The Tenth Muse: Cinema

Samuel Morse and the Muse

Last year the Metropolitan Museum received a portrait by Samuel F. B. Morse of his daughter Susan, the bequest of Herbert Lee Pratt. This important addition to the collection of American paintings provides an opportunity to review a group of pictures by Morse and other objects associated in one way or another with this most interesting man. Morse the inventor is so firmly embedded in the popula...

Early cinema, late cinema: permutations of the public sphere

There tends to be a moment in the development of cultural practices when discourses of the recent past become history; they are no longer just outdated but, like bell-bottom jeans, mini-skirts and platform shoes, acquire historicity. This is what seems to have happened with film theory of the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly as it revolved around the notion of 'the spectator'. I am thinking ...

Development of the Cinema

Children and the Cinema

was appointed by the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for Scotland and the Minister of Education. The mention of the first and third of these sponsors suggests that the chief enquiry was to discover what effect the cinema had on children?particularly whether it had a bad effect?and this information, one may guess, is what most people would expect from such an enquiry. If this is so, then ...

Workplaces in the Cinema

Representations of the workplace are an important aspect of popular culture. Genres from the thriller to the situation comedy are played out against a backdrop of offices, schools, hospitals, factories, police stations and other workplaces. Attention to the representation of the workplace is of central importance in the visual media, especially film and television, as they require either the co...