![]() ![]() In tracing wrestling’s shift from the ‘shoot’ film of the early 1900s to the ‘worked’ style that would come to dominate in the televisual era following the financial failure of films of legitimate contests, this essay offers an important counterpoint to largely ahistorical definitions of wrestling as an inherently melodramatic or spectacular mode. This article traces out the early history of wrestling films over the period 1892–1911, during which, despite widespread national popularity, the legitimate wrestling contest failed to catch on as viable cinematic genre. While professional wrestling is a form of moving image media most commonly associated with television, its origins date back to the earliest experiments in American cinema. ![]() More precisely, the author tries to outline the context of the transition from the perception that animated drawings were trick films to their eventual consecration as a genre within the institution. ![]() How, then, can we explain the popularity of the first animated cartoons in the mid-1910s when trick films had almost disappeared? How can we account for the popularity of a variety of ‘trick films’ -animated drawings - precisely when these same trick films had almost ceased to exist? This article addresses these issues by looking at the process by which a major shift occurred in the way we look at the earliest animated drawings. Analysis of discourses on the first animated cartoons - such as the critical and publicity discourses found in trade papers - reveals that these films were seen like any other trick films, not as a distinct type. "By abandoning a linear understanding of film history, the author revisits animated film history by placing its emergence within the lineage of trick films. Revising the early history of vampires onscreen brings renewed focus to the intrinsic similarities between the supernatural creatures and the cinema. The paper concludes by analyzing Loïe Fuller (Pathé Frères, 1905), the only film of the era that seems to have depicted a supernatural vampire. In an effort to reconcile the onscreen ambiguities, this paper adopts a New Film History methodology to examine four early films distributed in America, showing how characters in two of them-Le manoir du diable and La légende du fantôme/Legend of a Ghost (Pathé Frères, 1908) have in different eras been mistakenly read as supernatural vampires, as well as how a third-The Vampire, a little-known chapter of the serial The Exploits of Elaine (Pathé, 1915)- invoked supernatural vampirism, but only as a metaphor. During the same years, the subject of vampirism also experienced great change, with the supernatural characters of folklore largely dislocated by the non-supernatural " vamps " of popular culture. Between 18, moving pictures underwent major evolutions that transformed their narrative codes of intelligibility. ![]() By making rigorous use of archival materials, this essay tests those assumptions and determines them to be incorrect, while at the same time acknowledging the ambiguity of vampires and early cinema, both being prone to misreadings and misunderstandings. Horror film scholarship has generally suggested that the supernatural vampire either did not appear onscreen during the early cinema period, or that it appeared only once, in Georges Méliès' Le manoir du diable/The Devil's Castle (1896). ![]()
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