‘Cinema’ Archives
Film Music
Film Music Though the first cinema films had no sound track, the early picture palaces were not silent. To blot out noise from the projector and the audience and also to create atmosphere, a piano, organ or band, sometimes with many instrumentalists, nearly always provided music. The music was often extemporized or adapted from a stock [...]
Saint Louis Blues
Saint Louis Blues Saint Louis Blues (1929), a two-reel short written by William C. Handy and Kenneth W. Adams, was one of the first talking films with an all-black cast. It featured several influential actors and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance and contains the only existing footage of the singer Bessie Smith. The plot of the film, which [...]
Avant-garde Cinema
Avant-garde Cinema The British avant-garde film movement surfaced in the late 1960s when it was stimulated by the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC) and by American influences such as Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. Key figures in Britain included Steve Dwoskin, Andy Meyer, David Curtis, Peter Gidal, Malcolm Le Grice and [...]
Sean Connery
Sean Connery One of the few British actors who can sell a film on name alone, Sean Connery was born Thomas Connery in Fountainbridge, a working-class suburb of Edinburgh. Always identified with the role of James Bond, his career began in British B-Movies in the 1950s, and it was not until David Niven refused the role of Bond in Dr No (1962) [...]
Rock Hudson
Rock Hudson (Schere, Roy, Jr.) (1925-1985) As the independent movie Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) argues, Hudson’s career represents a telling lie embedded within American culture. Tall, handsome Hudson romanced Doris Day in sitcoms writ large, while other romantic roles made him a popular male actor in film and television. At the same [...]
Chuck Jones
Chuck Jones (1912-2002) Chuck Jones is an American motion-picture animator, writer, director, and producer, known for his work on many classic animated films. Charles Martin Jones was born in Spokane, Washington. He moved to California when he was a child and at the age of 15 enrolled in the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. After [...]
MOMI
MOMI The Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) is situated within the BFI’s South Bank complex, promoting British film and television culture. Established in 1988, MOMI charts the development of moving images from pre-cinema experiments in photographic projection and optical illusion to today’s industrialized and commercialized film and [...]
The Bicentennial Man
“The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov (1976) The majority of Isaac ASIMOV’s robot stories are clever intellectual puzzles or problems in logic, and even though his mechanical characters are technically self aware, they rarely seem like people. The biggest exception to this rule is in fact one of his most polished and remarkable [...]
Arthur Penn
Arthur Penn Arthur Penn was an American director of both motion pictures and stage productions, known for portraying the ways outsiders reflect the values of society. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a family of Russian-Jewish descent, Penn learned the family trade of watchmaking at a young age. After serving in the United States Army [...]
Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise Cruise, Tom (1962- ), American motion-picture actor, who became a celebrity in the 1980s after his performance in Risky Business (1983), a satire of suburban adolescence. In the 1990s Cruise became one of the world’s most popular film stars. Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV in Syracuse, New York, he appeared in a succession of [...]
