ABSTRACT
Rick Altman is Professor Emeritus of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. Altman has animated Silent Film Sound research by creating and performing "The Living Nickelodeon", a playful resurrection of diverse exhibition practices from film's first two decades. The Living Nickelodeon began as a collaborative project involving my University of Iowa Film Studies colleagues Lauren Rabinovitz and Corey Creekmur. One of the important missions of The Living Nickelodeon is to draw attention to the variety of approaches used during the 1895-1915 period. The name "Living Nickelodeon" seems a fitting moniker for the goals one have mentioned, not least re-animating the multimedial soundscape of early cinema. In Silent Film Sound argues for a "crisis historiography" in approaching early film culture, but also suggest such an approach "may usefully be applied to a wide range of cultural phenomena". Digital formats of sound and image have an extraordinary impact on the ways silent films might circulate.
