Finding Birt Acres

This is unquestionably a significant and original contribution to the field of early film studies.

Luke McKernan, formerly Lead Curator, News and Moving Image, the British Library

Finding Birt Acres stands alongside Martin Sopocy and Ian Christie’s monographs on James Williamson and Robert Paul as the tangible proof that an authoritative study on early cinema can also be a page-turner: a perfect marriage of scholarship and empathy, blissfully immune from hagiography.

Paolo Cherchi Usai, Senior Curator-at-large, George Eastman Museum

With a lively and authoritative text this book reappraises Birt Acres’ place in the history of cinematography and returns him to centre stage. The authors recast the troubled relationship with R W Paul, present a comprehensive filmography, and highlight the broader tensions that affected the nascent film industry. It should be on every film historian’s bookshelf.

Dr Michael Pritchard, photographic historian and researcher

An exemplary and very fine, almost police investigation into one of the most important film pioneers, Birt Acres, about whom little was known until now. This exciting work renews our vision of the very moving period of the early days of English cinema.

Laurent Mannoni, Scientific Director of the Heritage of the Cinémathèque Française

One of the book’s pleasures is to be found in its prolific illustrations... Above all, though, it is the astonishing quality of the research and the prose in which it is recorded that is the book’s great strength in the way in which it achieves the daunting process in which the long-forgotten Acres is restored to memory.

Brian McFarlane
Film & History

This comprehensive monograph on Birt Acres' inventions and commercial activities in the early years of cinematography, based entirely on primary sources, sheds light on the fierce competition during the development of this new medium and finally makes sound corrections to authorship claims that have been asserted for over a century.

Martin Loiperdinger
H-Soz-Kult

This is very much a "warts-and-all" and very readable history of Birt Acres... the book puts Acres back where he belongs as a genuine pioneer of projected film with a significant number of world's firsts to his credit.

Bryony Dixon
The Journal of Film Preservation

1. The Acres Enigma: An Incomplete Biography
2. Acres of Barnet
3. Finding Precedents: Acres’s Sources of Inspiration
4. Tradition and Transformation: What Acres Filmed
5. The Missing Link: Acres and R.W. Munro
6. Making an Exhibition of Himself: How Acres’s Films Were Shown
7. The Travels and Travails of Harry Short
8. A Nursery of Cinema: Acres’s Assistants and their Careers
9. How Birt Acres Got Lost

Notes
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Barry Anthony has written extensively about social history, particularly entertainment. His books include the ground-breaking A Victorian Film Enterprise and The Kinetoscope: A British History (both with Richard Brown) and Chaplin’s Music Hall. He has also written for periodicals such as Film History, Sight and Sound and The Stage.

Peter Domankiewicz has worked professionally in film and television for decades as a screenwriter, director and producer. He has written about early film history for The Guardian and Sight and Sound, also contributing to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, The Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema and several academic journals.

Deac Rossell is a historian of early cinema, magic lantern culture and chronophotography. His books include Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies, Faszination der Bewegung: Ottomar Anschütz zwischen Photographie und Kino, Laterna Magica – Magic Lantern, and Chronology of the Birth of Cinema 1833–1896. He also writes for journals, encyclopaedias and exhibition catalogues.