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Focusing on six significant early film corporations in the United States and France—the Edison Company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, American Vitagraph, Georges Méliès's Star Films, Gaumont, and Pathé Frères—as well as the first producers in Southern California, Studios Before the System describes how filmmakers first envisioned the space they needed and sourced modern materials to create novel film worlds. Artificially reproducing the natural environment, film studios helped usher in the world's Second Industrial Revolution and what Lewis Mumford would later call the "specific art of the machine." Studio architecture was always present though rarely visible to the average spectator in the twentieth century, providing the scaffolding under which culture, film aesthetics, and our relation to lived space took shape.
The first book to retell the history of film studio architecture, Studios Before the System expands the social and cultural footprint of cinema’s virtual worlds and their contribution to wider developments
Jan Baetens:A truly important book, which will easily find its way to the 'must-read' section in all literature on film studies as well as art and technology studies.
In this excellent book, Jacobson (Univ. of Toronto) blends history and theory to create a landmark study of the very first film studios.... Essential.
Charles Musser, Yale University:Studios Before the System offers a fresh, enormously productive and (as it turns out) badly needed perspective on filmmaking before the classical Hollywood studio system was fully established. Examining the buildings where films were made with unprecedented rigor, Jacobson illuminates the many ways in which these architectural spaces determined how subjects were filmed and represented––and the ways the studios themselves shaped the larger system of production and representation as personnel left the studios and moved on location.
Edward Dimendberg, author of Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images:Rare is the book that justly can be called an instant classic, but Studios Before the System is just that. Meticulously researched, elegantly written, and admirably capacious, it is a landmark study of the built environments of early cinematic production. It is a foundational work that is also a pleasure to read
Rosalind H. Williams, Massachusetts Institute of Technology:A breakthrough book—at once a history of technology, cinema, and architecture—showing how they merge in the invention of the cinematic studio in a few wildly innovative years around 1900. Jacobson tells the story of this invention with flair, fluency, and most of all with awareness of its historical significance: by uniting real and virtual space in cinematic space, the studio transformed the human-built world.
Richard Abel, University of Michigan:This is an impressive, groundbreaking book that joins other recent revisionist works in offering an innovative notion of early cinema history that has invaluable ramifications for cinema history overall. Furthermore, it promises to make a considerable impact on the study of cinema's profound interrelations with architecture, modern technologies, and urban infrastructure at the beginnings of the 20th century.
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