes in silent film. The article by Beth Werling about the use of these costumes is very informative, but there is still a lot of work to be done to put them and others from this era (if available) into different contexts and to analyze their narrative (among other) value. Queen of the Movies is also well supported by new media (including a Twitter account, Facebook page, screening events etc.) that makes a concerted effort to put Mary Pickford back on today’s map of cinema culture for those scholars and cinephiles interested in film history. It should inspire more work about one of the most fascinating and most important film makers of the silent era.
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Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2015
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Animation, 2011
This article explores the history of early animation and modern magic in light of discourses on t... more This article explores the history of early animation and modern magic in light of discourses on the cinema’s capacities for bringing inanimate objects (including the still photograph) to life. The cinema’s early encounter with a metamorphic magic book known as a blow book, which is constructed like a flip book without sequential imagery, will be considered in order to specify the terms of one form of animation and its structures of illusion and belief. The principles of modern magic will also be addressed to explain the significance of a number of trick films that featured the blow book directly as a means of demonstrating the animating ‘powers’ of the cinema. This analysis will challenge the use of animation as an umbrella concept within cinema and media studies, and provide a basis for beginning to think through the return of new media studies to 19th-century magic as a model for understanding digital illusions.
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New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2022
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The Many Cinemas of Michael Curtiz
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Books by Colin Williamson
Using a media-archaeological approach I investigate how the cinema has functioned as a “device of wonder” for more than a century, while also exploring how several key filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, employ the rhetoric of magic. Examining pre-cinematic visual culture, animation, nonfiction film, and the digital trickery of today’s CGI spectacles, the book offers a new perspective on the many powerful ways that magic has shaped our modes of perception and our experiences of the cinema.
Papers by Colin Williamson
Using a media-archaeological approach I investigate how the cinema has functioned as a “device of wonder” for more than a century, while also exploring how several key filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese, employ the rhetoric of magic. Examining pre-cinematic visual culture, animation, nonfiction film, and the digital trickery of today’s CGI spectacles, the book offers a new perspective on the many powerful ways that magic has shaped our modes of perception and our experiences of the cinema.