Stereoscopic photography rapidly became a worldwide craze after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Cheap viewers and mass-produced stereographs brought startlingly vivid images within reach of a mass audience, making this the form in which most people first encountered photography – a fact largely ignored in conventional photographic history.
Like the commercial suppliers of Magic Lantern slides, stereograph publishers offered systematic coverage of many subjects, even claiming that to ‘visit’ remote countries by stereo was better than risking the journey.
Professor Christie is former Visiting Professor in the History of Film and Media at Gresham College. He is a renowned British film scholar and currently Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy.
He has researched and published on many aspects of film history, including Eisenstein and Russian cinema, Powell and Pressburger, Gilliam and Scorsese, and is a regular broadcaster on cinema.
He has also worked on many exhibitions, including Spellbound (Hayward, 1996), Modernism (V&A, 2006) and Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32 (Royal Academy, 2017).
His exhibition, Animatograph!, will be at London Metropolitan Archives during September-October 2019, and his monograph Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema (Chicago University Press) will appear later this year.
Professor Christie's lecture series are as follows:
2020/21 Exploding the Film Canon
2019/20 The Worlds of Powell and Pressburger
2018/19 Screening London
2017/18 Living Through a Media Revolution
All lectures by the Visiting Professor in the History of Film and Media can be accessed here.
