Making Movies Into Art

<p>Focusing on early cinema's relationship with the pictorial arts this pioneering study explores how cinema's emergence was grounded in theories of picture composition craft and arts education - from magic lantern experiments in 1890s New York through to early Hollywood feature films in the 1920s. <p/>Challenging received notions that the advent of cinema was a celebration of mechanisation and a radical rejection of nineteenth-century traditions of representation Kaveh Askari instead emphasises the overlap between craft traditions and modernity in early film. <p/>Opening up valuable new perspectives on the history of film as art Askari links American silent cinema with the practice of teaching the public how to appreciate fine art; charts its entrance into arts education via art schools and university film courses;<br>shows how concepts of artistic production entered films through a material interest in the studio; and examines the way in which Maurice Tourneur and Rex Ingram made early art films by shaping an image of the film director around the idea of the fine artist.</p>