Silent movies in the classroom — teaching English

Found a fascinating little journal article this morning, written by an English teacher based in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1923. It’s the result from a little test to see whether movies could help teach children about English literature, better than books. (CUNNINGHAM Adelaide: “Teaching English with the Movies.” English Journal. vol. 12, no. 7, sept. 1923: [...]

The word “movie”

Thanks to http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0501D&L=ads-l&P=5480 :
20 March 1915, THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD, pg. 1749, col. 1:
One thousand editors in the United States, asked by the Photoplay Magazine as to whether the word “movie” shall be entered in the dictionaries and used as pure English, have decided in the affirmative. Of the 733 who voted, 511 voted “yes” [...]

Space bloopers from Harold Lloyd

From Just Neighbors (1919). Anything wrong in this sequence ?

In shot # 3, Harold Lloyd and Snub Pollard exit left, but on shot #4 they re-enter the frame left (instead of right as classical editing would have it). What’s more, if you look at the background, they’re just going back to where [...]

Add this to the daily chores

Regularly, read a text (short story, essay) from The GasLight :
one story a week from the genres of mystery, adventure and The Weird, written between 1800 and 1919.
(but their own chronological list of texts goes from 1817 to a generous 1997).

who called it “photoplay” ?

“[ in 1910] The term “photoplay’ had just been suggested by Mr. Edgar Strakosch as a result of an effort on the part of the Essanay Film Company of Chicago to obtain an appropriate classification for its releases then gradually assuming a plane higher than in previous years.”
(Robert Grau, The theatre of science: a volume [...]