Early Film and American Artistic Traditions

We begin with the traditions of American art—landscape, genre painting, historical subjects, and travelogue—and the ways in which the themes therein were taken up by the earliest films. The first section examines the artistic vision of figures such as Thomas Edison, who was broadening his cultural education in the 1880s. His understanding of the art world, newly available to the larger public through photomechanical reproductions in art books and periodicals, would have a crucial impact on the nascent character of moving pictures.