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The earliest London-made films showed the Victorian city doing everyday business, before its fictional screen image became increasingly shadowy and sinister.
The media and medicine have different perspectives. This lecture will use examples of how the public may be misled and consider the implications of such misunderstanding.
The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 gave Chinese artists a government that had explicit policies for the arts, seeing them as an essential part of the creation of ‘new China’.
Moving pictures may not have been the innovation once claimed, but within a decade few could doubt that they had become a major force in changing the Edwardian world.
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.
After the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, many artists and intellectuals in China saw the overthrow of ‘tradition’ as the means to rescue the nation from poverty and backwardness.
Homer’s Iliad, the earliest Greek poem, narrates the archetypal war between ‘Europeans’ and ‘Asiatics’ divided by the Hellespont. Looking at Wolfgang Peterson’s blockbuster Troy (2004), the lecture describes the genesis of the Iliad between the Mycenaean Late Bronze Age and the 8th centu