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The Invention of News: How the World came to know about Itself

audiences, Toulmin explores whether the strategy still works—and, in that sense, we do learn something new about how exhibiting these films now might relate to how they were exhibited then. Toulmin is able to quantify the success of the project precisely because of the simplicity in the way that the past is understood to connect to the present. It is unclear how the others would characterise the success of their projects, given that the terms which underpin programming choices are either highly personal or gleaned from theories which are underexplored. As it turns out, the pleasures of watching Mitchell and Kenyon’s films in contemporary contexts are sometimes as prosaic as an audience communally recognising familiar buildings captured on film. Two chapters of historical and theoretical content bookend the collection. At the start, Andrea Haller and Martin Loiperdigder break down the characteristics of early film programming which, they argue, quickly became conventionalised across Europe. This helps to ground the later chapters in context, but it also works against the notion of the local which is explored so valuably in Toulmin’s case. The conclusion, in finally theorising much of what goes untheorised throughout the collection, might well have been more successful at the start of the book as an introduction (which this collection lacks). It is only in the conclusion that the issues at stake (what kinds of contexts might be the appropriate ones for exhibiting early films, which models of the spectator might help a curator to build a programme, or how one might go about attempting to bridge a gap between historical periods) are explored in distant and dispassionate terms. This helps to clarify the theoretical landscape in exhibiting early films for contemporary audiences. If this section had come at the start rather than at the close, it might have worked to give the reader a map of theoretical issues which underpin the collection as well as to the lay the ground for the issues explored in each case study. This, the first of the KINtop series on early cinema, is an important collection, not least for its contribution to the debate on the role of early cinema in film history and it insistence that lost aspects of cinematic history are exhibited. It is also important for the way it, eventually, theories the distance between contemporary audiences and those of the past.