Frame : One

A pop-up exhibition introducing the work of the Early Cinema Research Group, Leeds.

17th Dec 2024 – 6th Jan 2025.

The ECRG, established in the School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University this year, aims to explore all forms of visual media relating to early cinema and will be presenting its work in a series of exhibitions and film screenings in 2024-25, and beyond.

At the heart of the project is the Stephen Herbert archive, a collection of books, research papers and artefacts connected to the early history and technology of motion pictures and held by the Northern Film School at the University. The archive contains a wide range of items including an original Talbotype, an original Eadweard Muybridge stereoscopic photograph, unpublished manuscripts and around 500 books on all aspects of film and television history. This material will be used to inform exciting new projects throughout the coming years on everything from animation to Leeds’ own film pioneers, Louis Le Prince and Wordsworth Donisthorpe.

The archive will also be available to the public and researchers are welcome to contact the University to discuss visiting it. Access at this stage can be arranged through Professor Robert Shail of Leeds School of Arts at Beckett: r.shail@leedsbeckett.ac.uk. Full access will be available as soon as scoping of the project is complete.

For more information, and updates, see: @ecrg.bsky.social

Exhibition as Wunderkammer

Frame : One may be taken as a form of cinematic wunderkammer, an assemblage of artefacts whose categories are in flux due to the ongoing process of exploring the material within the archive from which all elements are drawn.

Viewing the exhibition thus, speaks to the idea of cinema itself as a modern, industrial, democratic and limitless ‘wonder room’. This concept has historiographical utility - one of the figures central to the research of the ECRG is the inventor Louis Le Prince (see page 20) who was, for several years, a member of Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, exhibiting various ceramic, painted and photographic works at its annual conversaziones.

It is conceivable that Le Prince’s deep involvement with such progressive societies as the Phil and Lit informed his later vision for what motion pictures might mean to society, and is thus a potentially a rich seam for researchers. Lecturers at the society had been able, with magic lanterns, to show several hundred images on a screen, as opposed to 40-50 portfolio diagrams hung on a wall, taken off and replaced manually and vulnerable to wear and tear. Might Le Prince have envisioned his machines as the next step, industrial wunderkammers to be deployed, for the enlightenment of all classes, at Philosophical Halls across the nation? Did he intuit that he would be continuing the tradition of the Great Victorian Collector, only with new collections that would not be made up of skeletons and fossils and painted representations of life, but of life itself; life he had captured with a camera that he would come to call his receiver?