Restoration

Film history

Le Voyage dans la Lune

Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la Lune is a 1902 film whose history includes preservation, losses and recovery of materials. Production year, versions and running time are separate matters.

Craft and technique

Opening Credits Are Not a Neutral Prologue: How to Read the Design That Prepares a Film Before Its First Scene

Opening credits arrange names, images, sound and time before the fiction settles into place. Reading them well is not about guessing the plot; it means describing their materials, hierarchy and the precise relationship they establish with the first scene.

Film history

Restoration Is Not a Return to the Past: How to Read the Decisions That Change a Film

A restored print may recover shots, stabilize an image or reconstruct colour; that does not erase the film’s material history or turn every technical choice into transparent truth about its original release.

Filmmakers

What Does a Gag Do Before It Makes Us Laugh? Charles Chaplin Between Body, Editing and Versions

Charles Chaplin’s credits describe an exceptional degree of involvement, but they are not enough to turn every pause, cut or musical accent into a demonstrable individual decision. A corpus of three films and a comparison of versions make it possible to view the gag as a chain of operations: preparing information, managing the body in space, sustaining or interrupting a shot and, sometimes, altering the film again decades later.

Film history

Pre-Code Does Not Mean “Without Rules”: A Guide to Watching Hollywood from 1930 to 1934 Without Reducing It to Scandal

So-called pre-Code Hollywood was not a brief libertine exception between two orderly eras, but a period of existing rules, uneven enforcement, local censorship, religious pressure and business negotiation. This guide proposes watching its films through the ways they organize desire, work, crime and endings. AI-assisted article.

Film history

Hong Kong Is Not a Genre: How to Read a Cinema Across City, Languages, and Production Circuits

Reducing Hong Kong cinema to chases, neon, and combat choreography erases a history shaped by dialects, studios, migration, television, co-productions, and incomplete archives. This guide offers verifiable criteria for placing each film in context before turning it into an emblem.

Editorial collections

A Collection for Learning to Hear Offscreen Sound: Four Films Organised Around What Sound Lets Us Imagine

Four films, four distinct operations: announcing a presence, enlarging a place, making an unseen action unbearable, and revising how we read an image. This is not a list of films “with great sound,” but a path for developing comparative listening.