© Columbia University Press
Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography
First English Edition
March, 2006
Paper, 280 pages, Unknown
ISBN: 978-0-901299-75-8
Wallflower Press
Distributor of Books from the British Universities Film & Video Council
$45.00
This classic history of scientific film was published in Italian in 1984, and is receiving its first English publication in a revised and updated edition. Tosi challenges traditional histories of the cinema by arguing that late-nineteenth century sequence photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey were not precursors of the entertainment cinema but of a vital history of scientific cinematography. Tosi describes the scientific impulses behind Muybridge, Marey, other chronophotographers such as Jules Janssen, Albert Londe, and Georges Demeny, and demonstrates the fascinating ways in which surgeons, astronomers, ethnologists and biologists used film in the earliest years of cinema.