Content area
Full Text
Paul Spehr, The Man Who Made Movies: W.K.L. Dickson (New Barnet, Herts, U.K.: John Libbey Publishing, 2008).
Both historians and general readers will wish to read this new and major biography of W.K.L. Dickson, inventor, one-time colleague/employee of Thomas Edison, pioneer news film journalist and a co-inventor of what was arguably the world's first practical motion picture camera.
The author, Paul Spehr, brings to this biography his experience as both an historian and an archivist. He is the author of several well-researched historical articles and served for many years as a senior archivist and Assistant Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress.
Often ignored and sometimes forgotten, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson was rescued from oblivion and re-habilitated forty-nine years ago by Gordon Hendricks in The Edison Motion PictureMyth, a study which I reviewed with some misgivings at that time in the pages of Film Quarterly. Happily, Spehr's view of Dickson's contributions to the early history of the motion picture, and the economic deployment of that technology, is more thoroughly researched and a good deal less partisan than the unnecessarily polemic attack which Hendricks leveled at Edison in his 1961 book.
According to Spehr, his interest in Dickson began in the late 1950s, when he first joined the staff at the LOC and planned an exhibit celebrating the centennial of the motion picture. Following his retirement in the 1990s he began work in earnest on a detailed history of...