Bøker av Luke McKernan

This book is a carefully selected, thematically arranged collection of eyewitness accounts of seeing motion pictures - from the 1890s to the present day, and from countries across the globe.Included here are essays, diaries, memoirs, travel accounts, oral history interviews, poems and extracts from novels. These verbatim accounts - from both professional and amateur writers - have been selected not only for what they tell us about the historical experience of cinema in many countries, but for their literary value. It is evocative testimony that shows how deeply cinema touches emotional needs, and the huge impact that the cinema has had on modern society.One-hundred and fourteen carefully selected excerpts are organized thematically into six evocatively-titled sections: 'First Encounters', 'Audiences', 'Places', 'Players', 'Reality', and 'Fears and Desires'. We find a host of everyday voices responding to cinema - Rudolf Rocker, anarchist; Li Hung-fu, Chinese villager; James Malone, wrestler; George Jordan, policeman; 'Negro male student in High School, age 17'. Amongst these are interspersed the insights of more familiar names - Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig, George Orwell, J.M. Coetzee, Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen, J.B. Priestley, John Osborne, J.G. Ballard, D.H. Lawrence, Roland Barthes and Arnold Schwarzenegger.Twenty-one images complement the text by illustrating different ways in which films have been viewed, from battlefield cinemas to infrared studies of child audiences, from Madagascar to Vietnam, from Cinerama to virtual reality.While most film history studies put films or those who produce them first, Picturegoers puts the voices of the audience first. It analyses and celebrates the audience's point of view, shaped by time, experience and place, providing a rich, entertaining portrait of a medium that became so transformative precisely because anyone, rich or poor, educated or not, could share in it.Frank Cottrell-Boyce's pieceA Love Letter to Cinema, written for BBC Radio 4'sTodayprogramme (May 2021),and broadcast just as cinema emerged from lockdown, provides a fitting coda to the book - affirming the importance of cinema as a collectivecultural experience.The book will appeal to scholars interested in the relationship between cinema and society, those engaged in audience studies, and general readers interested in world cinema history.

Charles Urban was a renowned figure in his time, and he has remained a name in film history chiefly for his development of Kinemacolor, the world's first successful natural colour moving picture system. He was also a pioneer in the filming of war, science, travel, actuality and news, a fervent advocate of the value of film as an educative force, and a controversial but important innovator of film propaganda in wartime.The book uses Urban's story as a means of showing how the non-fiction film developed in the period 1897-1925, and the dilemmas that it faced within a cinema culture in which the entertainment fiction film was dominant. Urban's solutions - some successful, some less so - illustrate the groundwork that led to the development of documentary film. The book considers the roles of film as informer, educator and generator of propaganda, and the social and aesthetic function of colour in the years when cinema was still working out what it was capable of and how best to reach audiences.Luke McKernan also curates a web resource on Charles Urban at www.charlesurban.com