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Martin Loiperdinger (ed.), Travelling Cinema in Europe: Sources and Perspectives (Frankfurt am Main and Basel: KINtop Schriften 10, Stroemfeld/Roter Stern Verlag, 2008).
As is well known, the term"cinemaof attractions" was coined by André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning in an attempt to free the discussion of early film -andthe ensemble of affects which the cinematograph mobilised - from a concern with aesthetic effect in favour of the radical, disruptive nature the medium represented in the early years of exhibition. As Claude Bertemes argues in the concluding essay of Travelling Cinema in Europe, the work of Noël Burch and Thomas Elsaesser has been central in stressing the Protean and proletarian origin of the cinematograph as a social institution at the turn of the century.1 Some of the essays brought together in this collection forcefully demonstrate the case for such a proposal where exhibition not only shared the qualities of carnival typical of the fairground whose origins pre-date the industrial age, but also had in common an apparatus which Walter Benjamin argued was predicated on "shock effect" or, as Claude Bertemes puts it, "profanation and misalliance".
The collection of essays edited by Martin Loiperdinger presents the proceedings of an international conference held in the Cinémathèque de la Ville de Luxembourg between 6 and 8 September 2008, organised by the Cinémathèque and the Media Studies Department of the University of Trier in the framework of the Travelling Cinema Project which was part of "Luxembourg and the Greater Region, European Capital of Culture 2007". Besides the conference, the Travelling Cinema Project funded the production of a double DVD and, importantly, a touring cinema presentation, Crazy Cinématographe, which was intended to return the cinematograph to the environment in which it spent its formative years around 1900 before the boom in permanent-site cinemas in the first decade of the twentieth century.2 This perspective informs a number of the essays in the first two parts of the book. In the third and final part, travelling exhibition in Europe, mostly after 1920, is considered.
The first section of the book focuses on travelling cinema exhibition and reception in Europe before the First World War, and includes a discussion of exhibition practices discussed in trade periodicals by Daniel Fritsch, who considers the interaction between itinerant...