NitrateVille.com

I'm pleased to be able to announce the re-launch of Who's Who of Victorian Cinema, a biographical guide to the earliest years of motion pictures 1871-1901. The Who's Who was first published as a book, edited by Stephen Herbert and myself in 1996. It was converted into a website in 2004, but had fallen somewhat into disrepair in recent years. A fresh design and tidying up of coding and such like has brought new life to the site, and many of the entries have been updated.

In it you will find over 300 biographies of people behind and in front of the camera, from all around the world, both the famous and the obscure, and not just those directly involved in filmmaking but the many different kinds of people who got caught up in the new medium. As we say in the introduction:

What this website tries to do is to show something of the lives of the many hundreds of people worldwide who by their efforts in the closing years of the nineteenth century collectively invented the cinema. Scientists, entrepreneurs, doctors, sportsmen, artists, politicians, dancers, photographers, reporters, showmen, propagandists and crooks: the whole extraordinary variousness of the late Victorian era.

So you'll find Thomas Edison, Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès, but also a host of others, from Ruth St Denis (dancer) to Mary Hitchcock (explorer), and from Herbert Booth (evangelist) to Komada Koyo (benshi). There are also background essays, illustrations of early cinema technology, guides by country and type of person, and other research resources.

The site is here http://victorian-cinema.net/

and I've written a short history behind book and website here: http://lukemckernan.com/2012/11/28/meet-the-victorians/" target="_blank

urbanora wrote: The site is here http://victorian-cinema.net/

and I've written a short history behind book and website here: http://lukemckernan.com/2012/11/28/meet-the-victorians/" target="_blank" target="_blank" target="_blank

Congratulations on the facelift, I look forward to exploring further. Is this what you've been working on since shuttering the late, lamented Bioscope? for which I am pining like a Norwegian Blue, btw?

No, I've been working on other stuff, mostly work-related. The Who's Who is a side project which has been in need of a facelift for some while now.

The Bioscope's still there, still getting a healthy readership, I just haven't added anything to it. It's great - no effort expended and still people read it. I have set up a new blog at http://lukemckernan.com which covers all sorts of subjects, occasionally silent films. It doesn't get read much at all, but I persevere.


Luke

Well, that's a couple of new Bookmarks on my computer......as always, great work, and great writing. I didn't know Jenning's Pandaemonium had been republished for a kick-off....