Free talk on early history of cinema at film festival office

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The ttff, in collaboration with the US Embassy, is pleased to host an informal talk on the early history of cinema and the appreciation of film at its offices at 199 Belmont Circular Road, Belmont on Tuesday 17 June at 6.30pm.

Ms Leslie J Taubman, PhD, will give the talk, which is entitled “Cinema as Art: An Introduction to the History and Appreciation of Film”. The event—which will last approximately an hour—is free of charge, and everyone is invited.

Beginning in 1895, when brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière of France held the first public film screenings, cinema has entranced the world. Yet cinema as we know it now did not always exist, and the art form—considered the “seventh art”—has undergone many changes since the Lumières first showed their short, silent, black-and-white films to astonished Parisian audiences.

Interspersing her talk with fascinating clips from early film history, Ms Taubman will speak about some of the pioneers of cinema. These include not only including the Lumières but also Georges Méliès, another Frenchman. (A fictionalised version of Méliès appears in Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film Hugo, about the early days of cinema.)

Ms Taubman’s talk will take her up to the momentous year 1927—when sound was introduced and cinema changed forever.

About the speaker

Leslie J Taubman, PhD, a Fulbright Scholar in Barbados (2008-2009), developed the Film Studies programme at the University of the West Indies and was president of the jury of the Barbados International Film Festival. She holds an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University and her PhD in Communications-Cinema from the University of Southern California. In 2010, Ms Taubman was a post-doctoral Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, and has been an Adjunct Associate Professor at Fordham University in New York. She has written for many publications, including the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Reporter. She has given talks on cinema in numerous countries around the world.

Image: A shot from Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902)