Early American Cinema - David Levy

...nitrate outlaws grinning in the dark...

Education

Ph.D. McGill University, Graduate Program in Communications, 1983, dissertation: "Edwin S. Porter and the Origins of the American Narrative Film, 1894-1907."

1966 M. A. Université de Montréal, dissertation : "The Counterfeit Revelation : A Study of the Juncture of Life, Death and Eternity in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe."

1960 B.A. McGill University

1976-2001 - Lecturer in Cinema, McGill & Concordia University.

Selected Publications

• "Talking About California Video" review of California Video: Artists and Histories, a Getty Publication.
  Inclined to regard their work as distant from the forms of both cinema and TV, video artists have gravitated to the anti-illusionist what-you-see-is what-you-get documentary mode linked to the expanded art world of sculptural installations and performance pieces.

  In the view of Michael Brand, Director of the Getty Museum, the focus of the video artist's commitment to the image has involved a complementary correction: "As generations of filmmakers throughout the twentieth century developed the complex language of cinematic narrative, parallel generations of visual artists created dizzying works of abstraction and experimentation that challenged every convention of the medium." ...read full article

• "Movies and the French Revolution" review of Laurence Chatel de Brancion's Carmontelle's Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment. In "Film History: An International Journal", vol.20, no.2, 2008.
  Louis Carrogis, 1717 - 1806, a k a Louis de Carmontelle, a draftsman, painter, garden designer, party planner, and military surveyor invented a visual amusement to which he gave no name. A miniature diorama, an apparent precursor of the movies, it displayed landscape art on transparencies in a box device. The story of the invention is told in a wonderful little book by Laurence Chatel de Brancion, Carmontelle's Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment, a J. Paul Getty Museum publication, 2007.

  The transparencies, some reproduced for the book, are described as a "fantastic traveling shot through the places where the ancient regime went up in flames and a new world was starting to emerge." ...read full article

• "A Note on the Role of Imports in the Emergence of the Last-Minute Rescue Narrative in the American Cinema", Domitor, University of Utrecht.
  What Imports May Not Be Able To Tell Us About the Emergence of the Last-Minute Rescue Narrative in the American Cinema.

  I want to consider albeit in a tentative way the role distribution, which is to say imported film subjects, might have contributed to a major shift in American film production between 1903-1908. In the first phase, producers abandoned the actualities and comedies, the so-called "cinema of attractions" that dominated the vaudeville period dating from 1896 in favor of fictional story films, a trend that appears to have begun in 1903.1 Initially, much fiction film production in that five-year period took the form of a lecturer-dependent tableaux narrative modeled on the lantern slide show, a form characterized by strong spatial orientation and weak temporality, e.g. Edwin Porter's LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN(1903). ...read full article

• "Sentimental Journeys of the Big-Eyed Sight-Seer: Tourism and the Early Cinema", paper presented at the Second Colloquium, Domitor, Lausanne, Switzerland, in Roland Cossandrey(sp?) and Francois Albera, Cinema sans frontieres 1896-1918 Images Across Borders, Editions Payot Lausanna. Read full article: Sentimental Journeys of the Big-Eyed Sight-Seer.

• Georges Méliès NASA letter, Correspondence Between David Levy And The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) On Georges Méliès' Le Voyage Dans La Lune.

• "The European Rest Cure", in Jay Leyda and Charles Musser (eds.) Before Hollywood: Turn-of-the-Century Film from American Archives, The American Federation of Arts, Exhibition catalogue.

• "The Street Mob as Rube Goldberg Machine: A note on the chase in the slapstick era", in Eileen Bowser (ed.) The Slapstick Synposium, FIAF, 198, based on a Paper presented at the Slapstick Synposium, 41st FIAF Congress, Museum of Modern Art, May 2-3, 1985, New York City.

