Author Description

Since the late 19th century, film has been the ultimate medium to express and illuminate the darker, wilder recesses of man’s imagination. An alchemical convergence of magic lantern experiments and new photographic technology led to the production of the very first moving images, including visual captures of magic, mystery, violence, cruelty, crime, sex, devilry and death. SHADOWS IN A PHANTOM EYE Volume Two reveals a flickering carnival of attractions and aberrations, from 1908 through 1913 when the world’s first film serials, from Selig’s ground-breaking Adventures of Kathlyn to Feuillade’s sensational Fantômas, were already exploding across screens along with early narrative horror films, violent assaults of absurdist slapstick, animated fantasies and other landmarks in cinematic history. This volume references more than 1,800 films from all countries and reproduces more than 270 rare photographic images and illustrations, many newly unearthed from international film archives and never before published. SHADOWS IN A PHANTOM EYE is the ultimate multi-volume guide for those wishing to explore an alternative global history of the moving image in its inaugural decades – a history that reveals a wild, often disturbing and provocative world which includes Hollywood but also stretches far, far beyond.