Fixing a Shadow: A Digital Timeline and Video on the Historiography of the Cinema

PI: Dimitrios Latsis

Collaborators: Sara Wiley (GA)

The goal of the project it to catalog, digitize, curate and make available a wealth of primary documents related to early and silent film history in the United States and Canada in the form of an interactive website structured as a multi-media timeline. These will include: books and pamphlets, exhibition records, theatrical and non-theatrical short films and newsreels, periodicals and other ephemera. The website will provide access to this wealth of material for the use of scholars and for active deployment by students at Ryerson and beyond. As an introduction to the website and a stand-along piece of work utilizing the resources digitized for the project, I intend to produce a short (12-15 min) video providing a snapshot account of the way film was viewed during the first four decades of its development in the press, the movies themselves and related exhibitions.