Primal Screen

The Goddess (1915 Vitagraph serial) mentioned in the Moving Picture World, vol. 25

Naïve Spectator — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 23:00:20 +0000

Neptune’s Daughter

Naïve Spectator — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:15:03 +0000

3 sheet reproduction for Neptune's Daugher 1914

Posters Posters Posters

Naïve Spectator — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:12:27 +0000

Of course, the ethnicity of Sessue Hayakawa’s character was changed from Japanese to Burmese in the film itself. I guess not soon enough for them to change their advertising posters.

Is this like Mr. Mom? The Squaw man was made into a movie several times, but this could also be a poster for a play version

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="580" caption="Houdini 1908 Poster"][/caption]

One of many moving image fights

Apparently "the menace of the movies" was good publicity for MPC

Hilarious Hats

Naïve Spectator — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 22:43:30 +0000

This hat is too insane to be erased from the historical record

Hilarious posters in France, in America

Naïve Spectator — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:29:22 +0000

http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.2.1.swf

The internet “returns us to our natural state of destractedness” ??

Naïve Spectator — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 23:47:19 +0000

Really? Didn’t McLuhan say something like this a few years ago?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127370598

Here’s a summary from NPR:

“Carr admits he’s something of a fatalist when it comes to technology. He views the advent of the Internet as “not just technological progress but a form of human regress.”

Human ancestors had to stay alert and shift their attention all the time; cavemen who got too wrapped up in their cave paintings just didn’t survive. Carr acknowledges that prolonged, solitary thought is not the natural human state, but rather “an aberration in the great sweep of intellectual history that really just emerged with [the] technology of the printed page.”

The Internet, Carr laments, simply returns us to our “natural state of distractedness.”

Advertising the Goddess

Naïve Spectator — Fri, 14 May 2010 23:33:22 +0000

But I can’t seem to find a digital image of the poster for the goddess (an archive in DC has a copy. . . perhaps I can write to them.

Posters cause comment in 1915 (MPW)

Naïve Spectator — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:20:26 +0000

According to MPW, the first production company to employ in-house poster designers was Metro, in 1915:

This full-page ad ran in the August 7, 1915 issue of MPW, calling into question the claims about Metro, (perhaps Vitagraph did not have in-house poster artists but contracted out?)

Lynde Denig conducted an interview with William Wright of the Kalem Company in the August 7, 1915 issue of The Moving Picture World on the subject of film lengths. The conversation led to Wright’s boasting of the merits of the company based, in part on the fine quality of its posters (which could be purchased from the General Film Company) as a selling point for the company to exhibitors:

Likewise, Essanay advertises special posters and (MPW July 31, 1915, p. 764):

Nonetheless, independent lithographers were still advertising posters and pendants in the pages of MPW in 1915. These three ads all appeared on the same ad-filled page of the August 7th issue

I’m not sure where to place this ad: but it appears that some distributors were still selling reels to exhibitors outright in 1915:

Advertising The Black Pirate (1926)

Naïve Spectator — Wed, 12 May 2010 22:51:05 +0000

Women Duck their Heads

Naïve Spectator — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 23:27:46 +0000

“The pictures of battleships in action were so real that every time a shot was fired the women would duck their heads to let the thirteen-inch shells pass over” (Gomery, 12). [Quoted in Edward Lowery, “Edwin J. Hadley: Traveling Film Exhibitor.” Journal of the University Film Association 28, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 6]