In the 1940s and 1950s, hundreds of art documentaries were produced, many of them being highly personal, poetic, reflexive and experimental films that offer a thrilling cinematic experience. With the exception of Alain Resnais's Van Gogh (1948), Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Mystere Picasso (1956) and a few others, most of them have received only scant scholarly attention. This book aims to rectify this situation by discussing the most lyrical, experimental and influential post-war art documentaries, connecting them to contemporaneous museological developments and Euro-American cultural and political relationships. With contributors with expertise across art history and film studies, Art in the Cinema draws attention to film projects by Andre Bazin, Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Haesaerts, Carlo Ragghianti, John Read, Dudley Shaw Aston, Henri Storck and Willard Van Dyke among others.

How the Movies Got a Past presents a comprehensive survey of the rise of historiographical discourse on cinema in North America as it is reflected in publications, exhibitions, lectures, and films about the cinema as a technology, form of art, and source of entertainment, from its inception up to 1930. This pioneering historiography of American movies proposes a typology of genres of historical knowledge and examines the role that its articulation played in legitimating the moving image as a form of cultural heritage and a field of study. How did early studios seek to understand and promote their own activities as part of a brand-new form of entertainment with its own traditions, "founding fathers," and ambitions? How did early writers modulate between retrospection and analysis, between nostalgia and ballyhoo, between journalism and research into the "relics" of the nascent film industry and what were their motivations and influence on subsequent historians? What rhetorical and material platforms were deployed to talk about and show the history of cinema and for what audiences were they meant? In teasing out answers to these and other questions, this book makes an argument for early cinema historiography as an emergent genre with its own conventions and goals instead of a "primitive" version of today's historical writing on the movies. With a wealth of case studies, and illustrations, How the Movies Got a Past will appeal to media historians, silent movie buffs, film archivists, and students alike.

In the 1940s and 1950s, hundreds of art documentaries were produced, many of them being highly personal, poetic, reflexive and experimental films that offer a thrilling cinematic experience. With the exception of Alain Resnais’s Van Gogh (1948), Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystère Picasso (1956) and a few others, most of them have received only scant scholarly attention. This book aims to rectify this situation by discussing the most lyrical, experimental and influential post-war art documentaries, connecting them to contemporaneous museological developments and Euro-American cultural and political relationships. With contributors with expertise across art history and film studies, Art in the Cinema draws attention to film projects by André Bazin, Ilya Bolotowsky, Paul Haesaerts, Carlo Ragghianti, John Read, Dudley Shaw Aston, Henri Storck and Willard Van Dyke among others.