• "Of Clocks, Dogs and Women", Paper presented at the Colloque, Cinéma et Histoire - Histoire du Cinéma: Les Premieres Ans du Cinéma Français, Institut Jean Vigo, Perpignan, France, October.
• "Edison Sales Policy and the Continuous Action Film", in John L. Fell ed.) Film Before Griffith, University of California Press.

• "The 'Fake' Train Robbery: Les reportages simulés, les reconstitutions, et le film narratif américain", in Les Cahiérs de la Cinémathèque, Toulouse, France, Number 29, Winter 1979. Based on a paper presented at the 34th FIAF Congress, Brighton, England, May 1978. An English-language version appeared in Roger Holman (ed.), Cinema 1900-1906: An Analytical Study, The National Film Archive (London), 1982.

• "Honk! Honk! It's the Bonk! History as Soap Opera, the News as Entertainment", with Art Spiegelman, RAW 2 Magazine, New York.

• A celluloid life line: Jack Hazan's David Hockney movie, A Bigger Splash", The Montreal Star.

• "The Great Train Debate", The Montreal Star, on the screenings and discussion at Brighton, 1978.
• "Photographers as Filmmakers", The Montreal Star.

• "Peter Watkins: In Conversation", The Montreal Star.
• "Joining dance and film: The cinema of Yvonne Rainer", The Montreal Star.
• "The Laurier Palace Fire: 50 years later", The Montreal Star.

• "Ken Jacobs: Conversation with an independent filmmaker", The Montreal Star.
• "Videotape and the sports high", The Montreal Star.
• "Pornography and the Cinema", The Montreal Star.
• "Johnnie Ray's in town", The Montreal Star.

Silent Celebrities and Others...

• Film and Attraction
  
  André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, foreword by Rick Altman, University of Illinois Press, 2011. Trans. from the French Cinéma et attraction: Pour une nouvelle histoire du cinématographe, CRNS Editions, 2008 by Timothy Barnard. ...read full article

• To the Moon and Back
  
  Matthew Solomon (ed.) Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination: Georges Méliès's Trip to the Moon, SUNY Press, 2011.
  This anthology of essays devoted to George Méliès 1902 one-reel motion picture sensation LE VOYAGE DANS LA LUNE makes it clear how much the assessment of Méliès has changed. That may be the volume's chief value. On the one hand, the essays do not tell us all that much about the ... ...read full article

• Early Iranian Cinema
  
  Some Iranian cinema historians claim that the history of cinema in Iran began in 1900, the year that the Shah of Iran, Mozafar-e din Shah of the Ghajar dynasty, visited Europe. He brought back Lumiere subjects and others as well as some pornographic films! ...read full article

• My career in early film history begins ...
  
  My career in early film history might have begun when an advertising executive accused me with some irritation in his voice of wanting to know why the world was the way it was and not some other way. Well, why is the world the way it is? Why is the cinema the way it is and not some other way? ...read full article

• Art, Gangsters & Money
  
  Early in the last century art was seen to be attracting some enormously unsavory admirers. Hans Arp: "Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts....We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art as a way of deadening men's minds." ...read full article

• Movies & the Working Class
  
  A study of the rise of movie attendance in Worcester, Massachusetts 1904 - 1920, makes virtually no reference to individual films or film programs. The focus is on the sociology of the film experience: the appeal of the medium to the working-classes; the competition between movies and other forms of leisure including live theatre and the saloon; the democratic seating; ...read full article

• Lascaux & Cinema
  
  Was the cave art of pre-history a cinema forebear?

