Projected glass “lantern” slides were part of the cinema-going experience from the very beginning. Slides were used for advertising products, instructing, informing (or scolding) audiences, and spectacularly advertising the delights of upcoming shows. Not only visually stunning, these slides provide unique insight into audience behavior and expectations, as well as advertising and promotional strategies. Many archives and museums hold cinema slides that have been passively collected, but that generally reside on the fringes of the institution’s collection. In his richly illustrated presentation, Rob discusses the history of glass projection slides within the cinema, placing them in both a historic and aesthetic context, as well as the archival challenges and opportunities presented by these fragile objects that many institutions hold in their collections.
About the Presenter
Robert Byrne is a film preservationist and restorer specializing in early cinema and films of the silent era. In conjunction with film archives and collections worldwide he has led restorations and resurrections of more than forty feature films and numerous short subjects. He has lectured at the Library of Congress, University College Cork, Queen’s University Belfast, The Reel Thing Symposium, and numerous AMIA and FIAF technical symposiums. He is co-author of FIAF Image Restoration, Manipulation, Treatment, and Ethics and publishes regularly on the topics of motion picture restoration and preservation. His work appears in the volume Films that Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, and he is co-author of Discovering Lost Films of Georges Méliès in fin-de-siècle Flip Books (1896–1901) and Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents. Rob holds a MA in Presentation and Preservation of the Moving Image from University of Amsterdam. He has served on the boards of the Global Film Initiative, Friends of the Oakland Fox Theatre, Castro Theatre Conservancy, and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. He currently serves as president of the San Francisco Film Preserve.
