Sensitive Material: Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Blackmail, and the First Motion Pictures
The story of early cinema may have been different had Wordsworth Donisthorpe been better at blackmail. Irfan Shah goes digging in the archives to recover the details of this forgotten polymath — political individualist, chess reformer, inventor of a peculiar kind of film camera — and finds a fierce debate about the history of English wool combing improbably implicated in the rise of motion pictures. more
The Public Domain Review is dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – focusing on works now fallen into the public domain, the vast commons of out-of-copyright material that everyone is free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restrictions.
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![[*Door creaks open. Footsteps*]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on *Aesthetic Theory*](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/mimesis-expression-construction/5448914830_cc288c2266_o.jpg?w=600&h=1200)
[Door creaks open. Footsteps]: Fredric Jameson’s Seminar on Aesthetic Theory
By meticulously translating his recordings of Jameson’s seminars into the theatrical idiom of the stage script, Octavian Esanu asks, playfully and tenderly, if we can see pedagogy as performance? Teaching and learning, about art — as a work of art? more
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