Louis Pelletier and Rachael Stoeltje (ed.)

Tales from the Vaults. Film Technology over the Years and across Continents

With a preface by Christopher Nolan

Cinema’s multiple lives as an art, a form of entertainment, an industry, and a tool for education and propaganda all share one thing: they rely on machines and technical objects. For more than a century, this essential fact has shaped the life cycle of moving images, from their production and exhibition to their eventual preservation. Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents collects 100 stories of boundless creativity and ingenuity. Submitted by the archives and film preservationists who now care for this long-neglected heritage alongside historians, these tales cover a wide range of pre-cinema, cinema, video and digital devices developed since the eighteenth century, and used all around the world by filmmakers, exhibitors, hobbyists and archivists. Yet, these tales also frequently enable us to conceive film histories that go beyond individual inventors and film auteurs, or the specificities of national cinemas, by making visible the international networks through which film technology was conceived, circulated, used and constantly adapted to emerging practices.