Overview

What do moving images mean? How and why do they work? What do we gain by having them and what would we lose by not having them? What was it that film first brought to society that was so revolutionary, and what is the significance of the moving image in the multi-format, hybrid world through which we communicate today? In sixty short, engaging essays film archivist, curator, historian and writer Luke McKernan looks at 140 years of a bewitching medium, focussing on the importance of stories and form in shaping the moving images on our screens. It's an entertaining compendium that ranges from The Third Man to Breaking Bad, from Cheers to the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games, and takes in memory, film's literary connections (Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Stevie Smith), spoilers, misplaced reels, prequels, politics, fame, sport, AI movies, playing dead, libraries, anarchists, feral children, newsreels, David Attenborough, the birth of YouTube, screen shapes and sizes, compilation films, migration, colourisation, fairy tales, clean shirts, and stray dogs. ""What a wonderful collection - surprising, smart and rich. Luke McKernan is as likely to find something clever and observant to say about the pilot episode of Cheers, or repeats of The Big Match, as he is about Celine And Julie Go Boating or Abel Gance's Napoleon. These essays are the product of a unique and admirable mind and I loved them."" - Nick Hornby, author and screenwriter ""McKernan presents a collection of his writing on the moving image in all its multiple forms, crammed with insights into history, technology, and humanity. He proves an excellent guide to the many ways that the storytelling impulse survives, and adapts to each new medium, from magic lantern slides to AI."" - Pamela Hutchinson, Silent London ""Luke McKernan's wonderfully eclectic, entirely delightful, learnedly informal, gloriously quirky, deeply knowledgeable, and totally original essays concern films, story telling, archives, memories, football, dreams, Bob Dylan, David Attenborough, long-dead dogs and more, all of which are held up to the light with absolute precision, with playfulness and above all with passion."" - John Wyver, University of Westminster

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Author Information

Luke McKernan is a media historian. He has worked at the British Film Institute, the British Universities Film & Video Council and the British Library, where he was Lead Curator, News and Moving Image. He also served as chair of Film Archives UK. He has written on early cinema, colour cinematography, newsreels, Shakespeare on film, audiences and news media history. His book Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925 won the Krasna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award in 2014. He has developed several databases for the study of media history. His widely-read blogs have included The Bioscope and Picturegoing, and he writes regularly about cultural topics of many kinds on his personal site, lukemckernan.com.

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