  "cave art can't possibly be visual art think about it for a minute think about those things on the walls of caves they aren't even pictures of things the idea that these things are pictures would lead to the question of what kind of pictures they were is this a ... ...read full article

• Invisible Photographs
  
  "...for an ingenuous observer, a highly elaborate representation in perspective, whose code he doesn't know, doesn't remotely resemble the object in question...epistemological operations are involved in establishing isomorphism." Umberto Eco, "Introduction to a semiotics of iconic signs," VS, no.2, (April 1972) p.8... ...read full article

• The Photographic Time Machine
  
  In the spring of 1907, a Manhattan nickelodeon featured a lecture-stereopticon slide show presented by the journalist and photographer, Jacob Riis. Entitled "The Battle of the Slums", the slides together with Riis's spoken commentary described the wretched lives of New York City's enormous "submerged" population: ...read full article

• Picnolepsy
  
  In our time, the "pernicious industrialization of vision" is alleged to have produced a "displacement of visual subjectivities and the standardization of visual experience". The contemporary vision machine is said to induce picnolepsy, a dissociative, disorienting condition based on a confusion of the actual and the virtual. ...read full article

• Edison Conquers Mars
  
  In mid January 1898, The New York Journal began publication of a serialization entitled "Edison's Conquest of Mars". Garret P. Serviss was the series author. Interplanetary imperialism on the eve of the Spanish-American and Boer wars? The first installment included a drawing of what was purported to have been a "...consultation in Wizard Edison's laboratory ... ...read full article

• Muybridge and the Movies
  
  In the spring of 1879, Muybridge gave his initial Zoopraxiscope demonstration of "real motion on the screen", a horse projected in sequences of painted images based on his photos, as well as sequences of birds, men, and women. Cantering, trotting, leaping, the horse was the highlight of the show. As exciting as the evening was for its apparent scientific revelation... ...read full article

• Les Sorties
  
  Years ago Andre Gaudreault and I were trying to identify difficulties involved in researching issues in film history, given that one invariably confronts the problem of missing information, the what and how much uncertain. In the first instance, there is in a particular case six related documents; one has five and the speculation ... ...read full article

• D. W. Griffith and Television
  
  Said one writer of Francisco Goya's El Tres de Mayo, it "could have been anywhere; it could be My Lai."
  The observation relates perhaps as much to the image of the murder of innocents as it does to the mass dissemination of such images via 20th century TV networks. Georges Melies's prediction of television, LONG DISTANCE WIRELESS PHOTOGRAPHY (1908) ...read full article

• Notes for an essay on the film career of Monty Banks
  
  Born Mario Bianchi in Cesena, Italy, in 1897, Monty Banks was a popular slapstick movie star of the 1920s. Now, some decades later, his reputation has receded from institutional memory and indeed almost slipped beyond buffdom into oblivion. Of the many shorts and features in which Banks appeared between 1917-1928 - by one estimate between 100 two-reelers, fifty one-reelers and ten features - few have survived. ...read full article

Interviews

• "A conversation with Nubar Alexanian" about his book Nonfiction: Photographs from the film sets of Errol Morris, Walker Creek Press, 2007.
  NA: In 1992, I was asked by The New York Times to do a photo portrait of Errol Morris for a piece Phillip Gourevitch was doing on him. This was after the release of Errol's film A Brief History of Time. We got along well, and he asked me if I would shoot some stills for the film he was working on, Fast Cheap & Out of Control. I said I couldn't do that, because I can't do production stills, I'm just not cut out for that. ...read full article

Research Assignments

• "Taking it to the Limit: A Note on the Snuff Film", Graduate Program in Communications, McGill University.

• "Violence in Motion Picture Cartoon Material Presented on Broadcast Television and Children", Department of Sociology, McGill University.

• "Under the Alternate Counter: The Styles and Motives of Alternate Media", Department of Sociology, McGill University, research assignment.

In Progress

• "Melodrama of Punctuality: Rescue Structure in the Early American Cinema"

Radio and Cinema Work

• "Spirits Rejoice:The Music of Albert Ayler", CKUT - Radio McGill.

• "Rockhead's Paradise", actor: Johnee the doorman

Consulting

• Contributor and editorial consultant, Cinema 1900-1906: An Analytical Filmography, produced under the direction of Prof. Andre Gaudreault for FIAF.