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These proceedings of the 16th conference of the international society for the study of early cinema Domitor includes 26 studies and numerous rarely seen figures dealing with the often overlooked history of the crafts, trades and techniques of early cinema. By examining material culture and the institutionalization of practices into trades during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this new investigation into the skills and the techniques that defined the cinema in its early decades aims to foster a better understanding of the medium in its varied industrial and professional aspects. The art and gestures of craftspersons—including performers, camera operators, editors, directors, designers, engineers, projectionists, programmers, and critics—, like those of the factory or laboratory workers, are considered for their emerging specificity, as well as in relation to existing cultural, material and technological forms. This book shows how the industrialization of cinema, the professionalization of workers, and the standardization of techniques led to the creation (or at times, subversion) of norms, and consequently legitimized certain skills, crafts and techniques at the expense of others.
 
The intermedial approaches deployed in this collection bring into focus the influence of multiple professional worlds and cultural practices on the nascent film medium, as well as the necessary adaptations and transformations required by the latter. This circulatory dynamic concerns people and practices, studied in a non-diffusionist approach taking into account transcultural interactions. Chapters examine the mechanisms of professionalization and identity-building as they relate to professions such as filmmaker or colorist, as well as to more unexpected occupations such as accountant, censor, or chemical engineer.
 
The notion of technique is broadly defined. Several of the volume’s chapters deal with cameras or special effects, as well as with new historical investigation into mysterious technical devices such as shutters, cue systems or working samples. Going beyond this preoccupation with materiality, the collected studies also approach technique as a human and cultural activity, and thus as a set of gestures, crafts, and expertise. The book more specifically opens up a reflection on the skills of screen performers and on the training that brought the institutionalization of body techniques and film acting. The book further illustrates to an unprecedented extent that the first film workers were frequently women.
 
Several chapters are dedicated to the unconventional careers of specific film workers, with particular attention being given to the diversity and complexity of professional trajectories. Indeed, this book demonstrates that the invention of cinema was deeply enmeshed with the rise of international networks, which resulted in the standardization of technical practices within corporate and national contexts being ultimately shaped by globalization.

The early years of film were dominated by competition between inventors in America and France, especially Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers . But while these have generally been considered the foremost pioneers of film, they were not the only crucial figures in its inception. Telling the story of the white-hot years of filmmaking in the 1890s, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema seeks to restore Robert Paul, Britain’s most important early innovator in film, to his rightful place.
           
From improving upon Edison’s Kinetoscope to cocreating the first movie camera in Britain to building England’s first film studio and launching the country’s motion-picture industry, Paul played a key part in the history of cinema worldwide. It’s not only Paul’s story, however, that historian Ian Christie tells here. Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema also details the race among inventors to develop lucrative technologies and the jumbled culture of patent-snatching, showmanship, and music halls that prevailed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Both an in-depth biography and a magnificent look at early cinema and fin-de-siècle Britain, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema is a first-rate cultural history of a fascinating era of global invention, and the revelation of one of its undervalued contributors.