[ { "id": "authors:p0zjr-zvc55", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "p0zjr-zvc55", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20211130-204506917", "type": "article", "title": "French cinema vs the bomb: Atomic science and a war of images circa 1950", "author": [ { "family_name": "Jacobson", "given_name": "Brian R.", "orcid": "0000-0001-6325-2991", "clpid": "Jacobson-B-R" } ], "abstract": "This article examines the struggle over the meaning of atomic science and nuclear power in mid-century French film culture, including popular and art cinema, newsreels, television, and industrial films produced by the French atomic energy commission. It considers the nuclear as a representational problem, rooted in the enduring iconicity of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the difficulty of making atomic science's value visible. Building on recent criticism of France's 'Trente glorieuses,' it focuses on the less-than-glorious image of nuclear power that filled French screens during the 1940s and 1950s, especially in two films released in 1950: Ren\u00e9 Clair's popular but largely forgotten, La beaut\u00e9 du diable, a Faust adaptation-cum-nuclear allegory, and Nicole V\u00e9dr\u00e8s's seldom-seen (but recently restored and re-released) La vie commence demain (the follow-up to her better-known Paris 1900 (1947)), which uses a who's who of French arts and letters\u2014including Sartre, Gide, Pr\u00e9vert, Picasso, Le Corbusier and Jean Rostand, among others\u2014to denounce nuclear weapons while imagining a future enlightened by peaceful atomic science.", "doi": "10.1080/01439685.2021.1990470", "issn": "0143-9685", "publisher": "Taylor & Francis", "publication": "Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television", "publication_date": "2021-11-10", "series_number": "2", "volume": "42", "issue": "2", "pages": "191-218" }, { "id": "authors:53k3m-kft02", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "53k3m-kft02", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20200804-103938265", "type": "article", "title": "Hollywood in Flames", "author": [ { "family_name": "Jacobson", "given_name": "Brian R.", "orcid": "0000-0001-6325-2991", "clpid": "Jacobson-B-R" } ], "abstract": "On September 25, 1970, two fires, one started by downed power lines, the other by burning rubbish at a public dump outside Malibu, both stoked by 80 mile-per-hour Santa Ana winds, sparked the most devastating wildfire \u2014 to that point \u2014 in California history. Over the next 10 days, more than 500,000 acres burned, leaving 350 injured and 13 dead. Among the fire's lesser casualties was the old Spahn movie ranch, just northwest of Los Angeles in the Santa Susana Mountains. Formerly owned by silent film star William S. Hart, the ranch had once been a hotspot of Hollywood world-making as the set for films including David O. Selznick and King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946) and episodes of The Lone Ranger. By 1970, production had slowed, and the ranch was better known as the recent home of the Manson family. Meanwhile, the biggest shoot in town was happening 25 miles south at the MGM studio, where French director Roger Vadim was filming Pretty Maids All in a Row, a murder mystery comedy starring Rock Hudson as a lecherous, lethal gym teacher.", "publisher": "Los Angeles Review of Books", "publication": "Los Angeles Review of Books", "publication_date": "2019-06-21" }, { "id": "authors:m7ght-3ht33", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "m7ght-3ht33", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20200729-084134004", "type": "article", "title": "Black Maria: film studio, film technology (cinema and the history of technology)", "author": [ { "family_name": "Jacobson", "given_name": "Brian R.", "orcid": "0000-0001-6325-2991", "clpid": "Jacobson-B-R" } ], "abstract": "In late 1892 at Thomas Edison's laboratory in West Orange, NJ, William, Kennedy Laurie Dickson designed an architectural space like few seen before. Soon dubbed the Black Maria \u2013 a colloquialism for nineteenth century police vehicles \u2013 the building was variously described by contemporary observers as a coffin, cavern, or outright conundrum (Figure 1). Today it is better known as the world's first film studio. Dickson developed the studio concurrently with two of Edison's better-known moving-image machines, the kinetograph (camera) and kinetoscope (viewer), and indeed the studio was integral to Dickson's work on these devices. Each operated on the same principles: the juxtaposition of light and dark, the interplay of movement and stasis, and the technological reproduction of nature. As with the kinetograph and kinetoscope, the Black Maria allowed Dickson, Edison, and the inventors, artists, and image-makers who followed to create new forms of visual representation and to contribute to the emergence of new conceptions and experiences of modern technological space.", "doi": "10.1080/07341512.2011.573277", "issn": "0734-1512", "publisher": "Informa UK Limited", "publication": "History and Technology", "publication_date": "2011-06", "series_number": "2", "volume": "27", "issue": "2", "pages": "233-241" }, { "id": "authors:71bvz-78358", "collection": "authors", "collection_id": "71bvz-78358", "cite_using_url": "https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20200729-151853545", "type": "article", "title": "A Business without a Future? The Parisian Vid\u00e9o-Club, Past and Present", "author": [ { "family_name": "Jacobson", "given_name": "Brian R.", "orcid": "0000-0001-6325-2991", "clpid": "Jacobson-B-R" }, { "family_name": "Neves", "given_name": "Joshua", "clpid": "Neves-J" } ], "abstract": "Almost eighty-five years after the cin\u00e9matographe created a flurry of enthusiasm for cinema on the Grands Boulevards, Paris's first video rental stores were met with no less excitement or skepticism by their first owners, clients, and industry critics. Despite early predictions of the video business's certain failure that evoked Antoine Lumi\u00e8re's apocryphal dismissal of cinema's future, thirty years later French vid\u00e9o-clubs remain an important if increasingly marginalized form of media distribution in the nation's capital. Compared with similar markets, the history of French video stores offers a familiar tale of initial enthusiasm and success, followed by periodic cycles of modest growth, rapid decline, and often-failing efforts to form a business model capable of adapting to technological changes and new consumption practices. \n\nUsing a combination of historiographic research and on-site analysis and interviews,[i] this essay examines historical and ongoing developments in video rental in France, with particular attention to current trends in Paris. Our historical and field research shows that the French context is at once particular\u2014marked by French legal and economic strategies (l'exception culturelle fran\u00e7aise), consumers' attitudes towards media technologies, and stereotypes of French cinephilia\u2014and at the same time surprisingly continuous with the broader landscape of media change in places like the United States and Australia. Indeed, the case of French vid\u00e9o-clubs offers important evidence of how local and national actors both reproduce and reshape emerging global media practices in ways that nonetheless reflect historical traditions and cultural specificity.", "issn": "2159-7553", "publisher": "University of California, Santa Barbara", "publication": "Media Fields Journal", "publication_date": "2010", "series_number": "1", "volume": "2010", "issue": "1", "pages": "1-23" } ]